PETER EVANCHO: Hey, Alison.

PETER EVANCHO: Thanks, Alison. Hi, everyone. It’s nice to meet you. Thanks for spending a bit of your evening with us today. My name is Peter. I am a lead college admissions coach at Prepory, and I’ve been working with the company for going on my sixth cycle now. I’ve also worked in admissions at various capacities at various colleges and universities. Most recently, I was actually on my school’s admissions committee for medical school and also did interviews for the last cycle of admissions. So very familiar with medical school admissions. I’m also a fourth year in medical school, so also familiar with the pains of the path that you’re all hoping to go down. Yeah. I also — I went to law school before medical school, and then I also did my undergraduate at University of Rochester. And then I have a master’s from Brown as well, which is less relevant to medical school, but we usually go through education stuff for people who want to know that as well. Nice to meet you all. I’ll toss it back to Alison to tell you guys a little bit about Prepory before we start talking about medical school admissions.

ALISON KALESHI: Alright. Thank you so much, Peter. You’re very thorough. So with that, who is Prepory? We are a college admissions counseling firm with over a decade of experience — nearly fifteen years — in helping students and families really navigate every grade level from eighth grade all the way up through senior year. And in that time, we’ve guided more than 14,000 students towards their highly competitive college goals. We are really proud to consistently rank as number one in this industry, and with excellent admissions outcomes to show for it. One statistic we’re very, very proud of, as you all can see, is that ninety-four percent of our students are admitted into one or more of their five top-choice schools. And when we say top five, it’s truly about aligning with each student’s goals and aspirations. It’s not just a number. Our work is about turning your competitive dreams into results during the most competitive time in admissions history. For students that are targeting highly selective schools with under 15% admit rates, Prepory students are 3.38 times more likely to gain admission than the general applicant pool. And we have really spent so many years in helping students stand out in the admission cycle, and one area where we make incredibly large impact is on developing highly compelling, admit-worthy profiles for premedical and BS/MD programs. During our last admission cycle alone, we had, of course, exceptional outcomes. Our students were accepted into every Ivy League school, every UC school, and every school from number one to number 50 on the U.S. News and World Report list. And with that, Peter, we can go ahead and talk about this evening’s agenda.

PETER EVANCHO:

Sounds good. Thank you, Alison. So today we’re basically going to be talking about how to apply to BS/MD programs and also how to apply to undergraduate programs as a premed hoping to matriculate to medical school. So we’ll kind of talk about those two different pathways — the BS/MD combined application versus the undergrad-plus application. And then we’ll talk about what those competitive applications look like, what they consist of, a little bit of a roadmap for things you can be considering at the different areas you’re at in high school right now, which it sounds like we have a good smattering of everybody here. And then we’ll go through a student case of someone who was a very competitive premed applicant in the last cycle, give you guys a little bit of insight into how these things actually look in an application, and then some pitfalls, what to avoid, and then how we can help with that.

So to get started: what is the difference between applying premed and applying BS/MD? Most people who become doctors and who go to medical school will do the traditional premed path. They will apply to undergrad. They will do their four years, and then they will separately apply to medical school. Oftentimes, students will take a gap year when they do that. You do have to take the MCAT in that path, which is the Medical College Admission Test — the SAT on steroids for medical school specifically. And then it’s a traditional four-plus-four, with four years of undergrad and four years of medical school. And you have a decent amount of flexibility in where you go because you don’t have to go to the place that you went to undergrad for.

BS/MD is different in quite a few ways. For one, there are accelerated programs. So there are BS/MD programs that let you do it in quicker than the eight years. So you would do your undergrad in less than four, and then you would still do the four years of medical school. A decent number of them are the eight years, so they’re not all shaving it off. But there is the potential to do it in less than eight for BS/MD. BS/MDs also have this kind of appeal that you don’t have to take the MCAT — that’s an asterisk. A decent number of programs do require you to take the MCAT; you just need a lower threshold number than what you would normally be advised to apply under if you were doing the traditional four-by-four path. Or some of them actually do not require you to take the MCAT, but that’s becoming a little bit less popular among those programs. And those programs will allow you a little bit less flexibility because you will go to the program that’s attached to the school that you go to. You don’t get to shop around once you get into the program. If it’s UConn’s combined program or Rochester’s combined program or Brown’s combined program, you go to the same school for undergrad and medical school, which some people might like and some people might not.

So those are some — just laying of the land of what these two different options are. And as far as who goes into either one: the same person who’s competitive for the very elite premed-type programs, like the Ivies and Ivy-adjacent, is going to be similarly competitive for BS/MD programs, because basically every BS/MD program, regardless of what college it’s attached to, is going to be considered a reach or elite-difficult school pretty much regardless of your GPA, test scores, stuff like that.

With that, I’m going to talk a little bit about the pillars of what makes a competitive profile. There’s a lot of things that are good for premed applicants that kind of bleed into really any undergraduate major, but some of the specific ones we focus on are here on this board. I’m not going to go through each of these right now because I have slides upcoming where I’ll talk about what these all look like in your application. But this is a brief snapshot of what you can expect your student — or if you are the student, what you can expect your application — to look like. And you’ll notice these aren’t checkboxes for specific experiences that you have to have or specific extracurriculars that you have to do. They’re more core values and attributes that schools and programs look for in their students — things that you want to be checking the boxes for, more so than ‘oh yeah, I did Science Olympiad’ or ‘I did research, I checked that box, I’m good to go.’

Academic excellence — GPA. For BS/MD programs specifically, they will oftentimes publish baseline SAT, ACT, and GPA cutoffs below which you won’t be considered. Surpassing that does not make you competitive. A lot of times, these will be like a 3.0 or 3.5 GPA. So that doesn’t mean if you have a 3.6, we’re soaring. For basically this entire talk, I’m going to be talking about people who are targeting BS/MD programs and the elite tier of schools for premed. So the GPAs and test scores you’re looking for those types of programs are usually 3.9 unweighted, around there, and then something in the 1500s-plus for SAT and then comparable in ACT, so like a 34, something like that. These are going to be what gets you reviewed. These are not going to be what gets you admitted, which is why the other parts of your application and the other parts of your experiences throughout high school are so important. Without these, you don’t even get reviewed. So these are very important, and putting your best foot forward with your academics throughout your four years is paramount to success in this field and in these programs. But that’s what gets you reviewed. It’s not what gets you admitted.

