For future doctors

Disclaimer:

I’ve been teaching ambitious teens for years. I care about them and I'm beyond frustrated at the level of disengagement and overwhelm our school systems can create in ambitious teens.

But I’m an admissions expert, and also currently a Teaching Fellow for a class on leadership at Harvard.

This guide is not just a call for more sanity in our college prep. This healthier approach is also more effective at getting you accepted.

Doctors are well respected, can make a great living, and spend their time helping people heal.

Doctors literally save lives.

Medicine is a noble field.

Many ambitious teens desire to make such a meaningful impact on others while creating strong job security and, often, getting paid well.

But the road to becoming a doctor is one of the most competitive there is. Medical school, residency, matching with a hospital (and specializations), all happen after undergraduate degrees are earned, but this guide will focus on making you as competitive as possible for your college admissions– an important first step– while also setting you up for future success as a doctor.

If you are interested in learning more about BS/MD programs, this podcast will go into detail on your options and how you can prepare for that.

If your parents or mentors are doctors, it is important to know that U.S. college admissions, especially for the most selective colleges, have evolved!

Fortunately, there is a much more effective way to prepare for college, and you don’t have to give up your childhood for it.

The myth: What many people THINK colleges are looking for

We conducted an unscientific survey of what people thought colleges were looking for in their freshman classes. While there were a variety of answers, the three most popular, by far, were:

1. Colleges are looking for the smartest students possible.

2. Colleges are looking for the hardest-working students possible.

3. Colleges are looking for the most impressive students

The idea is that admissions officers must be reading through piles of applications, separating them into stacks, and ranking them from “smartest” to “dumbest” or from “hardest working” to “laziest…”

Once those piles are completed, the admissions officers simply take the 2,000 applications at the top of the pile (the 2,000 smartest or most impressive applicants) and reject the rest.

When you believe this, college prep can be the most stressful thing in the world because you end up staying up late, waking up early, and burning yourself out trying to prove you are smarter, harder working, or “more impressive” than anyone else.

How do high school students prove themselves without burnout?

Preparing for the admissions process often becomes a race to see who can take the most AP or IB (advanced) classes.

Who can join the most clubs (and become president!)

or create the most clubs.

Who can earn the most awards from MUN or Math & Science Olympiad competitions…

and who can get the highest GPA and test scores.

But if ALL the ambitious students (there are tens of thousands of truly ambitious students every school year who will be applying to college) are trying to show that they are the most impressive by doing these same things …

how can you compete?

Parents of these teens fuel the anxiety when they log into Facebook groups and hype each other up about how impossible the odds are.

This is a quote from part of a post in one such Facebook group of college-bound teens:

I feel great empathy for these anxious parents.

And I feel even more compassion for the stressed-out teens.

It is true that colleges want to admit academically curious and competent students. But to be competitive for selective colleges, it is important to understand the full picture.

The good news is that when you understand the full picture, you’ll discover that being healthy and happy throughout high school actually increases your odds of being competitive for college—if you do it right.

That’s why I’ve written this guide—so you can LOVE high school while becoming the kind of applicant that selective colleges fight over.

As seen on: