How to Build a Winning Pre-med or BS/MD Admissions Profile

PETER: Yes, thank you Daniel. Hi everyone! Thanks so much for spending some of your evening/late afternoon with us today. My name is Peter. I have worked with Prepory for going on five cycles now and have known Daniel for the same. Before or sort of throughout and during my time at Prepory, I was an undergraduate at the University of Rochester as a pre-med and I studied neuroscience. I went to Brown after that for graduate school, did a stint of law school because who doesn’t love punishment, and then I am now in medical school starting my clerkship phase of my medical training. As far as my admissions experience outside of Prepory, I’ve worked in a lot of capacities in the different admissions offices in the schools that I’ve attended, including as an admissions interviewer and most recently as a member of the committee on admissions at my medical school. So, I’ve had the pleasure to be able to read applications to medical school, vote and help make decisions, and present applicants to our committee for admission, which has been one of my favorite things to do in medical school. So yeah, it’s very great to meet all of you!

DANIEL: Wonderful. Before we jump in, we just want to give you a little bit more of a glimpse of who Prepory is in the college admissions counseling space. If you don’t know a lot about us, we’ve worked with over 14,000 students since our inception back in 2012. We’ve been around for 13 years. We employ a team of over 70 of the country’s best admissions experts and our students are 3.37 times more likely to get into any school with an acceptance rate below 15%. Outside of these statistics, I think what makes Prepory really special and unique is just our unrelenting commitment to supporting our students, getting to know them deeply, what they care about, and sort of what makes them them, and helping them tell authentic stories that make them better applicants in this admissions process. So, this is just a little bit about us and who we are. I think as we go through this presentation, you’ll learn a lot more. And with that, go ahead Peter.

PETER: Alright, great. Thanks, Daniel. So this is just a little slide before I get into our talk today, just to provide sort of a visual context as to some of the schools that are students that we’ve worked with have had the opportunity to attend either as, well I mean regardless, as pre-medical students, but either in the traditional track or in the BS/MD track, which I’ll be talking about very shortly. So this is sort of just an agenda of what we’re going to be talking about today. PowerPoint presentations are all tell ’em once, tell ’em what you told them and then remind them what you tell them. So here’s step one of three. We’re going to be talking about what top colleges are really looking for in their pre-medical applicants factors that strengthen a pre-med and BS/MD program application, strategically planning your involvement, sort of where outside help can be really beneficial to the process, common mistakes and pitfalls to avoid, and then strategies to develop your application over time as this is not something that you can kind of just do November of your senior year.

So in the first section of what top colleges are really looking for. Before we delve deeply into that, I want to first talk about what the two main tracks to get into medical school are in the U.S. So this is of course notwithstanding that some schools have early admission programs that you can apply to while in undergrad. So with the caveat that I’m not going to talk about that today, these are the two main tracks that people use to get into medical school. So the first path is the traditional path where you apply to undergrad through one application service, Common App or sometimes Coalition or some schools have their own school-specific one, but we’ll just say Common App to be all inclusive of those. And then while you’re in undergrad or potentially after some gap years after undergrad, you apply separately to medical school through AMCAS, the American Medical College Application Service or AACOMAS, which is the one for doctor of osteopathic medicine programs.

So that’s kind of the route that most people will end up taking. It’ll get you eight years expected to graduate, with four years of medical school and four years of undergraduate. Period. End of sentence. The combined program, which is the BS/MD program, which I might use interchangeably throughout this talk, is a combined and sometimes accelerated program where you can do your undergraduate in four years or sometimes as low as two or three, and then you do your medical training after that and they follow immediately one after the other, there’s no gap years and it’s all one application. So you would apply through the Common App to both your medical school and your undergraduate program, and then you’re considered by both committees simultaneously, and then a decision is made about undergrad and then the graduate medical education program. So talking a little bit specifically about what the BS/MD program is for anybody who doesn’t know before we move sort of more broadly into the pre-med application process.

Generally, BS/MD programs, like I said, are combined medical degree programs. So one of the pros of doing these is that they can be accelerated. So, some programs are actually shorter than the eight years that you would do traditionally, and that would just be pretty much cutting off some of your time in undergrad to move in a more accelerated fashion into medical school. Additionally, they have opportunities for early clinical exposure and mentorship with the medical professors at the medical school. So that might look like early opportunities for shadowing and networking with physicians at the school that you’re going to be attending. That might look like starting to look at case-based learning and what that looks like in medical school because that’s a lot different than what you’ll see in undergrad, and it’s a nice introduction to sort of the ways that you’ll be taught when you move into your medical education.

BS/MD program overview

And then similarly, there are benchmarks to matriculation after you come to your undergraduate education, before you actually get to go to medical school. So, one of the big pros that people talk about for pursuing a BS/MD application is the ability to sort of bypass the MCAT. And while the MCAT is unfun and is a punishment to anyone who has the displeasure of knowing her, it’s not always true that just because you’re going to a BS/MD program, you don’t have to take the MCAT. There are some programs that require you to, regardless. There are some programs that have certain flags that will make you have to take the MCAT. So it’s not always true that just because you’re pursuing a BS/MD that you get to avoid the MCAT. But anywho, components of a BS/MD application, what does it look like to actually apply? So a lot of it, at least the first bullet, is exactly identical to the traditional path. You apply through the Common App, you submit your transcripts, your standardized test scores, your letters of recommendation, activity list, and then your personal statement. All of these things I could spend the rest of this time talking about just each one of those and the part that they play in pre-med application processes, which I’ll get into a little bit. But anyway, those are all the same for both the traditional pre-medical and then the BS/MD program application supplemental essays for BS/MD is where we begin to diverge. So, the traditional application will have supplementals, the majority of schools do, but for the BS/MD application, it’s going to be much more tailored to medicine specifically. So, the schools will sort of vary in terms of how many, they’re going to ask about how many essays they’re going to give you, but for the most part they’re going to try and cover one of these or all of these three domains.