Next, clinical exposure. This can come in a lot of different ways, and the ways that students often find this is through volunteering at different hospital systems near them or outpatient clinics — things where you have the opportunity to actually interface with patients and have people who oversee you, who watch you interact with these patients. Because down the line, when we’re talking about what goes into your application, letters of recommendation are extremely important both for undergrad and certainly for BS/MD programs. And for BS/MD programs, you really want — not ideally an MD, but someone who can write you a letter that can talk about how you interact with patients and talk about you from a more humanistic standpoint. This volunteering and this patient-focused extracurricular work are really the best way to put your foot forward and will give a sense of authenticity to your essays when you’re talking about why you want to do medicine and why you want to care for patients, because you can actually draw from experiences where you did that.

Some of the things that admissions officers will look for when they’re reviewing your application is consistency over just the number of hours that you have committed to something. You can have a lot of hours and have almost nothing to say about it, which is not going to be helpful. It’s not going to be good for your interviews. BS/MD programs have interviews. Undergraduate premed programs almost invariably don’t, other than the Ivy and Ivy-adjacent which will oftentimes have interviews — but the interview for that is far different from the interview for BS/MD programs, which we’ll talk about later. So being involved in a clinical experience over a long period of time or over sustained years gives you the opportunity to — if for no other reason — get a lot of cool patient experiences under your belt that you can talk about in essays or in interviews, and also have people who watch you working with patients and can speak to the caliber of student clinician, if you will, that you are in letters of recommendation. Plus it’s just fun, different than doing your normal extracurriculars in school. And even if it’s not something that’s going to win you an award or something that is, like, what people consider to be these crazy elite experiences or paid programs at Ivies, these are things that give you a lot of meat to talk about in your application, and give a lot of authenticity when you talk about how important patient care is for what you want to do in your future — because you’re going to be talking about that, because you want to go into medicine.

Research experience — also very important. It’s not required. For BS/MD programs, it’s required asterisk. There’s kind of a division for BS/MDs between programs that are very research heavy and then programs that are a lot more public-health heavy. If you’re going to be applying to a program that’s much more research heavy, like REMS at Rochester, for example, then you’re going to want to have research, whether it’s an abstract or poster presentations at different conferences that are accessible for high school students. Those are going to be things that are important to show that you have initiative, to show that you can get projects done, and to show that you have areas in science, in medicine, in health care that you’re interested in pursuing — interested in pursuing so much that you’re able to actually put something out into the world of literature that’s available, that you can say you contributed to, basically.

Community engagement is next. That’s very similar to the clinical experiences. This doesn’t necessarily need to be patient-facing, but you can certainly do a patient-facing type of community work. But this also just goes to the importance of the humanism aspect when you’re applying either for BS/MD or for elite programs for premed. People want doctors who care about people. And the people in BS/MD programs who are in the medical school who are reviewing your application, and the admissions officers in the undergraduate schools who are reviewing you for both BS/MD and for the regular traditional path, similarly want to see that. The BS/MD reviewers are certainly going to be more focused on you as a future physician when they’re reviewing your application and considering your community experiences and how you give back to your local area or the national community that you’re a part of. But the undergrads for the traditional pathway review is just the same, because they consider this as a proxy for what kind of member you’re going to be at their undergraduate community. What kind of contributor are you going to be? Are you going to be someone who cares about others and helps other people and gets involved? Or are you going to be somebody who comes and bleeds them dry for knowledge and then leaves? So it’s helpful for both instances.

Leadership can come across in any one of the categories that I’m talking about. But this is another — I don’t know about pitfall, but — thing that people worry about: that everything in their dossier needs to be leadership and needs to have this cool ‘chief something’ title. Similar to how I was saying before that you can do something for a long time and have actually done nothing, you can have really cool titles and you can be CEO of whatever or COO of whatever and also have not really done much and not have had a really great impact. So it’s cooler and it works better for your narrative to have a handful of things that you worked from the ground up in terms of starting and then becoming a leader of — or even maybe founding from the get-go and being a leader of — than trying to be the e-board member for every club you’re in because you’ll have the leadership titles. But when they go through to read your application and understand the impact you had and the takeaways and what the club would have been like if you weren’t there, it’s going to be anemic, because there’s not going to be much you could have contributed. You can’t really be a leader in every single organization that you’re a part of.

So I’m going to turn it over to Alison for a second to talk a little bit about our students and the types of majors we look at, and the types of students that we serve at Prepory.

ALISON KALESHI: Excellent. Thank you so much, Peter. What’s really helpful with Prepory, especially with this specific academic area of interest, is that families really truly come to us to develop not only a compelling narrative, but one that targets the most competitive pathway, which is medicine as well as the natural and physical sciences. That makes up about a third of Prepory students. It is our most popular pathway by a long shot, and we have a lot of data that is going to be very beneficial for your student in understanding what it really takes to go from your high school into an incredibly competitive BS/MD or traditional premedical pathway program at a top-tier university. Some of you just recently joined — I’ll share a little bit about Prepory’s success: ninety-four percent of students at Prepory are admitted into at least one or more of their five top-choice schools. And given how competitive it is at this level within admissions, with a 1-to-5% acceptance rate at any BS/MD program, those are excellent odds. Our responsibility is to really enhance your probabilities as much as possible, making sure you’re competitive on all fronts. So from interviewing, to your essays being excellent, to: do you have the right volunteer hours? Are you really taking advantage of the opportunities in front of you? These are all things that we are thinking about constantly at Prepory and making sure it’s really tailored to you specifically. What are your goals? And with that, thank you to those who are asking questions in our Q&A. We are continuing to answer them. Some of them, we will discuss live, but definitely feel free to continue typing in those questions and scheduling your one-on-one consultations with a member of our team.

