Imagine grinding towards your medical school application for 5 or more years only to receive zero acceptances.
If this is the position you’re in, you’re not alone. Each year, more than 50,000 premeds apply to med school, but only around 40% are accepted.
Being rejected from medical school can be devastating. It sparks self-doubt, anxiety, fear, and, sometimes, causes applicants to completely rethink their careers.
Here are four things to do if you suspect or know you won’t be accepted to medical school.
1 | Check Your Mindset
First, check your mindset. Receiving rejection after rejection is extremely taxing on your wellbeing and mental health, as it’s incredibly disheartening to see your peers get accepted to medical school when all you’re faced with are rejections. You start to wonder what’s wrong with you and if you’re good enough, which will likely spark a severe case of imposter syndrome.
Be very careful during this time, as this kind of negative mindset is toxic to both your physical and mental health. Yes, being rejected is a serious setback, but if you allow negative thoughts to consume you, you’ll create a self-fulfilling prophecy that will permeate through every goal you set for yourself.
While far from ideal, this setback is only that—a setback. What matters most is how you perceive it. Is it evidence you’ll never be a doctor and are doomed to a life of failure? Or is it a chance to pick yourself up, get that dirt off your shoulder, and prove to yourself and the world how resilient you are in the face of adversity?
What you learn from this rejection will prevent you from making the same mistakes during the next admissions cycle. Every failure is a learning opportunity.
Take time to process your feelings. Breathe, journal, and speak to people you trust. Don’t make any hasty decisions, as your next steps will depend on what went wrong and what you want for your future.
2 | Don’t Play the Blame Game
Next, avoid comparing yourself to others, and don’t play the blame game. Your peers being accepted to medical school has nothing to do with you. When applying to medical school, your only true competition is with yourself.
When you compare yourself to others, you lose focus. Soon you’re consumed by envy, bitterness, and resentment. Why them and not you? What do they have that you don’t?
Your peers may have been accepted with a lower GPA or lower MCAT score than you, but they could have had stronger soft components or may have absolutely nailed their interview. Or they may have a family member on the faculty at that one prestigious medical school which made them a shoo-in, which I recall an instance of from my application cycle.
There are many factors that determine acceptance, including your clinical and research experience, personal statement, letters of recommendation, interview, soft skills, and more.
One major problem with comparing ourselves to others, especially in stressful situations, is that we often fall victim to what’s known as the fundamental attribution error.
This error is the tendency for people to put more focus on personal characteristics and less on external factors when it comes to interpreting someone else’s behavior. However, when it’s our own behavior, we put more focus on external factors and don’t consider our personal characteristics.
For example, if someone cuts you off while driving, you might blame their character and call them names instead of considering the external factors that caused them to do this, such as being late for a meeting or needing to expediently drop the kids off at the pool. Whereas if you cut someone off, you’ll attribute it to external factors as opposed to your own personal flaws.
We often see the same biases in medicine—especially if you’re not accepted into medical school. You might look at your peers and wonder how they made it in when you’re a much better candidate than they are. However, this ignores the many aspects that contribute to an acceptance, such as an attainable school list, an intriguing application narrative, or glowing letters of recommendation.
In order to protect your ego, you may be tempted to shift the blame to external factors, such as an unfair or biased admissions committee, rather than reflecting on your own application’s shortcomings.
This mindset will be your downfall as you prepare to reapply. Automatically blaming the system rather than looking inward will prevent you from improving the aspects of your application that need improving, which brings us to the next step—pinpointing your weaknesses.
3 | Pinpoint Your Weaknesses
Third, in order to improve your application, you first must understand what went wrong.
There are many reasons why someone may be rejected, and many of these issues can be rectified. Identify your shortcomings by working backward.
If you received interviews at multiple medical schools, this means you’re strong enough on paper, but something likely went wrong during interview season. You might have been unprepared or fumbled because of nerves. If you delayed scheduling your interviews, you may have missed out on acceptances simply because other equally qualified candidates interviewed before you.
If you didn’t receive many or any interviews, you need to look back at your primary and secondary applications. Start with your hard metrics, which are your GPA and MCAT score.