So chiefly, why do you want to go into medical school? Why do you want to be a doctor? What is it specifically about our program that’s enticing to you? And then the opportunity for you, the student, to talk about your goals as a physician to evidence more why you’re interested in medicine, and then provide context as to why your experiences that you’ve had up to date make you qualified to make this decision to enter will also make you a competitive student in the program. Interviewing is another place where we diverge. So for BS/MD applications, interviews are a lot different than the traditional round. So in the traditional round, upwards of 90% of students who apply are admitted, and it’s based mostly on when your application is considered complete by this office of admissions. And then also constraints like geographic location of interviewers and major considerations for the students who are applying.

So it’s not really based on competitiveness for the traditional route versus BS/MD applications. If you’re invited to interview, that means that you’ve met certain screening criteria and they consider your application to be competitive enough to warrant an interview. So not only is the decision of whether or not to interview different, the substance of the interview is also different. So, standard interviews, people are probably more or less familiar with, if you’ve ever interviewed for a job, they’re probably going to be closer to something like that versus MMI is multiple mini interviews. So those are a little bit more challenging for students and applicants. That’s multiple rounds of interviews conducted by different interviewers, and they’re usually case-based and oftentimes require the student to apply the pillars of medical ethics to different situations and then also answer questions about the healthcare system and problems that exist, how they can be ameliorated, things like that.

And then finally, deadlines are also different for BS/MD applications. They’re earlier. So in order to be considered for a BS/MD application at different programs, you have to apply for the earliest deadline that they have. So, that’s sometimes Early Action or Early Action II for state schools. So these can be usually around November 1st, but sometimes as early as October 15th for some programs. It’s another thing to consider where you don’t want to decide, I don’t know, late September that you want to apply to a BS/MD program because you are out of luck, I would say at that point. So, who is right for a BS/MD program? Ideally, the Venn diagram is a circle, right? So you want to have objective and subjective qualifiers to make you a good candidate for a BS/MD program. So objective, I won’t spend too much time on it because we’re going to get into that more in the next couple of slides, but basically you have to be perfect.

The only thing on the list, all you have to be is perfect! So easy, check it right off! So that looks like a stellar academic record, probably top 5% of your class, if not more. Great standardized test scores. We’ll talk about what “great” means in a couple of slides, and then well-aligned extracurriculars, which we’ll also talk about in subsequent slides. A lot of people might have that, which is fantastic and wonderful. Subjective things that you should consider before applying to a BS/MD program are things that people often don’t think about and can create misery and tension and other unfortunate things. So for one, career certainty, if you apply to a BS/MD program, you want to be a doctor. You’re not considering other allied health professionals or maybe being a PhD researcher in biomedical sciences or even teaching. There are a lot of things that touch and concern the roles of a physician outside of just being a physician, and some people benefit from the ability to explore that more in undergrad before actually committing to medical school. Commitment to the institution in the area. So like I said, BS/MD programs can be as long as eight years. So you’re committing to be in a specific school and at a specific location for eight years, which for some people is a commitment they’re more than willing to make, and for others it’s like, “Oh my gosh, I kind of didn’t think of that. I don’t know if I want to be in—I won’t name-drop a state to be mean to that random state—but like a random place that you maybe don’t know if you want to be in for eight years of your life.” And then purpose and focus. You want to make sure that you know that pretty much similarly to career certainty that this is something that you want to do.

You don’t necessarily want to delve into other career fields. The schools will have different vibes so to speak. So the undergraduate college that you go to will likely be a lot different and have a much different feel than the medical school, but you’re going to be committing to both right now by virtue of applying and then potentially subsequently getting in. So, this is sort of just as a reminder that most people think about the objective, which is important. It’s necessary, but I would say insufficient to make you a qualified BS/MD applicant. But you should also be considering the subjective qualifiers that would make you a good fit for a program and that are also easy enough for reviewers to kind of weed out when reading essays and interviewing to see if students are actually really committed to this. So, to move on from BS/MD and then shortly move into pre-med, generally BS/MD programs offer early assurance.

You’re into medical school. Obviously this, as I said, is a conditional acceptance, so you do have to meet certain benchmarks that are usually related to GPA, performance, and then MCAT score for those that require it, and then obviously your pre-med prerequisite courses like organic and general chemistry, which I haven’t talked about in a while, and are sending shivers down my spine. And then they can also be accelerated. So these programs can sometimes be as low as six years, usually around seven or eight. And like I said, they require you to basically be perfect. So I won’t reiterate those bullet points.

Popular BS/MD programs

Popular BS/MD programs. So Brown’s PLME program people have probably heard of this as one of the more well-known BS/MD programs I would say. So, these next few slides are essentially just to provide a snapshot into what is considered competitive more objectively in terms of your grades and test scores. I say as Brown does not have a specified minimum, but SATs. So like I said, you want to be looking north, ideally higher, 1500s. Here, the composite was around 1530, ACT 35. For those who don’t know, it’s out of 36. So that does not leave you a whole ton of wiggle room. And then the MCAT is not required for people who are admitted. It is an eight year program, and then, here we’re looking at an acceptance rate of about 2%, which is not a lot. And even amongst the Ivies for undergraduate admission, that’s low.

BS/MD programs like Drexel. They do have minimums. A minimum of 3.5 for GPA, a minimum of 1420 and 32 for SAT and ACT respectively. Minimums do not equal competitiveness. So if you have a 3.7 (GPA), that’s not necessarily a reason to be like, “Great! Drexel’s in the bag!” I’ve provided the average admitted student scores and GPA for each of these to provide context as to what actually looks competitive for a BS/MD program because people will often see these minimum numbers and then think, “Oh my gosh, I’m chilling. I have a 3.8 (GPA). We’re reviving. Everything’s great!” Warning, red flag, that’s not necessarily the case.

MCAT. So, Drexel is one of the programs that does require you still to take the MCAT. So you have to get a 511, which right now is about the 82nd percentile and also requires you to not have a score below 126 on any of the four sections, which are Biochem, CARS, which is essentially reading comprehension, a psychology/ sociology section, and then a chemistry and physics section.

Also, an eight year program looking at a two-and-a-half-ish percent acceptance rate. So, all of these are sort of just to highlight that BS/MD programs are very competitive. They have very low acceptances, they are similar to pre-med in that any of the schools you look at for their general acceptance rate, their pre-med acceptance rate is going to be slightly less. So if you’re looking at a competitive T20 program that’s roughly a 10% acceptance rate, generally, you’re more competitive majors like business and pre-med and engineering are going to be slightly lower than that 10%. So, challenging to get into and not necessarily, actually not at all, the easy route into medicine where it’s like, “Oh, I’ll just do it now and bypass the systems later.” So just things to think about for the BS/MD programs. Moving more generally into medical school, or sorry, pre-med admissions, considering both the BS/MD track and the traditional track, which is to apply to college and then to apply to medical school.