PETER EVANCHO:

Great. Thank you, Alison. I’m going to come back in now and chat a little bit more about what a BS/MD application looks like. And I’ll talk as well about what a college application looks like, because that is relevant to this group. A BS/MD application is essentially a college application with a couple of extra essays and an extra step of interviewing. So with BS/MD applications, pretty much for this slide, this is the same for the traditional path and the BS/MD path. You will submit the Common Application. Some people submit Coalition, which is just a different platform that does the same thing — same whatever, different font. The Common Application will be your transcript — all your grades from high school and then any courses you took at colleges, dual enrollment, that kind of thing. You will have to submit SAT or ACT scores for BS/MD programs. A lot of colleges and programs are kind of moving back towards test-flexible from test-optional. It was born out of COVID. So COVID brought test-optional, which was: you can send us tests, you cannot send us tests, we don’t care, we won’t discriminate either way. Test-flexible, which was much more popular pre-COVID, is that you have to send us tests, but whichever one you want to send us is up to you — SAT, ACT. Schools are generally moving a lot more back towards the test-flexible option. But regardless of that COVID snippet piece of that, BS/MD programs always require it, because they’re going to be allowing you to go to medical school without taking the MCAT. So they want to know that you can take standardized tests and do well on them, because medical school is a lot of standardized tests. So you’re going to have to submit scores to BS/MDs regardless. Test scores are very important.

Letters of recommendation — I’ve kind of been talking about. Usually you want to have three or four. You can certainly have more. Programs will have caps. They’ll also oftentimes have minimums, which are usually two. And that is going to be a mixture of your teachers who can speak well about you — ideally a STEM and then something else, or two STEM — and then someone who can speak about you from the community and as a leader, as a contributor to your local community, and then something clinical. Ideally an MD, but someone who supervised you in a clinical capacity and saw you work with and speak to and help patients, is paramount for the BS/MD application. You don’t have to have that for the premed undergrad traditional path. It’s certainly helpful, but the BS/MD one — you’re going to have a very hard time putting together a reasonably strong argument that you want to be a doctor if you don’t have somebody to speak to your clinical aspirations and hopes, and just basically what you’ve been doing clinically even as a high school student. And then your activities and your personal statement, which are things we’ll talk about as we go on. That’s all basically the same for both programs. There’s nuanced strategy to BS/MD versus the traditional, but that’s essentially the same for both.

Where the path diverges: BS/MD applications will have separate essays. Most of the programs will have some sort of ‘why medicine’ essay and then ‘why our program.’ Some of them will have more than just these. Some will combine these into one essay, but pretty much every program is going to ask you in some way both of these questions. And, again, having a really robust clinical experience — whether it’s shadowing or — I think you can do it at 18, I don’t remember the age cutoff for that — clinical experiences will allow you to have a lot more authenticity and power behind your statements in your ‘why medicine’ essays, versus saying how much you care about people and you love health and you love bio, and then you’ve never seen or touched a patient.

And then they also have interviews. So interviews can be parts of both of these processes. I want to be clear about this. If you’re applying for Ivies and Ivy-adjacent for the traditional route, just the four years and then you plan to apply to medical school afterwards — there are interviews as part of that. I won’t get into it. They essentially don’t super matter. They’re alumni engagement tools more so than anything else. If you totally bomb them, it’s not great, but they kind of don’t matter a lot, asterisk. I’m not going to do anything more with that. If you have questions about it, you can ask. The interviews for BS/MD programs matter a lot. They are essentially the gateway in. If they don’t like you, then you’re not getting in. And if they like you, then there’s a very high chance that you’re going to get into their program. Those interviews come — and also, they’re screened. The interviews for the traditional path you get randomly based on geographic location, major, and alumni availability. These ones are screened. So only the upper echelon of applicants get interviews for the BS/MD programs. And they come in two flavors: standard and MMI, which is multiple mini interviews, which I’ll talk about in a little bit.

The other things that are different about BS/MD programs are the deadlines. BS/MD programs are due earlier than most. They’re due November 1, November 15, sometimes as early as October 15. So basically, if you’re doing BS/MD, you want to plan like you’re doing your schools for the early-action deadline — that November 1 deadline — because they’re due before most of the school. They’re due before the RD deadline, which is December 15 onward. So you want to be meticulous about that and be planning ahead and be sure that you’re shooting for that November 1, sometimes even October deadline, when you’re planning, when you’re getting your letters together, when you’re writing your essays, etc. — and not be waiting until the last minute, and certainly not be waiting till after that, because if you apply RD, you’ve missed the bucket — the BS/MD programs. You can apply for EA or ED or RD or any of the cycles for the traditional route. But for the BS/MD programs, you have to apply early.

So like I was saying, you want to keep that in mind for your letters of rec and for your essays. You don’t want to be doing these at the last minute. You want to be brainstorming early, running your ideas by people, getting drafts together, revising. You want to be asking your recommenders early. You want to be meeting with your recommenders and talking to them about what you hope to be in your application, what you hope their letter is going to do for your application, what you hope that they’ll talk about if they’re comfortable. Everybody has their different relationships with their letter writers, so I always leave that to the students to decide what they’re comfortable asking about. But my ideal is that you can essentially be like, ‘Here are the characteristics that I think I show that shone most brightly when I was working with you. Can you please write about those if you feel comfortable? And here are a couple experiences that I think really highlight it.’ Letter writers tend to like that, because then you’re writing the letter for them and they can kind of just put it together. They don’t have to think too hard about it. And then it’s nice for you because it really rounds out your application, because if you have three letters that are talking about three very different skills, it makes you look really dynamic versus if every person says that you’re, you know, detail-oriented and nice. It’s like, okay, don’t need to read that three times.

The standard interview versus the MMI. Standard interview is kind of exactly what it sounds like. You have about thirty to forty-five minutes. It’s typical to what you’ll see for the traditional interviews for the four-plus-four. So questions like: tell me about yourself, why are you interested in medicine, why do you want to come to our program, tell me about a challenge you’ve overcome, what books do you like to read. There are so many different things out there that are top 10, top 20 most common interview questions. Very likely, that is what these are going to be made up of. It’s very conversational. Not too much more to be said about that.