What are the average MCAT and GPA for successful matriculants for each of the schools you applied to? How do your scores stack up? Are they near average or above average compared to other matriculants? If your hard metrics don’t stack up, this is at least one of the areas holding you back.
If your scores are on par with former matriculants, turn to your soft components, such as your personal statement, Work and Activities, and overall application narrative.
For example, your personal statement may have been a rehash of your CV as opposed to a compelling, narrative-driven story, or your letters of recommendation may have been written by people you didn’t have strong relationships with. This can easily result in surface-level and lackluster letters that provide adcoms with little insight into who you are.
You may not have had a varied Work and Activities section that showed longitudinal commitment as well as notable clinical experience to prove you understand what you’re getting yourself into. Lastly, your secondaries may have been the problem if you didn’t take the time to adapt them to each school or submitted them late, as in more than 2 weeks after receiving them.
Take time to thoroughly review every component of your application to figure out anywhere you may have gone wrong—but don’t stop there. It is essential to have experts review it as well.
Ask the admissions committees from the medical schools you applied to if they can give you feedback on your application. While some won’t respond, it’s very possible that others will. If you have a friend, family member, or mentor who served on admissions committees in the past, share your application with them so they can provide honest feedback.
If you don’t know anyone who has served on admissions committees before, our team at Med School Insiders has. We can provide objective feedback as well as a game plan for maximizing the odds you’re accepted the second time around.
4 | Make Your Decision
And lastly, after identifying your weaknesses, it’s time to make decisions. You can now create a roadmap for how to optimally position yourself for the med school acceptances you want.
Are these weaknesses easy fixes you can make in time to reapply during the next admissions cycle? Or will you need to take a gap year or two to improve your application?
There is no one size fits all. Each applicant has different strengths and weaknesses, and it’s up to you to address these weaknesses if you choose to reapply. If your MCAT isn’t high enough, you may need to retake it or apply to schools that have accepted students with similar scores to your own.
If your extracurriculars were weak, it’s imperative that you take the time to gain the relevant experience you need to be a better applicant, whether you decide to shadow physicians, work as a scribe, do research in a lab, or become an EMT.
If you’re not confident in your letters of recommendation, you may need to take the time to build stronger relationships by getting involved in research, clinical work, or volunteering.
If you need to beef up your experiences or build stronger relationships for letters, it’s unlikely you’ll be ready for the following cycle, which begins at the end of May. Reapplying late in the application cycle sets you up for another set of rejections since medical schools give out acceptances on a rolling basis.
The harsh reality is that by the time you find out whether or not you were accepted, application season will be on your doorstep. You need to determine whether or not you can make the necessary changes within a few short months or if you’ll have to take a full year before you reapply.
Not getting into medical school is something you may be able to begin preparing for sooner. If you haven’t received any interviews by December, start assessing your application and working on a backup plan.
Above all, don’t go into your reapplication thinking it will be easier the second time. The last thing you want is a second year of rejections—which you’ll get if you don’t make targeted changes to your application.
On the other hand, if your interviews didn’t go as planned, you won’t have as much to improve on your primary application. This likely means you can reapply right away after making changes to your school list and tweaking your soft components, and of course make sure to dedicate ample time to preparing answers to common interview questions and participating in mock interviews prior to interview season.
Remember, even if interviews are the major thing holding you back, admissions committees still expect to see improvement from applicants across their entire application, as more time has passed.
While this is certainly a major setback right now, it’s a minor one in the grand scheme of your medical education. 5-10 years from now, when you’re in residency or running your own clinic, you’ll look back on this as a small bump in the road—a bump that made you a more mature and resilient medical student and human being.
Don’t let this experience deter you from pursuing your passion. Countless people have been in your shoes before and have come out the other side a successful doctor.
Leave nothing up to chance for your reapplication. The doctors at Med School Insiders have served on admissions committees, and we know exactly what medical schools are looking for. We can pinpoint the application weaknesses that held you back, and we’ll develop a customized plan to help you get accepted the second time around.
For more tips, strategies, and mistakes to avoid, check out 6 steps to reapplying and 8 reasons reapplicants fail to get in.