PETER: We’re going to talk about a lot of different things in the coming slides, including the avoiding generic side, which is like a trademark thing, but avoiding generic applications strategies for improving or creating a successful application, and then kind of what narrative looks like, what an angular profile is, and then just providing more context as to that in a concrete way. So, what are top pre-med programs really looking for? Step number two is to tell them once and tell them again. So academic excellence, intellectual curiosity, authenticity and passion, humanism, leadership, maturity, and interpersonal skills. So that’s it. I can end the talk right now. Just make sure you have all of these. Check the boxes and then you’re great! Everything’s great. What I’m going to attempt to do in the next, however much time we have left, is to try and concretize these for you and show you, I mean, we know what academic excellence means, but how do I demonstrate intellectual curiosity?

What does authenticity and passion look like to an AO? Because they’re very likely not going to see you, not very many programs for the traditional route do interviews and BS/MD, of course, they’ll see you if you do it that way, but you’re not going to be able to fervently give them your story in the spoken word in an interview. These all come through in essays. So how do we showcase that? And then same thing with service and leadership, kind of providing context as to those sorts of things. So, when people talk about checking boxes and college admissions like, “Oh, I’ll do Science Olympiad, that’ll check the box for scientific and whatever, I’ll move on.” That’s not the boxes you should be checking. These are the boxes you should be checking because by virtue of going after school a couple of days a week for a couple semesters and doing Science Olympiad, that’s not checking the box for intellectual curiosity if you just go and you blow up a couple of things and then you leave. Intellectual curiosity is demonstrated by you succeeding, when you participate in the tournaments like doing well and getting gold or silver or bronze medals, it’s mentoring students on your team, it’s maybe creating a second team, like maybe your school has an A team and you wanted to create a B or a C team because there was so much interest for underclassmen and you helped to garner support for that and put it together formally and allow other people at your school to participate. So, these are the things here that you should be checking off and we’re hoping today to be able to tell you or start you to think about some of the ways that you can do that concretely in your day-to-day, quarter-to-quarter, year-to-year throughout high school depending on where you find yourself.

So, I don’t just spend too much time on this because I think this is probably the fourth time I’ve mentioned metrics at this point that are quantitative like this. But GPA, anything above a 3.9, easy, easy peasy, lemon squeezy. So again, surpassing the minimum is not necessarily, in fact, is not competitive. So for like I said, schools, when you’re applying pre-med, whether that’s BS/MD or traditional, you’re going to be put in a more competitive box than some other majors. Pre-med is very hot right now. Business is very hot right now. Comp sci, engineering, to name a few. They’re going to be expecting very high performance academically, just full stop. Not much more detail is really needed there. Same thing for ACT and SAT. So this is sort of based off of our own data with students, how our students tend to fare with the T20s and the more competitive schools and otherwise for difficult majors.

So you want to be, again, having very high SAT and ACT scores. What does that look like in terms of how many can I take? Should I do one or the other? Those are all sort of tailored things that you can and should probably talk to somebody about. But that’s again, also a whole other talk. So we’re kind of glazing past that today. And then of course rigor. So obviously you should be, or maybe not as obviously, you should be taking as many STEM courses as you can in undergrad. Well, that’s also true, but in high school, so that’s AP bio, AP chem, physics, calculus, and you should be excelling in those. And you should also be doing well in your non-STEM courses. So while getting a B in chemistry will destroy you for a pre-med application for obvious reasons, getting A’s in all of those, but getting a C in English because you were like, it’s just AP lit. I can let that go as long as chem is doing fine. That’s also not true. They want you to be excelling in all areas if for no other reason than because English is a pretty necessary skill and you’re still going to be writing lab reports or grants or God knows what else as you progress through your career. So that’s not something that they’re going to want to see you slacking in. And also undergrad and medical school are going to be competing, have a lot of competing things for your time. So, being able to focus solely on chemistry and do well is not the same as being able to do well in all of your coursework altogether. So, showing that increasing rigor with a commensurate increase in or maintaining a good GPA is very important.

DANIEL: Peter, can I interrupt you here really quickly?

PETER: For sure.

DANIEL: Sorry about that. Really quickly, I know the Q&A has been really active, but if anyone is maybe driving or didn’t see this earlier, I know we’re sharing a ton of information. So, if you have any follow-up questions as we’re going through, I’m really active in the Q&A, so any questions you have, go ahead and drop them in there.

PETER: Fantastic, thanks Daniel. So extracurricular profiles. This is where we start to get a little bit more granular in what we mean by intellectual curiosity, leadership, etcetera, and what that looks like and what the AOs are going to see and without using the fluffy words that they’re hoping for in their hearts but actually reviewing when they’re looking at your applications. So the three pillars of premedical courses or premedical extracurriculars are biomedical research/science activities, community engagement, and clinical shadowing or patient contact. So those can look like a lot of things. I have an example here that I’ll go through. I have some later that we’ll also talk about, but this slide is sort of meant to evidence what angularity looks like in a profile versus sort of just haphazard box checking. So this is based off of a student that I worked with recently.

For the biomedical research box, they worked as a research associate in a basic science lab looking into neuroplasticity. Community engagement. There were a couple of different things that this student was interested in, but one of them, or some of them, were volunteering for a local nursing home to play music for residents. They also organized a letter writing campaign to support residents of assisted living homes in their area, just to make them feel like they were people out there who were supporting them and just sending nice, kind, I think they had, if memory serves, they wrote little fun quotes and had puzzles that they gave them or something. It was sweet, I thought. And then also creating a digital literacy program for seniors in their area because they’re certainly techier than I am. And then clinical shadowing/patient contact, they shadowed a neurologist in their area who specialized in care for patients with dementia.