The MMIs are very different. It’s usually timed stations, and you’ll move from station to station. Sometimes you’ll have as much as eight minutes — sometimes it’s less than that — and you’ll get a scenario. Sometimes it’ll be like: ‘You and your friend are both running a business, and your friend is having trouble coming into work on time, and it’s stressing you out because you have to cover for them. Talk to your friend right now about this and why this is harmful for you and the business. Go.’ And then you have like thirty seconds to think about what you’re going to say. You talk to the interviewer like they’re your friend, and they talk back to you, and it’s like a simulated activity. And then it just ends. You don’t get feedback, and you move on to the next one. Some of them might be a more clinical one where it’s like: ‘You’re about to go into the OR with your friend and scrubbing on your first case as third years, but you realize that your friend’s breath smells like alcohol. What are you going to do?’ And then you have like thirty seconds to think about it, and then you just tell the person. They don’t really ask you questions — you kind of just tell them what your thoughts are, then you move through. So it’s very different, structured in a much different way. It’s not conversational at all. It helps them understand how you work through ethical dilemmas, how you communicate with others, how you react when things aren’t going the way that you plan. It’s a lot more dynamic and a lot more stressful for students, especially if they’re not prepared for it, to just walk into this and then have to make something up with thirty seconds to spare. People oftentimes, if they’re not prepared, end really early and then get really stressed and upset.

That’s the interviews. So what can you be doing depending on where you’re at throughout your time in high school? Ninth through twelfth grade. And sorry — I don’t have an eighth-grade slide. I know we have some eighth graders here as well. So you can just get ahead of the game.

Ninth graders — you want to be starting strong with your GPA from day one. There’s not a lot of forgiveness for elite undergrad programs for the traditional pathway or the BS/MD pathway. Generally speaking, if they’re going to be lenient about this, it’s usually in ninth grade. So I guess if you’re going to mess up your GPA, that’s the time. But in an ideal world, don’t. Start yourself off strong. Take courses that you’re going to do well in and that you care about. I know you don’t have a ton of flexibility to do that in high school really generally, but certainly in ninth grade. Just do what’s right for you. Just because you have the opportunity to take a bunch of really hard classes your first year doesn’t necessarily mean you have to. Certainly as you’re starting off, doing well in things is better than trying to take really hard stuff and getting a bunch of B’s. This is the year that I always tell students: go to every single meeting that you think you’re even kind of interested in. I want every day of your five days a week at club meetings and stuff. And then by the end of your first semester, you can start whittling those down to the things that you actually care about. But this is the one where I’m like — if you even read the title and you were like, ‘this seems remotely interesting to me,’ go to it. Because ninth grade is the year to figure out what’s interesting to you. You’re 13, you’re 14, you don’t know what’s out there. So until you go to things and actually figure out what the clubs are doing, what’s happening, what fields are available that you didn’t realize before you started going to these clubs — do that.

Tenth grade — everything just kind of starts refining. So you start to add more difficult coursework, maybe some honors and AP courses, certainly things in areas that are relevant to the BS/MD-premed route. So your AP sciences, your AP maths, your AP psych. But these programs also want to see you doing well in everything, so you should not be going throughout this and just doing all AP sciences and then taking regular history, regular English, regular everything else as you progress through. These colleges and programs want to see you excelling in the highest rigor available to you at your high school, and they will have access to what that rigor is, because your guidance counselors will send it to them in essentially a little packet that explains what’s available. Similarly, if you go to a high school where they only offer four AP courses, if you take those four AP courses, you’re looking pretty good. Certainly there may be other opportunities for you to do dual enrollment or find other things, but you won’t be penalized if you go to a high school that doesn’t offer as many AP courses, because if you’re taking what’s available to you and doing well in it, that’s the benchmark that AOs are going to be adhering to.

Eleventh grade is when everything gets terrible. Everything gets really hard. Your teachers don’t care because you’re not seniors yet, so they’re not letting you off with the ‘ugh, you’ve almost made it, so everything’s fine, we’ll be kind to you.’ Classes get hard. You have to start really thinking about your SAT, ACT. You should be starting to move into more leadership roles in the clubs that you’ve started to identify as being areas of interest. You should really start looking at your application. You should start looking at your week-to-week, day-to-day as your application, and figuring out what holes do I have? Okay, maybe I’ve done a lot of research, that’s great. Have I ever stepped foot in a hospital? Do I have any clinical experiences that I can talk about? Have I ever done anything for my community? Have I ever helped with a fundraiser or contributed to a cause that I’m passionate about that will help to showcase this area of me on my application? This is the last time when you really want to start looking at that and getting that done. Because doing that eleventh-grade summer into the twelfth-grade year — it’s better than nothing, but it’s pretty obvious when they look at your applications and see that.

Twelfth-grade year is really starting to figure out — ideally the summer before — but twelfth-grade year is putting together those applications. It’s writing the essays. It’s brainstorming. It’s revising. It’s retaking the standardized tests if you need to. It’s preparing for your interviews, and it’s really getting all of those things together so you can apply and hopefully be successful.

There’s a lot of different things that you can be doing with your summers. I won’t spend time going through everything on this slide because I want to make sure we have time at the end to go through your questions that have been popping in that we don’t get to in the chat. But there’s a lot of things you can be doing over the summer. There’s a lot of research things. There’s a lot of clinical things. There’s a lot of things you can just make up in your community to contribute to, based on skills you have and interests that you have — because there are always holes that can be filled.

So I’m going to finish off by talking about a case of a student who did very well as a premed applicant this past cycle. Some of their stats: a 4.01 weighted GPA, 1530 SAT with 780 in math, 730 in the reading section. Some highlights for their activities: they did a lot of engineering things — they were VP of their FIRST Robotics team, cofounder and CEO of a medical technology startup that they founded with their friends, I want to say sophomore-junior year of high school; an app developer creating apps for an education startup that was not their startup; research assistant for a neuroplastic lab; they did YYGS; they had a lot of teaching experience that they had done throughout — those are the grades that they taught, not the grades that they participated, that they did throughout high school. They did tutoring through different honor societies in high school. They did some STEM advocacy for different national conferences. And they’re also a scholar-athlete and played lacrosse. So they kept busy. You can see this person didn’t end up doing BS/MD — they wanted to do the traditional route for options. But they had a lot of research in their portfolio, a ton of leadership in their portfolio, not as much of the clinical aspect, though the research was fairly clinical — they got to do stuff with patients there. Their startup and their community engagement happened to overlap with clinical. So they got a lot of, if you will, those humanism-patient points coming from those experiences.

