Congrats on making it to interview season! It’s been a long journey with the pre-med courses, long hours in the lab, grueling MCAT prep, and seemingly endless AMCAS and supplemental essays. You’re almost there. I found the interview portion really fun - I traveled to places I’d never been, got wined and dined by students and faculty, and talked about research with people who were equally passionate about it!

As an MCAT tutor and former test taker, I have often encountered a subset of students who struggle with the Critical Analysis and Reasoning section (CARS) of the test. It can become a significant source of frustration during studying, and there are many students who may even have to re-take as a result of a poor CARS performance.

One of the most common frustrations that I’ve seen students run into during their MCAT studying is the dreaded score plateau. A student’s studying is going well, they are improving on their practice exam scores and feel confident in their content mastery, but then several exams in a row show the same score. It can feel demoralizing, but remember, it happens to nearly all students, even students who end up with 520+ scores, and it is a normal part of the MCAT studying process.

Here are some helpful tips that can make you stand out from other interviewing applicants:

OK, let’s state the obvious – the MCAT is daunting. Just take a look at the MCAT topic list PDF provided by the AAMC. It is one-hundred and twenty-five pages of topics alone. And while there is no substitute for good old-fashioned content studying, there are strategies to improve your studying that have nothing to do with studying itself.

So, you want to be a doctor. Maybe you remember playing with your plastic doctor’s kit when you were little, examining all your stuffed animals’ fuzzy ears. Maybe someone in your family works in a healthcare profession, and you always admired what they could do. Or, maybe in school, you realized that you excelled at science and enjoyed learning about the intricate mechanisms of the human body, but also wanted a career where you could help people in dimensions of both the body and mind.

One of the very first questions a student asks about a standardized exam is invariably, “Which study resources should I use?”. For the MCAT, the answer is far from simple. With the multitude of test prep publishers out there, each claiming to guarantee students the best possible score, it can often be difficult to find sources that are truly representative of AAMC’s MCAT. As someone who faced this conundrum myself, I can personally attest that no single resource is by itself enough to tackle the monstrosity that is the MCAT. So, which ones should you rely on? Hopefully, this brief guide will help!

If you’re a college student planning to wait 1-3 years after graduating before attending medical school, I was very recently like you. Yay, we were the same! Although you or the people around you may have doubts about prolonging your training or entering the nebula of a life unstructured, I think the time you spend during your gap years can have a profound impact on your personal development and life trajectory.

“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.” Rudolph Virchow, the father of modern pathology, devoted an equally large portion of his life (when he wasn’t classifying thrombosis risk factors into a triad) to social medicine. Medical history is filled with countless examples of physicians serving as activists, and much of the advances made in public health are through the political advocacy of healthcare professionals that noticed a problem in their community.

For some, early July is the season for poolside relaxation. For medical school applicants, it's the season of secondaries, or supplemental essays required by medical schools for admission. Secondaries roll in very fast, and applicants are expected to turn them around quickly, as admissions are rolling. What's more, each school has a slightly different set of prompts. All of these factors make early July a season of peak stress for medical school applicants.

We have worked with countless applicants on their secondaries, and our thousands of hours of experience in this process have yielded these 5 essential tips.

1. GROUP PROMPTS BY TYPES

Begin by understanding the repeated themes of secondaries - such as, career vision, diversity, adversity, leadership, clinical experience. You're not writing 1,000 essays; you're writing on a dozen themes.