So, hopefully you can see that there’s kind of a story coming through here that this person cares a lot about the health and wellbeing of elderly citizens in their community. And that comes through in the type of work, the type of disease processes that they are studying. It comes through in the ways that they try to impact their community, and it also comes through in terms of the patients that they try to seek out and whose days they try and make better and whose physicians they try and learn from. So this could also come across much more haphazardly and box checking if someone’s, you know maybe their biomedical science research is looking into signal transaction pathways for a cancer drug, so cancer research. And then community engagement is volunteering at the local soup kitchen because that’s what NHS at your school does. But you don’t have to disclose that that’s why you do it. You just kind of say, this is my community engagement that I’m doing. And then patient contact clinical shadowing might be you’re seeing an OB/GYN because your parents are friends with them and that’s the practice that is the easiest for you to get into. So you can hopefully kind of see how those are different in terms of one, being more angular and intentional and evidencing a specific area and population of interest, and the other one being, oh, I have to make sure I get research. Oh, I have to make sure I lay eyes on patients, oh, I have to make sure I look like I am someone who cares about my community and would likely have a much less robust discussion of them in the activity section. So, when I mention angularity and intentionality, that’s sort of what I mean. And I will say sometimes you have to take what you get.

There’s not always opportunities overflowing for you to pick exactly what area of research you want to go into. You might truly be very interested in basic science, neurology research, but the only thing available is something else. That’s not me saying don’t do that, but that’s where it can be helpful to have somebody other than you looking over your application and helping you understand how you can talk about what you’ve done and help weave together a narrative based on what you were able to do because not everybody has the opportunity to cherry pick every single thing just based on availability of where you live, resources, etcetera. So extracurricular profile, angular and intentional. So I’m going to toss it over to Daniel for a moment to talk a little bit about how our students fare in the pre-med and other majors, Daniel.

DANIEL: Yeah, of course. So just sharing what you’re seeing here is a pie chart of our students’ makeup and where they come from. As you can see, the majority of the students that we work with either are pre-med or some sort of physical or natural sciences like biology, chemistry, microbiology, physics, and these students are some of our highest performing students, in terms of our admissions outcomes. Looking at our data from the last admission cycle, these students were 3.1 times more likely to get into any school with an acceptance rate below 15%. And when you’re looking at BS/MD, that pretty much means any BS/MD program as Peter shared, they all tend to be really selective with acceptance rates in the single digits. And then of course, more broadly if you’re looking at bio, chem, microbiology, public health at any other schools. So essentially, our pre-med students’ last admission cycle really crushed it. And this is a really large portion of the students that we work with. What that means is that we have a ton of historical data on what exactly it takes to go from maybe a school in Frisco, Texas to a BS/MD program or a school in the northeast to Johns Hopkins as an example. So that’s just a little bit on how our students have fared.

PETER: Yeah, great, thank you, Daniel. Yeah, so we have tons and tons and tons of students applying into really all of these majors, but pre-med is a very big one and personally one that I love working with. So what does this look like in practice? So, now we’re going to provide for you even more, hopefully, granularity as far as what these different box-checking, leadership, intellectual curiosity, etcetera, look like in the college application. So to provide some context into what we’re going to be looking at here, as I mentioned earlier, the Common Application is going to be your starting point for BS/MD and traditional undergrad, then medical school applications. Part of your Common Application, amongst many other things, is your activity section. Your activity section is 10 or up to 10, but we always say 10, 10 activities that are the most important to you that you think highlight the best aspects of you that will serve to be your evidence for the essays that you write, and are basically how you’ve been spending the majority of your time throughout high school.

So in recent years, recent cycles, that has become much more important in the application process in terms of sort of parsing out applicants based on competitiveness, because GPAs and test scores can only do so much, and essays can only be so believed if they don’t have the actual experience to back them up. So when you say things in your essays, like, I don’t know, as you can see from my extensive experience working with the elderly and your extensive experience of working with the elderly is one semester of volunteering at a nursing home versus the student that I mentioned before who had done all of the activities I was talking about for three out of his four years of high school, it’s just more believable when you have the evidence in the form of longstanding commitment to back up the claims that you’re making in your essays.

So all that to say, what I’m going to be talking about right now are activities sections from students that I’ve worked with very recently that highlight what this looks like. And this is a very good practice. I mean, I would say, what would you rather do on a Tuesday night than after you leave this wonderful talk? Write down your activities in the form of a Common App activity section and start seeing where you’re lapsing and seeing where you could be using help and seeing if you’re a junior and you have six out of 10, warning red leader number two, it might be time to really make the most of your summer and your senior fall. So anyway, these are actual student profiles, to provide some context as to what this can look like for pre-medical applicants. So this student, one of the research opportunities that they had was working in a genetic disease lab at a local university, and they were performing, we’ll just call them basic science techniques, to kind of understand the causes of different rare genetic diseases.

So, this is something that the student and I were actually able to work on together to figure out a way to get this, because research is not just super readily available to everybody all the time. So that’s one of the most common questions that I feel like I get from students and parents is how do we get this kind of research? And it’s a very fair question. PhDs or MD researchers have a lot of demands on their time, whether that’s postdocs who are working in their lab, PhD students, medical students, undergrads who are rotating through for fellowships. There are a lot of people who come in the way of high school students in terms of demanding time from PIs and their experience and mentorship. So how do you kind of pierce that? And that’s something that we help a lot with. I’ve helped a lot of students with that. What it comes down to a lot of the time is spray and pray, a lot of emails to different PIs and not just, “Hi, I think your lab’s really cool. Please let me work there,” but curating it: “Here is a project that I’m really interested in and a goal that I see myself fulfilling, and I would really just love the opportunity to be able to do this under your lab.” What we basically help them with is coming up with the projects such that all the PI really has to do is say, yeah, you can do it with my pipettes and test tubes. It’s not, “Hi, teach me everything I need to know about basic science, neuro research so I can put it on my college application.” So this was one of the opportunities where we got a yes, which doesn’t always happen, and the student was able to do some meaningful research during their 11th and 12th grade year that they talked about in different parts of their application.