Just a little bit of an idea of their essay. So this person applied biomedical engineering. I have read so many boring engineering personal statements. I’m sure Alison has as well in committee review.

ALISON KALESHI: Uh-huh.

PETER EVANCHO:

It’s always like, ‘I tinker in the garage,’ and it’s just different fonts and whatever of that. So that’s kind of where we started with this. And the essay ended up being essentially about the student’s love of gardening. They talked about their garden in this very imagery-laden, evocative language, cutesy, fun kind of way, and in a way that they cared about each vegetable in their garden like it was their own child, and then kind of talked about the effort that they put into all of the different things that they do, being in that same caring — not paternalistic in the rude sense, but kind of — way. And it ended up being this idea, this topic sentence of ‘I optimize because I care.’ That’s what the whole essay was: contextualizing why they did the startup that they did and where the idea for that startup came from and why they cared to take it from an idea to an actual implemented product that they’re working to innovate on and adapt and help to address the needs of a particular patient population that they cared about, why they contributed to the research that they did at the college that they were a summer intern at for two years, and just kind of what lights their fire. That’s a really great way to put together a personal statement. You don’t want it to be an expository resume of ‘here’s all the things I did.’ They’re going to have that in your activity section. What you want it to be is what lights your fire. They want to know about why you do the things that you do, who you are as a person, and finish the essay with the idea that they want to talk to you and learn more about you afterwards — not just a rehashing of the things they imagine you probably did based on the titles of your different extracurricular activities. I know we always get asked — this person’s at Stanford right now. Very proud of them. So that’s a very quick showcasing of how you can put together all the things I’ve talked about in terms of what looks good on an application, what you should be doing throughout your four years, into an application that did very well. And he had a lot of options. Stanford was the highest top one, but he had a lot of very good options.

What are some common mistakes that students should avoid and should be thinking about when they’re putting this together? Starting too late is the biggest one. I don’t want to freak the juniors out. But you want to be thinking about everything early. So that goes down to what courses you’re going to be taking, what years, to make sure that you have a trajectory that increases in rigor and also allows you the room to increase — or at least stay the same if you’re already doing well — in performance. You want to be thinking very early about what you’re going to be writing about and what your essays are going to look like, what topics you’re going to be doing, because brainstorming takes a long time. Revising takes almost longer, especially with students who — everybody comes with writing with a very different perspective and a different skill set. And so putting that together is difficult, and finding ways to augment it with AI is also difficult. I’m so pro using AI to help with essays. I do it all the time. But you can’t use AI to write essays. When I have students use AI to write essays, it’s almost harder than just going through and restarting it all the way from scratch. So finding that balance of how to use AI to augment and help you put together a solid draft, versus having it just completely write it for you and have it be completely lacking of personality and zest and anything that anybody wants to read.

Broad but shallow activities — again, being a leader of everything but not actually doing anything; contributing a billion hours to an activity that you don’t actually get anything out of. Particularly for the BS/MD application: downplaying the interview. It’s very important. It’s something that you have a lot of preparation and mock sessions if you can done beforehand. And then probably the other biggest one on here is the weaker generic essay. You want people to leave your essay thinking that they know something about you, and thinking that they can see you at their college and imagine things that you could do and would say and how you would act and how you can contribute. Which is something that they’re not necessarily going to get from what people do often, which is essentially just an expository resume, or just talking about the one activity they did for the longest with a little bit of context beyond the activity section of what they did.

And with that, I believe I’m turning it back to Alison. Well, this — yeah. Basically, this is just a rehashing of everything that I just said that I’m not going to say again.

ALISON KALESHI:

These are things that we want to make sure that we are really elevating for students that are seeking entry at the most competitive level possible. These are obviously things that, Peter, you’ve really excellently described as being very important — but intellectual curiosity is one that’s going to continue to show up over and over again. And it’s just one of many examples of things that these offices are really going to look for when they view your application, and that’s exactly what we are trying to focus on at Prepory and how we can best support you.

And with that, we ask a greater question: how is Prepory going to be able to help my student or help me get admitted into a top-tier premedical program or a top-tier BS/MD program? All of our programs across the board include hour-long one-on-one advising sessions over Zoom, where you are matched with an incredibly experienced and dedicated college admissions coach. And not only that, there are so many incredible aspects of all of our programs. This includes parent check-ins. You will have unlimited essay and resume reviews when you are applying to school for up to 15 distinct applications. This will include ongoing offline guidance with your coach as well, via text and via email. And, of course, Peter, as you mentioned, how important those interviews are — and we’ll talk a little bit more about that during our Q&A live. We want to really focus on strengthening those interviewing skills. And at Prepory, you don’t just have a coach. You have a full team. So you have your coach you’re meeting with over Zoom, but you also have the writing specialist team and the admissions team to make sure that your admission cycle is a success.

And with that, we have many questions that we want to make sure that we get to. You all have asked excellent questions, and we have saved some of them to answer live. I do want to note this QR code that you all are seeing — that is so that you can book a one-on-one consultation with me or a member of my team to learn more about how your enrollment at Prepory will help you in succeeding in this competitive admissions landscape and developing that competitive profile. So with that, Peter, I’m going to rapid-fire a couple questions. I’ll answer some as well. With your understanding, when you think about deadlines during senior year, what are your recommendations, Peter? Is November the best time to apply? Is applying on the earlier ends better? What is your perspective?

