You don’t have to let a low GPA keep you out of medical school
How would you feel if I told you that, at this very moment, the odds are quite good that somewhere in the US there is a student in medical school who was accepted with a lower GPA than yours?
Would it give you a sense hope and possibility that there’s still a chance for you?
It should, because getting into medical school with a low GPA happens more often than you think. As a medical school admissions consultant, I see it happen often.
While getting into medical school with a low GPA is certainly possible, it does not happen by chance. It only happens when admissions committees see something in the applicant that causes them to discount the significance of the poor grades. For this applicant, the GPA is not viewed as a disqualifying factor, but rather, an aberration in an otherwise obviously capable applicant’s profile.
Of course, getting into medical school with a low GPA is not easy. In fact, it’s incredibly difficult. Everybody knows how hard it is to get into medical school. Every year, nearly 60% of medical school applicants are rejected. And these are well-qualified applicants. We’re talking 3.9 GPA’s and 515+ MCAT scores that are rejected all the time! So with such fierce competition for relatively few seats, why would an admissions committee admit someone with a 3.2 GPA? Not an easy question to answer.
The fact is, if you’re one of those pre-meds who has a low GPA because you experienced a difficult life situation such as sickness or a disadvantaged background, or because you have a learning disability, or maybe it’s just because you lacked focus freshman year, you no longer have any margin of error if you want to get into to medical school. First, you must commit yourself wholeheartedly to the process. Then, you need to know what you're truly up against and formulate a plan that will give you a fighting chance of getting accepted.
In How To Get Into Medical School With A Low GPA, I take you through the process I’ve been using to help my clients get accepted year after year. It’s a strategy I’ve honed first as a Harvard pre-medical tutor and now as CEO of MDadmit, a medical school admissions consulting company. I show you how you can:
- Get into the minds of the admissions committees and see how the GPA is really used in medical school admissions
- Use the framework I employ with my “low GPA” clients to formulate what you need to do to get accepted to medical school
- Develop a plan of action based on your own personal circumstances using my categorization framework
- Strategize about how you can get accepted to medical school by reading 13 case studies of how pre-meds got into medical school despite their low GPAs
- Forget about the mythical “GPA cut-off” and plan your application strategy based on statistical data broken out by six different dimensions on easy to read graphs
- Learn how you can subtly, yet effectively address a low GPA in your personal statement by reading the personal statements of three pre-meds who were accepted to medical school despite low GPAs
- Avoid making things worse by addressing a low GPA inappropriately
- Enhance your prospects of admission by undertaking any of the activities listed on my GPA Mitigation Activities List
- Make an informed decision about whether it’s worth the investment required to gain admission based on your own personal situation
- Be ready for the actual application with my medical admissions process overview in which I describe each of the application sections including the AMCAS application, secondary essays, and interviews