Other parts of the extracurricular profile. So this student worked as a medical assistant in a primary care clinic, and they had the opportunity to do a lot of patient-facing work. So it wasn’t just, again, when we talk about checking the box for patient-facing clinical work, shadowing is great and you need to be able to see what a physician does to understand why you want to do what they do so you can speak maturely and thoughtfully about that in an essay, but it’s called shadowing for a reason. Seen and not heard. You’re sitting in the corner trying not to knock trays over. There’s not a lot of active stuff that you’re able to do. So, an opportunity like this, to actually be the one to greet the patient, to take sort of an initial history, get vitals, and even just work on your professional speaking and working with people who might be in uncomfortable settings, some people truly really do not like going to the doctor, is really wonderful and something that provides not only a lot of fodder for essays in terms of evidencing one’s interest in medicine, but also in terms of showing like I’m not just checking the clinic box like I really threw myself into learning how to help patients, learning how to allay their anxieties and actually being able to contribute to the clinical workflow by getting vitals and the initial history and things like that. The student was also an EMT, which I won’t spend too much time on because that’s very similar in terms of a lot of really great clinical exposure, lots of opportunities to work with patients. If I remember correctly, I think their BS/MD application was actually based on an encounter that they had when they were an EMT that I thought was compelling.

And then one of the other things you’ll note as we’re going through here is the commitment that the student is doing these things for the hours of the weeks per year, the years of high school. These aren’t transient things that they just did a semester to check a box off and move on. And here we are again, community service. So different things that we’re spanning two to three years of high school, the youth leadership council for the Alzheimer’s Disease Association, organizing events and promoting fundraisers, founder of a nonprofit. So here we see just in the descriptions, leadership and initiative, and impact, which are all things that are super important. And here’s ways that you can actually see them coming together in an application. So obviously saying leadership and saying founder are important, and those are more or less going to be box checky. You were either the president of the student government or you were not. But running for those things, taking on those roles are very important and seeing an application that says founder, founder, co-founder, president, president, vice president is a lot more compelling than member, member, member, member, member.

Similarly, things happened. Stuff resulted. This person was able to garner over a hundred people, an interest from over a hundred people for a fundraiser that they were doing to spread awareness about Alzheimer’s disease. They also got local businesses to donate to their fundraising initiatives for their nonprofit that they founded about mental health awareness. So again, this is not only impact and initiative, but you can kind of see a thread here coming together. This is the person who really authentically cares about people. They’re not just using a semester or a summer to get as much time as they can to check a box and move on to the next thing. And they also seemingly have an idea of what they might want to do there. I’m seeing a lot of neuro and psychiatry here, maybe even primary care. So, when you can start seeing where this person can go in the future and making guesses about their trajectory, that’s how you know, have a really good application because regardless of whether their guess is correct, they thought something about you. So if they were wrong, they’ll never know because they already accepted you and then you can do whatever you want. Or if they’re right, then that’s even better because they think that they’re getting to know you. And the ideal situation when an AO is done reading your app is that they want to invite you over to have a cup of coffee and ask you questions about expanding on your essays and the different things that you’ve done. So that will come from being able to provide that sort of context as to, anyway. Yeah. Daniel, what’s up?

DANIEL: I love what you said there on sort of creating a trajectory and how admissions officers start to envision who you might be on campus or sort of start to envision what your career would look like over time. I know that you work really tirelessly with your students and as a part of the committee actually, I know that you work a lot really tirelessly with a lot of our students on their activities section. Can you talk a little bit more about how we develop these activities sections with our students or what this student in particular is maybe doing really well?

PETER: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a lot of easy, quick things. There’s strategy because there’s substantive strategy and there are procedural strategy, right? Procedural strategy is easier, so I’ll talk about that first. You have 150 characters for each of these activities, which is not a lot. It’s like a tweet, I think something like that, to sum up what this person in this case did for three whole years, which is not an easy thing to do. So, some of that is starting with action verbs to cut down on the amount of wasted space that you use at the beginning. Some of it’s making sure that you aren’t duplicative with what you say in your organization title and what you say in your description. A lot of times I’ll have people—they’ll say, “founder of a nonprofit fighting against mental illness,” and then their subject or their description will be, “I founded this nonprofit to fight against mental illness,” and I’m like, I know.” I sometimes put in all caps, “I KNOW YOU JUST TOLD ME.” So some of it is things like that where it’s just checking yourself because it’s hard when you’re writing it by yourself and you don’t have the outside context of someone who doesn’t know you or your situation or what you’re thinking to be like, oh yeah, I guess I did already tell them that three times. I don’t really need to say it again. So some of it is procedural quick, things like that. And then there’s also more substance. So one of the things that I do with my students painstakingly to their benefit, but not always to their delight, is making sure that their descriptions are extremely quantitative to the extent that we can, so talking again about impact. Don’t necessarily tell me what you did, tell me what resulted from what you did and what you learned from what you did.

Because if you tell me for example, that you were the team captain of your Science Olympiad team, I get that you participated in events and I understand that you practiced science after school, but what resulted from it? Like if you had not been in this team and in this role, would it have been different? Hopefully, yes. If not, then we have to continue talking. But, did you put together some sort of mentorship program for students in the Science Olympiad to help with cross-disciplinary sharing of ideas for people who are more interested in earth science events versus bio versus building events? Were you a person who was always the one who would take the events that nobody else wanted because you wanted to make sure that the team did well and you actually found out that you were really curious about epidemiology doing disease detectives, and you didn’t know that because you thought that you were really big into the engineering building events?

If you can’t tell, I did Science Olympiad in high school, so pulling back all these names like I just did it yesterday. I can’t hear any applause, but I’m hoping there’s at least some. Anyways, doing things like that to make sure that we understand what you actually did and not wasting what little precious space you have and telling me things I don’t care about, and some of that just comes from doing this for a while. I can read through these applications in the activities sections and I kind of have a good idea of what people are going to care about. So there are some things that you do and impacts you have that, while very meaningful to you personally, might be better spent as an added part of an essay or somewhere else in the application rather than in your activities section. A lot of it is just sort of coming from being as quantitative as you can, having takeaways, and also varying how you talk about different things. Not everything has to be super resume, numbers, and whatever. Some of them can be more fun. I think we’ll get to one in a couple of slides. A student I worked with who was very big into jazz music and started a band at his school was a lot more fun. So, I’ll save that for that. But yeah, that’s kind of an idea of what we do. There’s procedural aspects to it, and then there’s also the substantive. The procedural. We can fly through without a problem. The substantive comes a lot more from you, the student, and talking with your coach to understand what you did, because you generally have the basic idea of what you did. Like, oh, I did Model UN, so I went and participated in blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But it’s a conversation about what actually impacted as a result of that, what changed as a result of your involvement in this. And if the answer was nothing, again, then we’re going to have to work on that.

