Qualifications: Bachelors Degree in anything (four years), Medical School – MD or DO (four years), Neurosurgery Residency (seven years), Completion of Board Certification
Desired Qualifications: experience with aneurysmal clipping cases, Skull base/tumor experience, and/or fellowship-trained preferred but not required.
Job To-Do List:
- Perform very well in undergrad academically (3.7+ GPA)
- Get involved with medical research during undergrad (400 hours)
- Exhibit leadership capabilities through student org/jobs (2-3 solid experiences)
- Gain clinical experience while in undergrad (150-200 hours)
- Gain many volunteer hours in undergrad (200-400 hours)
- Shadow physicians in different specialties (50-100 hours)
- Score competitively on the MCAT (510+)
- Get into medical school and continue to perform academically
- Continue research in medical school
- Match into a neurosurgery residency program
Plan:
The best thing I can do right now for my future and for my future patients is to be the best possible student I can be and excel in all my coursework. Without a solid GPA and MCAT score, the likelihood of my admission into medical school will drop tremendously, although still possible. In order to achieve these numbers of 3.7+ GPA and 510+ MCAT, I will need to be very disciplined in my studies and making sure I am always prepared for exams. As far as all the experience hours go, I have already made an excel spreadsheet where I log all my experience hours and have the totals calculated. I currently volunteer eight hours a week at RMHC Riverside Methodist Hospital and I pick up smaller volunteer activities when I can through the student organizations I am in. My goal is to get 200 hours before my sophomore year. Also, as the summer rolls around I have been applying for research and clinical experiences that will be about 40 hours a week combined in addition to the 8-12 hours of volunteering a week. In my sophomore year, I hope to have a lot of volunteer hours knocked out so that I can focus more on being a leader on campus. My goal is to be on the executive board for a student organization I am passionate about and to be a mentor for younger students. I also want to leverage some of my passions and be a leader in that space. Moreover, once I get a research and clinical position, I would like to get deeply involved with those experiences and keep them throughout my undergraduate career. So, the biggest thing on my plate right now is landing some of these positions so that I can get those involvement hours over a long period of time. I much prefer the quality of experiences over the number of experiences, so I am looking for a small number of extracurriculars that I can get the most out of.