PETER EVANCHO: Well, for BS/MDs, there’s not really a choice. The deadline of the first is the deadline of the first. As far as getting it in a couple days earlier or whatever, you can. I don’t think that there’s any crazy difference there. If you’re doing BS/MD, you have to plan for the November 1 — or if it happens to be a little bit earlier depending on the program. But you want to be preparing those applications far in advance of November. Ideally, the summer going into senior year will be a good opportunity for you to really start brainstorming those ideas and looking at your application and thinking, ‘What is my narrative? What’s my argument?’ You’re writing an argumentative piece, whether you think it or not, because you’re trying to convince people at the end of it to do something for you. It’s not just for them to read for fun and then move on. So you want to put together that argument in a cohesive and coherent way. And you want to look at your application and think, ‘Okay, what do I want to get across in my personal statement? What are the vibes and values and attributes about me that I think are the most meaningful and will be the best coming from me, versus the ones that I hope will be in my letters of recommendation based on the meetings that I’ve had?’ The personal statement’s a very important essay, but it’s also just one. Every school’s going to have supplemental essays that, for the traditional path, will usually be ‘why this major,’ ‘why our school,’ and other things like that. And then BS/MD ones will be ‘why medicine,’ ‘why our school,’ and some will have more than that. So putting together those applications in a way that they don’t repeat each other — these are all things that take time. So starting earlier, having people who can help you read through and make sure you’re not being redundant and make sure you’re telling things in the way that you intend them and not just the way that you think you’re saying them — intent and impact are often discordant here — that’s why doing this earlier and having people look at them earlier helps you to avoid that disconnect, when it goes to someone you’ve never met who lives however many states away from you, and is going to give it three minutes of their best and then make a decision.

ALISON KALESHI:

Very helpful. Very, very helpful. I want to make sure that we cover everyone’s question. I’ll answer this one. In terms of really researching different programs, different opportunities for exposure to medical settings — we want to make sure that we are helping you explore the most meaningful and worthwhile opportunities. Your coach will help you in researching that, and then, of course, applying as well in terms of summer programs and summer planning too. Prepory will wholeheartedly support you with that. And there is obviously a lot of information that you’re receiving all at once. There are many accessible programs. We want to help you sort through those and find the most meaningful opportunities.

Another question received was: are we online, or in the Sacramento area? We historically have supported so many Northern California as well as Southern California families — very, very popular at Prepory — but we are a fully remote service. So all of your program will be conducted remotely, which is excellent, because you can meet us from anywhere.

Moving forward, generally — answering YB’s question — it is more difficult to get accepted into a BS/MD program in terms of admit rate. It sits at about between one and five percent. And traditional premedical programs are also highly competitive, especially when you’re thinking at the Ivy League level. But in terms of pure admit rate, BS/MD is going to have lower acceptance, admit rates, as well as fewer seats available.

For the unlimited components at Prepory: you have unlimited writing support for up to 15 distinct applications. And I want to make sure that you are also aware that, as part of Prepory’s program, in between every meeting, you’ll have offline ongoing guidance as well via text and via email.

We received some questions too in terms of extracurriculars. So one person asked: Peter, I currently work in a nursing home as a dietary aid. How helpful could this be for my application? I’m curious — what is your perspective on that? Obviously it depends on the full picture. It’s not just limited to one extracurricular that makes you competitive. But that was a unique question, and I wanted to throw that your way, Peter.

PETER EVANCHO: Yeah. Anything has the potential to help or hurt your application, which isn’t necessarily the answer that you want, but is the answer I can give without reviewing your whole profile. That certainly sounds like it’s in the bucket of ‘I get to touch and speak to patients,’ which is a great bucket to be in when you’re applying premed or BS/MD. So if you have done it for a while, have either an MD or NP or whoever your clinical adviser is, have a good relationship with them such that they’d write you a letter, and you have cool experiences that you can talk about in interviews or in essays of actually getting to care for patients and be there on the path to helping them through whatever it is they’re dealing with — I think that would be a great, meaningful way to put together your application that has a nice clinical spin on it and will give some authenticity to you talking about patient care, because you are actually involved in caring for patients. People will oftentimes be like, ‘Well, the only ortho and plastics clinics in my area already have their scribes’ — like, alright, girl. There are other ways that you can do it. That’s not the only way. Places always need help. Clinical sites, hospitals always need help and always need volunteers. This sounds like a job too, which is cool. But there’s all kinds of ways that you can just email or go to hospitals and say, ‘I’m here, and I want to help patients. What can you let me do?’ and then contribute. But that sounds like a cool activity that I think you’d be able to talk about meaningfully.

ALISON KALESHI:

Very helpful. I agree with that. Rapid-firing away — in terms of students whose stats, whether their test scores or their grades, aren’t very strong at this point in time: is it worth it or not to try? I want to answer this. I do think it is worth it to continue pursuing what you are passionate about and really upholding an upward trajectory in high school. Not every applicant is going to be perfect — whether it’s perfect grades or perfect extracurriculars. We want you to of course try your best at anything that you are committed to. But realistically, not all applicants have the perfect statistic story. And what Prepory does really well is help you navigate those situations. How do I make myself more competitive if, for example, I had a rough semester first semester freshman year? We want to make sure that you stand out. And of course, academics is the baseline to admissions, but there are other ways to also continue to amplify the competitive level of your profile.

I want to also note in terms of what makes our essays strong and not the same as everyone else — I think, Peter, you can attest to this — but we have an excellent writing support system at Prepory. You not only have your coach, who is highly experienced with your pathway and deeply understands college essay writing, but you have unlimited writing support from the writing specialist team as well as the admissions team. And you’re receiving truly differentiated perspectives from experts that know your case in and out and the profile you’re trying to develop. And I think that this goes hand in hand with unique extracurriculars that Prepory wants to help you in developing on your profile, and unique exposure to different environments that are only going to prepare you further for success within the admissions cycle.

Moving on, I want to also address a question that was asking about: when your GPA is on the lower end, should you just concentrate on good premedical colleges, and completely skip BS/MD? As with most things in admissions, it depends. If you can continue to work towards straight A’s, and depending on your student’s grade level, we want you to have a variety of options. So recommending high-reach schools, which can include BS/MD, and target schools as well with highly competitive premedical programs. The higher your GPA and SAT is, the better for the academic baseline at BS/MD, because that’s the most competitive it gets. Again — five to ten seats. But in general, we want you to have a balanced list, and you’ll apply to up to 15 distinct applications with us.