So to keep moving through these activities, let’s see, science and math. So this kind of falls under the science-y activities. I see Science Olympiad on here. I’m not going to continue to bore people to death who don’t want to hear about Science Olympiad. So we’ll just say, this person did a lot of Science Olympiad events. They did very well in them, placing in states and regionals, and then they were also part of TSA as a mentor and a participant doing very well in the same.

They worked. So working is a way to showcase all kinds of things, including leadership, teamwork, interpersonal skills that people oftentimes don’t necessarily think about. So this student worked as a tutor in different STEM and also English courses. And then again, to be as quantitative as possible. What difference did you make? If you tell me you’re a tutor, I understand you tutored students. Got it. But if you had not done this, would things be different? So talking about who you worked with, how things changed for them as a result of your participation in their lives is important to show that again, you have initiative and impact and not just checking boxes. The impact is a really big thing there. And this is another student’s application profile. So that was all, I don’t know if I said it, that was all one student, their application profile. So you can get an idea of how all those activities coalesce and come together. These next two slides are a different student, which I’ll go through a little bit less granularly.

This person you can just see scrolling down, co-founder and president, captain, captain, founder. So tons and tons of leadership. We have research, working at a hepatic physiology lab. We have a robotics club founder, a robotics club captain, science bowl captain, founder of the band that I was talking about. So, you can see all of these, a lot of leadership. We’re understanding. We’re seeing where the scientific curiosity is coming in and the people skills and the initiative and creating this last one down here, the band leader one is what I was talking about in terms of making a little bit more of a fun description rather than just always having things be starting with an action verb and moving through the numbers of what you did. So those are fine. I don’t think you can have nine of 10 of them being that because we need some sort of like it can all be levity, but having those in activities that are appropriate gives your personalities more of a dynamic feel.

DANIEL: Peter, you touched on this a tiny bit, sorry for interrupting you there, and I think this is something that I think is a misconception that most parents or students don’t expect. And I know you harp on this a lot with your students, especially your pre-med students about humanizing themselves as an applicant. Can you talk a little bit more about what that means to humanize yourself as an applicant and maybe where and how students can go about doing this?

PETER: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re in a very non humanistic part of the application I would say. The activities section, because you have so little space, affords you very little time to be cute and quirky and fun and yourself. And this is a lot more, as I’ll talk about in a couple of slides, the matter-of-fact evidence. But in the essays, that’s really the opportunity that you have to shine your personality through and tie everything together for that admissions officer and come across as a human person. I always love when students can, we can kind of vibe, like come up with a vibe for the student as we’re reading through their application and understanding a little bit more about them. So, one of my kids this year, we called the conscientious tinkerer. I know it was tinkerer, I think it was conscientious. But anyway, which comes through in his essays in the way that he talks about what he does.

So, the short answer to Daniel’s question is how you talk about what you did. So the activity section, it’s fine to be more matter-of-fact and saying, here’s what I did here was the impact because you don’t have that much space. Your personal statement and your supplemental essays allow you the space to tie together your narrative essentially and say why you did what you did and provide the necessary context for the reader to not only prove, okay, I didn’t just do these because these are the things I have to do to be a good pre-med, but also here’s where my drive and passion comes from. Because understanding that drive and passion, which can sometimes be proxied by the initiative and the impact, helps us see you in the future and helps us see where you’re going to go and helps us see that this passion is strong and is something that you’re going to continue doing and is not going to Peter out, I guess, so to speak, as soon as you come to undergrad and it’s not something you just did to lie and bypass the college admission system. So, I could talk for a lot longer about how essays are meant to do that and how that’s where we do a lot of our work, frankly is in the essays and in that narrative building and authenticity. I don’t want to say creating because it was already there, but authenticity-finding I suppose. But yeah, basically that.

So finishing up this student’s profile, we have more community service and more science-y activities. So again, youth leader, president, youth leader. We have a lot of leadership and a lot of STEM focused stuff, which is fantastic. I won’t read through every single individual one, but this is more context as to how you can see what initiative and what scientific curiosity and what teamwork looks like in what you’re actually going to be submitting to your colleges come November if you’re a rising senior right now.

So just to go through some mistakes that people make and then shortly we’ll be tossing it back over to Daniel. So, doing too much. There is such a thing as doing too much and then not having enough depth to your profile to be able to talk about the activities that you do. Starting too late is a big one. Not only deciding and deciding to do pre-med, but in deciding what you want your undergraduate application to look like. Senior summer is already a little bit late, but this is something that as you see, the profiles that I just showed you aren’t things that are cultivated overnight. Those are things that are cultivated over years and years that demonstrate longstanding commitment, passion, and drive and aren’t going to be something that you can just do junior spring when your teachers start reminding you, “Hey, you’re applying to college next year” or you do your first personal statement writing draft in your English class and you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s right. That’s up until this point, college applications were a thing that happens to other people, and now I’m other people.” Generic motivation for medicine, kind of obvious, no clear narrative. So again, a lot of those things come through in the essays. Obviously if your letters of recommendation aren’t great, that’s not going to serve you very well. And then all of these are pretty much self-explanatory. Let’s see. So, things that you want to develop over time. We’ve made it to the third time now that I’m going to be telling you, leadership, community engagement, initiative, drive, the curiosity, both in terms of scientific research and also just of the world around you, are the boxes that you want to be checking and the things that you want to be focusing on.

And the ways that you do that were hopefully made clear to you through what I’ve been talking about today and also the profiles that I shared with you. So starting early. Starting to look at your profile as early as possible and getting involved in different things that mean something to you so that you cannot check the box of, “Oh, I did Science Olympiad,” but so you can start filling in the box of, “I’m demonstrating intellectual curiosity through my varying involvements.” Angular activities are better than haphazardly string together activities as I discussed. Introspection is better than just writing out matter-of-factly what you did, notwithstanding the activity section, which is sort of its own beast. Feedback on essays kind of starts back with the early, not only is it helpful to have seasoned people who don’t know you looking at your app and providing feedback, but doing so early so you have the opportunity to iterate and potentially throw things out that are bad and come back.

