Session 63 Our poster today is a former student interested in optometry but is now trying to pursue medicine. A poor MCAT score is holding him back though plus his premed advisor told him he had zero percent chance of getting into medical school due to lack of research experience. Is research really necessary? How else can you improve your application given these circumstances? The OldPreMeds community has been around for a long time helping nontraditional students like yourself on their journey to and through medical school. If you haven’t yet, sign up for an account today and if you have any questions, ask away. OldPreMeds Question of the Week: Today’s post is one from Louis Gonzalez. "I am 27 years old. I have put off going to medical school for the last five years due to personal and family reasons. I’ve been taking care of my sister who developed a form of psychosis back in the spring of 2013 and I was my grandmother’s caretaker during her fatal bout with liver cancer in 2014. I was trying for optometry school but after shadowing several optometrists, I just don’t think that it was the correct field for me. I graduated in 2011 with a 3.4 science GPA and a 3.7 accumulative GPA. I, at this time, only have 450 hours of volunteering and three years worth of science tutoring biology, microbiology, chemistry and organic chemistry. Tutoring at the local community college near my home, I can’t travel that far due to my sister’s health. I did have shadowing experience but the doctor I shadowed back in 2011 doesn’t have an office in this state anymore. I know I’ll have to start shadowing and taking my MCAT. I got 23 on the 2012 MCAT, but what else should I do to prepare my application? I’m taking my MCAT in mid-August. So is it a good idea to get letters of recommendation right now and apply late? Or wait until next year and ask those professors in early 2018 to write letters of recommendation? Also, is research necessary? I went back to talk to an advisor at my university about applying to medical school in December, but she told me that I had a 0% chance of getting into medical school at this point due to my lack of research. Overall,any advice would be most helpful." Here are my insights: [03:15] Zero Percent Chance and Research Experience First of all, as much as I love premed advisors, I just have to disagree with "0% chance" of getting into medical school because zero percent chance is never the answer. Anyway, do you have to have research? No. It’s a tricky thing because when you’re applying to medical schools and you’re looking at the MSAR and the College Information Book, you'd see various breakdowns of students that were accepted including what percentage of them had research. And it’s a large majority. But the bottom line is that you do not have to have research. If you’re interested in research, great and go seek it out. I highly recommend you go and get research because it’s interesting and just to see if you might like it or not. It's very easy just like any other experience of shadowing or getting clinical experience.You could either do laboratory research or clinical research wherein you’re helping a physician do some data analysis on their patients. Again, you don’t have to have research but I would recommend you get it or at least "dip your toes" in it for a little bit to see if you like it. [04:45] Older Prereqs and Preparing for the MCAT Your GPA scores, volunteering experience, and science tutoring are great. Your prerequisites are a little bit older (take a listen to OPM 62) but it's probably still okay. I recommend you check in with each of the schools you're interested in applying to just to make sure they're okay with having some older prereqs. Just as I talked about last week, you got a 23 on the MCAT so it may help you on the new MCAT to take some more courses to help solidify your knowledge of the sciences that are going to be tested on the MCAT. But it comes down to you just not understanding what the