For you, Peter — I want to ask an additional question. We received a question about our educational background, which I think is so thoughtful. It’s important to know your team. I graduated from the University of Southern California. And Peter, go ahead and share with us your educational background.

PETER EVANCHO: Sure. So I went to the University of Rochester for undergrad. I did a neuroscience major there, which, like every premed does. And then I have a master’s degree from Brown. Then I went to University of Buffalo for law school, and now I’m at the University of Maryland for medical school. And that’s it. That’s it. No more.

ALISON KALESHI: I can definitely tell you truly enjoy learning. Very, very smart. You are an expert at being an excellent student and a wonderful coach. And with that — we’ve received a question in terms of: is my 1400 SAT score considered okay for BS/MD considering now it’s digital SAT? I highly recommend retesting to truly be competitive at these schools, because, again, 1500-plus is really going to be the baseline that you’re competing against. So I would highly recommend a retake or even trying the ACT.

PETER EVANCHO: I can take the summer internships one. So that depends on where you’re at in school, I would say. If you have more time to pursue some of the more structured things, I think that would be ideal. When I say more structured things, like the more competitive summer programs that you have to apply to earlier in the year — if you’re a ninth grader or a tenth grader and you have another year or two to continue applying to those, I think you should keep pursuing that. Research, same thing — if you have a couple more years of high school still where you can work with someone to try and get into a lab, or try and conduct your own research, or meaningfully contribute to ongoing projects in labs at either local universities or whatever is available in your area, I think those are really great things that are super cool to have on your application, are very helpful in the med space, and take a long time. That’s not something that is going to be super feasible for the junior springs where you don’t even have a year left of applying to summer programs, and research isn’t a thing that happens in two months. But earlier on in your application, if you have those, that’s certainly great.

For the people who are juniors, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do something meaningful with your summer, or that you shouldn’t. So what I have students do oftentimes is — that’s when we’ll look for the causes that you care about or the holes that exist in your community that you can fill based on your skills and passion, and put together projects that allow you to be a leader in your community and contribute something meaningfully based on the areas that you’re interested in and the areas that you care about. So depending on where you are, it’s kind of going to structurally allow you to do more or less things just because of what time is available. But I would prioritize the three pillars of premed extracurriculars, which is: clinical — anything clinical. Get in a hospital, talk to patients; or get in a clinic, talk to patients; or a nursing home, talk to patients, as we’ve heard. So clinical, then research — again, depending on where you’re at, biomedical research will be more or less attainable if you have more or less time in school — and then community engagement. So whatever that looks like for you is probably what I’d say for that.

ALISON KALESHI:

Very, very helpful. And you’ve received some thoughtful notes — we have a professor at the University of Maryland tuning in with us, and they’re glad that you are part of the community. Welcome to our professor. Thank you so much for the kind words for Peter.

And with that — when you are completing coursework, we get a lot of course enrollment questions. We received one just now. It says: what can students do in senior year if they complete all required coursework in junior year? We support you in developing your coursework plan. I’m assuming that this is specifically in terms of your upcoming classes. And if that is the case — you are trying to determine your senior year courses — we’ll work with you to assess: what has your STEM progression been, and what is going to really enhance your ability to look academically rigorous in the eyes of admission? So that is a loaded question, and we want to assess your full transcript before making those recommendations. So I would recommend going ahead and scanning the QR code to book your free one-on-one consultation, and we’ll talk more about how we help with course enrollments. And with that, I believe we have answered all questions. Peter, do you see any remaining that you haven’t yet answered?

PETER EVANCHO: BS/DO versus BS/MD. The DO students and MD students in recent years have been at about the same level for the match. DOs match about at the same percent as MDs — so allopathic versus osteopathic. There is a bit of a distinction between what types of programs they match in. So, for example, the surgical subspecialties and things like that generally are filled by more allopathic — so MD medical students — whereas primary care, psychiatry, family medicine programs are often more filled by DO students, osteopathic students. It’s just kind of a trend. I don’t know if that’s just because people who go to DO schools tend to be more interested in primary care, or if MDs tend to be not, or whatever. I don’t know how to speak to that necessarily.

One of the things that you also want to be considering — like I said at the beginning about the flexibility — is BS/MD, BS/DO don’t offer you flexibility. So you’re locking into a medical school right now. Students, when they’re applying to medical schools after they’ve had four years of undergrad and they’re thinking more about the actual impact of the decision of where they’re going, will look at things like Step 1 pass rates and match lists and things that are kind of what students who aren’t going to grad school look at for undergrads. Like, how likely are they going to place me into a job? That’s what you want out of your medical school. How likely are they going to place me into a job? So that would be residency. So looking into the programs that you’re interested in and seeing what their school’s match lists are, and then what their Step 1 pass rates are, and for ones that publish their Step 2 means — those would be reasonable things to consider when you’re wondering BS/DO versus MD for what you’re looking for. But as far as ‘will you match’ be it DOs or MDs — they match at about the same rate now. The DOs don’t match less than MDs like they used to. It’s basically the same now.

ALISON KALESHI:

Great. We’ve got about two more questions, and then we are going to make a final recommendation for anyone who still wants to ask additional questions on how Prepory can best support you through our program into navigating this pathway. I want to answer some. ‘I’m in the eleventh grade. My GPA so far is a 92, and my highest score on the SAT is 1300. What are my chances to get into premed, and what should I do?’ Really great question. Right now, a 92 and a 1300 SAT — depending on your schools, I would recommend attempting at least one more try at the SAT. The higher SAT score, the better for the academic baseline. But with premed, in terms of ‘getting into premed,’ you are selecting a premedical major if you are going down the traditional pathway to medical school. So strategizing with your coach on the best major and the top three majors to select for each school, or most schools, is going to be important in terms of your admit chances. And what I would really focus on is, one, of course, boosting your SAT score; but two, making sure that you have volunteer hours, that you’re a leader in your community, that you have a compelling eleventh-grade summer. Your junior year summer is so important. These are just some of the things that I would do, and I would recommend speaking with a member of our team on how we can take the window of time that you have left to really control your outcomes.