And then interview prep, which I didn’t talk about very much during this, but is also important. Applications are evaluated through all the things that I just said, so I guess this is actually the fourth time now, so I’ll just say, all of these bullet points are the boxes that you want to be checking and they’re evaluated throughout your application. Your extracurricular profile I’ve mentioned is your evidence. Your essays I’ve mentioned is your narrative, which are thoughtfully cultivated with you and hopefully a lot of people that you know and don’t know looking at your app and providing you with feedback so you’re not just putting together something based on how you understand it, because you’re not the one who’s going to be reading it. And interviews and letters of rec are quality and reality checks. Are you who you say you are in person and are your activities and involvements what you say they are through the letters of recommendation?

And all of this is to show not only that you’re qualified now and that you fervently care about the things that you say you care about, but also that this drive is going to carry you forward and demonstrate potential for success down the line. These are the things that if you check these boxes, you have a very strong, because there are no guarantees, chance of getting into these really competitive programs, whether traditional or the combine. And now, I will throw it back to Daniel to talk a little bit more about how Prepory can play a role in this. All of these many things that I’ve just been talking about.

DANIEL: And I do want to say for parents who are here, I know we’re wrapping up shortly, but we will be hanging out for about 10 more minutes after 8:00 PM to answer any questions that might still be going on in the chat. So if you guys have them, you can continue to drop them in there. We’ll likely be answering most of those questions live. Peter, you can go ahead. But before that, I just want to share a little bit about what we do specifically with students to help them through their college admissions process. Our programs vary on what grade level your high school students are in, where they’re coming to Prepory, whether they’re 9th grade or 10th grade or 11th grade. I know there are some families that are here because they’re looking into medical school. We do offer medical school advising support, but that’s a whole different beast.

For today, we’re going to be focusing on our programs geared to high school students. Every one of these programs, regardless of what grade level you’re in, include one-on-one support through 60 minute hour long advising sessions with your dedicated Prepory college admissions coach. That college admissions coach is the person that’s working with your child most closely. The person that is for our 9th grade students, helping them identify research opportunities, create a list of target professors that we’re going to be reaching out to garner research opportunities, to identify summer program opportunities that would be a great fit for them and help them apply through that. As well as for our seniors, help them strategize on their Common App activities section like Peter just showed us today, prepare their writing, things of that nature. Every one of our programs also includes mock committee style reviews.

Essentially what that means is that internally, our team creates its own admissions office made up of former admissions officers and admissions readers, like Peter, other members of our team who worked in admissions at Purdue, like James Crawley, some folks worked at University of Pennsylvania, Juilliard, UMiami, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and we essentially review all of our students as if we were back in the admissions committee, studying their transcripts, sort of what trends existed there, what trends existed in their extracurricular activities list, are they really proving and sincerely demonstrating an interest in medicine. How did they humanize themselves? What are those essays and stories that they shared in their say about who they are? We then compile all of that committee’s feedback and deliver it to that student and their Prepory coach to implement it one time before it really counts. And we do this for the Early Action and Regular Decision process.

We also do a version of this for underclassmen, so you’re not waiting until 12th grade to get a 360 degree review, but it’s actually happening every year in high school when you’re working with Prepory. Every one of our programs also offers unlimited essay, resume, and deferral letter reviews for things like competitive summer applications for our underclassmen, and of course, college applications for our seniors. And all of our programs include parent check-ins, which are just an opportunity for us to keep you as a parent in the loop. How’s your student doing? Maybe you have questions. I know the parent rumor mill is really intense and crazy and we offer these webinars as a way to sort of share more information transparently, but being able to meet with just you to give you an update on your child and how we’ll support them through this process. This is just a gist of the kinds of services that we provide.

After this, we’ll also be giving you all a link, Peter you can go ahead, to schedule an initial consultation with our team. If after today’s webinar you feel like, whoa, this is really helpful, but I have more questions. How can you help my child specifically? What research programs should I do? My student has this opportunity, but they’ve also had this opportunity, which one should I be doing? How can I get research opportunities? Help me build a college list. Please scan the QR code on your screen and you can schedule an initial consultation with our team where we’ll be able to get to know you, your child, what your goals are, and talk you through how we can support you through your college admissions process. My colleague Leti, she’s also backstage, but she just dropped a link in the chat, so you can actually click on that link as well to schedule that initial consultation with our team. Again, you can scan the QR code or you can click on Leti’s link. We will be here for about the next 10 or so minutes answering everyone’s questions. And Peter will leave that QR code for you all here, but if you have questions, we are happy to address them now.

DANIEL: Alrighty, Peter, I will try to answer, maybe create some gist of questions here, but I think one of the questions that I’ve been seeing a lot from families is maybe can you give us an example or maybe just a few examples of the kind of maybe summer programs or research opportunities that BS/MD or pre-med students should be looking at or thinking about?

PETER: Yeah, sure. So definitely one of the big ones is research. And so finding research is difficult and varied. So there are programs that you can do at different universities that you apply into that are kind of fellowship programs that allow you the opportunity to sort of have didactic lectures and then also have in lab time where you’re able to work on a project with a PI, sometimes of your own choosing, and then sometimes of their design. And then honestly, the majority of people I feel like who are able to find research over the summer do it in kind of similar the way that I was mentioning before where you reach out and try and find people in your area who are amenable to working with high school or letting high school students work with them and then doing research that way. And I think one of the misconceptions or things that I hear a lot is that, well, I don’t live near Princeton, or Yale, or Stanford, so what good is it?

Getting research experience, hands-on research experience, at even just your local university is super helpful and not only showcases your initiative, but people know that it’s difficult to get research. That’s not a thing that AOs are unaware of. So just by virtue of getting in the door and being able to conduct research somewhere shows your initiative and shows the fact that you probably had to email a lot of people and do a lot of cold calls to get in there. But it also, it’s not diminished the fact that you were producing research and working with people at a university local to you versus a T20, so finding research, whether it’s through word-of-mouth, through family friends, or through fellowships you apply for, or emails chains that you send out is super important and a really good thing to do with your summer.

