I'm a Junior in a 4+4 D.O. Program - should I bother applying to M.D. schools given my stats?

There are a few things that need to be addressed here.

First and foremost, neither your grades nor your MCAT are going to grant you an easy shot at a MD school. Most people would suggest that you go for a DO with those numbers, but luckily for you, you already have that under control! That's a great spot to be.

Secondly, your extracurriculars are a bit weak. 50 hours and 20 hours are next to nothing in the scope of everything. I averaged 20 hours a week and I knew plenty who did even more. Without publications and your only poster being at an Undergraduate Symposium, these ECs won't win you many brownie points.

Employment: always good. Accounting is a bit unrelated to medicine, but experience in the workforce is character building, and stuff.

Shadowing in optometry isn't the right physician shadowing at all. If you got to the interview stage, you'd be asked questions such as "why didn't you apply for optometry school?" Are you sure you didn't shadow an ophthalmologist? If you aren't sure, then this doesn't bode well in terms of the insight you received during said shadowing experiences.

Volunteering in high school is nice if you can say that you continued with it throughout college as well. However, as it stands, most people interested in medicine, whether premeds or Adcoms, know that as a high school student, the closest you will ever get to a patient is when you greet them at the door. Most times, you're stapling or scrubbing or pushing or filing. Not the right types of exposure.

Clubs are great, but again, Adcoms can't really tell how involved you were unless you had a leadership position of some sort.

Lastly, there's no place to list your high school GPA on any med school app. Your 3.9 is moot. And also, out of curiosity, how in the world did you get a 5.2? Did you have classes that were weighted to a 6.0? Some curious grade inflation going on there.

TLDR: Be very happy with the fact that you can go straight to med school without the stress that is applying. Work your butt off and try to land that specialty of your dreams.

/r/premed Thread