For students who mentioned a downward dip from ninth grade — going from, quote, ‘I got decent grades in tenth grade,’ and ‘I got a C in precalculus,’ and then listing other grades, a variety of B’s and A’s — what should be my strategy to getting into a good medical school? Really great question. First and foremost, continue to work towards an upward trajectory again. That’s going to be very, very important — grades, keeping a strong SAT. And of course, as we’ve been talking about throughout the evening, working with our team to develop your extracurricular profile list, make sure that the passion projects are excellent. There is still time to develop your profile, but that remaining window of time is going to impact your admissions decisions, and we want you to have as many options as possible. In terms of guidance for — oh, go ahead.

PETER EVANCHO:

Yeah. I can take that. Thank you. So what I believe I was saying when I was talking about AP science versus lit versus history — there are going to be courses that are more relevant for premed. Obviously, those are going to be the AP sciences, the AP maths, and the AP psych. But BS/MD programs and particularly elite schools for the traditional path are going to expect you to do well in everything. So that doesn’t mean that you can just take AP bio, AP chem, AP calc, AP physics, and then just do all the normal classes for the humanities and the social sciences. Because what they are truly assessing is: are you taking the highest rigor available to you and doing well? And so if you are in the sciences, that’s great. But if you’re doing it at the expense of the other ones, they’re going to calculate that as, ‘Well, everything at my school is hard, so you can’t take some of the things harder and some of the things — we want you to be operating at the highest rigor, because we consider our school to be operating at the highest rigor.’ Obviously, you can’t take every single course available, and so that’s where we can be of help in terms of — I do this all the time with students — help them tailor what specific things are worth taking versus not. And based on what fits in their schedule. Like, yes, I would definitely say if you can only take AP bio or AP psych, take AP bio. That’s certainly more relevant. But if it’s AP lit versus an elective course that is for fun and not necessarily boosting your rigor and showing that you can handle a lot of coursework, I would say AP lit.

And we oftentimes also have students who will apply missing an AP science. The first thing I’ll do is look at a transcript for a premed and see, like, AP physics is missing, and I’m like, ‘Are we being lazy? What’s going on here?’ And then I’ll talk to the students. Sometimes it’s just that they needed to take a writing credit, and they truly could not — their school wouldn’t let them. And so when there are instances like that where it’s ‘you would if you could, but the school won’t let you,’ there are ways around that where you can have the guidance counselor put that in a letter for you, and then that goes to the school. So it’s not you saying, ‘Oh, I would, but I can’t.’ There are workarounds, essentially. But that’s basically what I was saying about that. You should be doing the most in everything — the English, the history, math, science, etc. — but obviously with the understanding that you can’t take every single class that your school offers.

AP courses — how many? I think our stats are like 10 or 11 maybe, is the — like, above that is what we consider for students for the more elite programs, which BS/MDs would fall into. Because that would be four — it’s probably more like 12 actually, because it’s at least four for your last three years, and then sometimes people will take five junior year or whatever. So I would say probably around 11 or 12 is what people who are trying to go into that elite category get into.

Very helpful. I think we talked about the activities over the summer already.

ALISON KALESHI:

Exactly. I’ll take these last few, and then we will close out for the evening. Thank you all for asking these questions. In terms of summer planning — we will absolutely help you. There’s a variety of meaningful opportunities, but what I recommend is working with us to assess what is next this upcoming summer for you. We’re at May 28. We want to make sure that this time outside of the classroom is as competitive as possible. It’s not limited to just one program or one internship or one research opportunity, but it needs to be competitive all around and highly academically enriching.

We do absolutely provide guidance for scholarship applications, both merit as well as need-based opportunities, and preparing you for those interviews too, and making sure that you have that executive presence there.

For a student that is interested in SAT versus ACT — both are considered for BS/MD programs. My recommendation is the higher the better, and to really begin focusing on the reading, writing, and verbal sections sooner than later, because that can sometimes take a longer time to improve over the math section.

In terms of APs — is AP physics in grade 12 okay for BS/MD? Taking AP physics is highly competitive. In terms of your science and math progression and which is the best possible year to take it — it’s going to be very dependent on your courses at your school and the opportunities available to you. So we will advise on your course enrollment opportunities. And having 10 APs can be sufficient for a highly competitive school, but it’s also going to depend on the number of APs that are available to you at each grade level at your high school, and what is the context of opportunities at your specific school. So that answer will depend, and we’re looking forward to speaking more with you all about this.

In terms of international shadowing or volunteering, does this count? For a final answer — Peter, I want to hear your take on this, and then we will close out for the evening.

PETER EVANCHO: Yeah. I don’t see — it isn’t going to be any more or less competitive than doing something domestically. It’s going to be feeding into the same vein that I’ve been talking about, that it depends on what you do and what your impact is. Just because it’s international doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily cooler or that your impact is that much more impactful. It’s not going to be that someone will look at it as not being here and think, ‘Okay, well, it’s not a real commitment, we’ll take this with a grain of salt.’ No one’s going to look at it like that. But it’s similarly not going to be thought of as being better than anything here. It’s all going to be about what you did, how — what you contributed to whatever the project is, what the outcomes were, and what part you played in those outcomes. So I would say yes, with the caveat that it depends on what you did.

ALISON KALESHI: Very helpful. And one final question came in here: ‘Is it okay to take dual-credit/enrollment classes over AP classes?’ Again, this question will depend. Course enrollment can be very tricky for these top-tier universities. You want to be as academically rigorous as possible. So if your school is offering a lot of incredible AP class opportunities, it’s important to take advantage of those. However, if you are limited in terms of APs, and you are seeking external rigor, it’s important to make best use of that. Dual-credit and enrollment classes can be very, very helpful and competitive, but we want to select the right ones for your academic pathway, which would be very STEM-oriented as a premedical student.

With that — you all have asked so many incredible questions. Thank you to our attendees, all of you for joining us this Thursday evening. We are excited to meet you. Please scan the QR code to book your free consultation to meet with me or a member of my team on enrollment here at Prepory. We are very excited to meet you, and we will see you all so soon. Thank you again. Alright, have a good evening, everybody. Thank you all.

PETER EVANCHO: Thank you so much. Have a great evening.