Another thing is community impact. That’s also something that you can start doing over the summer, so that’s a lot more tailored. It’s not as easy for me to just say, go impact your community because I don’t really know how you want to do that. So that’s another area that we, as coaches, help our students with. We internally refer to it as passion projects and helping the student to understand, “What is it you care about?”, “Who are some people or some cause or something that you want to work to help address and then how can you actually do that either in your community and beyond?” And we’ve had plenty of coaches do different things like that with their students that were ideated within the context of their little Zoom meeting room and then came to fruition over their junior summer or their sophomore summer or whenever they happen to be working with the coach.

And then summer, same thing. The third pillar, which I didn’t touch on yet, the patient care one, is also super important. And also, I will say similar to research, hard to get but not as hard as research. Is it going to be easy for you to do what the one student did where you just find an MA position and you’re able to go in and take vitals and get histories? No, that’s not necessarily going to be super easy. With help and with persistence, you definitely can, but hospitals have all kinds of volunteer opportunities for students of varying levels all the way down to high school that allow you to go and talk to patients. And sometimes, it’s just helping to direct people through hospitals, which are confusing and scary places. Sometimes, it’s just staying at the front desk and being a smiling face and talking to people before you direct them. Sometimes it’s bringing them from clinic to clinic or even wheeling them out to their cars, and all of that is very valuable experience. Even if you’re not the one documenting the vitals or the one updating the physician on the history, you are talking to people. You are sometimes going to have experiences where you were the brightest part of that person’s day. I remember having a student who worked with, who did something very similar at a hospital where they have just an open, not even application you apply, but you pretty much everybody can do it, and it was very much like you wield the person to and from either the clinic and then the parking lot and they had a patient who was just so grateful that they were talking to them about whatever it was that they were talking to them about because they were there that day for a really scary diagnosis that they didn’t want.

They didn’t want to be there. There were a lot of things that were really stressing them out. They didn’t need the wheelchair, but it was hospital policy, whatever, whatever. But being able to talk to the student, a young kid about whatever it was that they were going through, they were just so grateful and the student felt really amazing about it and was able to talk about it in a really cool and authentic way. At some point—I don’t remember where in their application—and that comes across so much more genuinely than just sitting there every day on your phone and saying, “Oh yeah, I volunteered at a hospital,” and then my first question being, “Okay, well cool, what did you do? Talk me through a normal day,” and then your normal day is TikTok. So any one of those three things, or more, are a valuable way to spend your summer or both? Honestly, I get the question a lot of like, should I do this or this? My answer is usually both, because if the only thing stopping you is sleep, that’s weakness. So you can always find time. But yeah, Daniel, I would say that those are things that I would say to start off with and you can always get more specific as you talk with people who know you better and find more specifically what kind of impact you want to have.

DANIEL: Yeah. I guess maybe one more question here, because this one is coming through a lot. Some families were asking, “Hey, my student’s interested in maybe neuroscience, but they only have opportunities to shadow a dentist or a primary care physician. Should a student who’s interested potentially in neuroscience should shadow a dentist or maybe any other field that isn’t neuroscience specifically?”

PETER: Yeah, great question. Definitely. So, this does go back to the angular discussion. Angularity is important and you want to have it and if you weren’t able to have it going into the activities, it’s nice to be able to find a way to make it angular on the backend, which is kind of an area that we’re able to help with a lot of the time. First of all, we take with a grain of salt major interest. So if you say for sure you’re interested in neuroscience right now, who on earth knows what you’re going to be doing in undergrad? And AOs are familiar with that and they understand that you’re not applying into a major that you can do and not switch out of with the exception of probably like BME. So just knowing that you want to be a neuroscience major doesn’t mean that you can only shadow a neurologist or a psychiatrist or you’re out of luck.

Primary care is great. Dentists are also great. I will say if you want to do the BS/MD route, dentist is probably not going to be enough for you because you weren’t with a physician and you don’t have that experience of, “I have a better idea of what doctors do.” But to the caveat of BS/MDs, for pre-med, absolutely you’re still going to get patient experience. You’re still going to have that ability to speak authentically about why you want to care for people and how meaningful it’s to be able to help someone when they’re having a difficult time or answer somebody’s question or be able to teach them something, which are all things that physicians do every time they meet a patient. So, you don’t have to be so specific in terms of that. And frankly, neuroscience is really the only major I can think of where someone would have a really strong correlation.

I guess you could argue if you want to do molecular biology, oh, should I be with, should I only follow a human doctor? Again, no. Molecular biology is relevant for all areas of medicine. If you want to do primary care, you want to do ob/gyn, you want to do dermatology, wherever you can get in. On the medical school applicant side of things, I’ve seen particularly for the surgical subspecialties like orthopedic surgery, urology, dermatology, which isn’t a subspecialty, but anyway, there’s a lot of opportunities for scribing and helping out in their practices. So, those areas and then primary care are probably going to be your best opportunities to go in and get some, if not hands-on, at least patient-facing experience. But the TLDR is no, if I want to be a neuroscience major, do I have to shadow a neurologist? Absolutely not. What you do have to do is have meaningful interactions with patients and healthcare providers/clinicians that you can talk about what exactly specifically it is, is more icing on the cake or is great if you’re able to do that from the get-go, but it’s certainly not necessary.

DANIEL: Thank you so much, Peter. I think that brings us to the very end of our presentation here. I maybe want to share one thing before we drop off. But again, if you are still here and we couldn’t get to your questions, I know there’s still 38 unanswered questions. I did my best. There were a lot of them. Please, I encourage you to scan the QR code in front of your screen. Leti will go ahead and drop that link again to schedule with us. It’s Prepory.com/book-now to schedule an initial consultation with our team so we get to know you and your students specifically and help them through the admissions process. The last thing I want to say, or maybe a question I want to address is a lot of families were asking about the pricing for a program. It depends on what grade level your student’s in. The pricing for the program ranges anywhere from $4,900 to $12,900 depending on where your child is in high school. We can offer really specific details on pricing through an initial consultation or if you just email us and tell us your kid’s grade level, we’d be happy to share that directly. Again, thank you so much to everyone for being here. Peter, thank you so much for the incredible presentation. I wish I had you as my college admissions coach when I was a bio or an aspiring bio major as a high school student. But thank you again for being here, everyone, and I hope everyone has a great night and gets home safely.