For those of you who were unable to attend this past Wednesday’s Welcoming Meeting, we have uploaded the PowerPoint slides for your convenience.

Click here to view the presentation.

If you have any additional questions, don’t hesitate to email us! (news@jmphs.org)

Best,

JMPHS BOARD

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

In addition to our new look, you’ll notice new content, pictures, and ways to reach us throughout our website.  Stay tuned for more content over the course of the next few weeks and updates to our 2008-2009 events schedule!

For more information on how to get involved, please click “Contact” above.

Thank you for your interest in JMPHS and feel free to contact us for anything at all!

~ John Morgan Executive Board

I was wondering if you had any recommendations for studying for the MCAT - class or no class? Is there somewhere I can find practice tests without actually taking the class? Thanks!

First a disclaimer – I taught Kaplan MCAT courses for a year and the Examkrackers courses for another year, but I’m not currently affiliated with any test prep companies. I took the MCAT back in 2003, so maybe some of the things I’m going to say aren’t true anymore, although I did my best to look things up.
I would recommend taking a class for the MCAT. The classes are expensive, but most premeds end up taking a class and they are a good investment. Of course it is possible to study on your own by buying question books and review materials, but classroom courses usually get you access to more and better practice materials, and the classes really help you focus on what to study and help you pace yourself.

If you want to study on your own:

If you don’t take a class, I would recommend buying some good review books. From my experience, Examkrackers makes really concise and helpful review books for all the subjects, and unlike Kaplan, their course prep books can actually be purchased without getting the full classroom course. The Kaplan ones are just a little painful to read sometimes, while the Examkrackers ones get to the point and have color and diagrams.

Next you need a source of questions – you need to do practice questions regularly and try to do as many full-length exams as possible. For practice questions, Kaplan has some good review books, but I prefer the Examkrackers books – I think they’re more representative of the actual exams. They have a series called “101 Verbal Passages”, “101 Biology passages”, and so on. The titles are pretty self-explanatory.
You need to do full length exams, and as many of them as possible. The advantage of taking a class is that you get proctored realistic exams on a regular basis. However, you can also get access to full-length exams on your own. The American Association of Medical Colleges makes 8 previous MCAT exams available online. You can take these in either printed form or as a computerized exam. One of them is available for free, and the remainder cost $35 each (but you get to use them for a year).
http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/practicetests.htm

If you take a class:

So of course the next logical question is which class to take. I can tell you about Kaplan and Examkrackers – I took the Kaplan course to study on my own, and later taught for both companies. I have no experience with Princeton Review, so if you’re interested in their offerings, you’ll have to do some research

Kaplan:
They have been around for longer, and so they have accumulated more practice materials. Their strength is the wealth of practice tests – subject tests and full length questions. Kaplan has something like 11 of their own full length exams, and you do 5 of those as proctored exams as part of the course. They also give you access to all the AAMC old MCAT exams that I mentioned above. So altogether, you have almost 20 full length exams, which is more than you could probably actually do without going crazy.
The downside with Kaplan is that the teaching is often hit or miss. They don’t pay very well, so they don’t always get the best teachers. They have a very standardized lesson plan, which is both a good and a bad thing – in general it does little to encourage the teachers to work hard. Of course, there are some great teachers out there, and Kaplan gives you the option of going to any of their offered classes, so you can jump around. Another thing I disliked is that they have 3-hour class sessions, which makes you want to stab yourself in the eye with the free Kaplan pencil.
One other major advantage of Kaplan is that they have nice prep centers where you can go for classes, to use their library of materials, and whatever else you do.

Examkrackers:
This is a relative newcomer – they weren’t even really around when I studied for the exam. Their strength is the teaching. Examkrackers pays their teachers about twice as much as Kaplan, so I think they have an edge in recruiting. Plus a significant part of the teacher salary is linked to student satisfaction, which makes the teachers work harder. The lessons are shorter overall and the material is laid out better. This is great if your knowledge base is lacking and you actually need to learn rather than just review for the exam.
Examkrackers has plenty of questions in their course books, and you do full-length exams in class using the AAMC released exams. Overall, however, they have less material available to you as part of the course. You can always buy more of the AAMC exams and more questions books, but you should factor that when comparing prices for the two courses.

Summary:
Take Kaplan if you have a good knowledge base and are just looking for a lot of practice questions and some basic review. Take Examkrackers if you need to review and re-learn a lot of the material you forgot from your premed classes, but be ready to get some supplementary practice material.

Good luck
Eugene

I’m Eugene, a third year MD/PhD student at Penn. One of the JMPHS leadership people wanted to do a blog where people can ask questions about various aspects of being pre-med, applying to medical school, and being a medical student. Since I’m in lab most of the time these days and get all sorts of down-time, I figured I’d sign up. Here’s how this will work. You e-mail me your questions at eugenekh@mail.med.upenn.edu. Please put “Ask a med student” in the subject line. I will pick a few worthy questions and post my answers on a regular basis. Feel free to ask anything - I won’t reveal who asked the questions.

A little bit about me:

I’m from Brooklyn, and I did my undergrad at Columbia, where I majored in biochemistry. I graduated in 2005 and came straight to Penn. I’m doing the combined MD/PhD program, so I expect to be here until roughly 2013. Chances are that some of you will finish college and medical school before I will.

I went to Career Services today, as I often do when I am freaking out. Usually, it comes at the heels of “Oh my God, I am never getting into med school and therefore my life is ruined” hysteria. As a second semester junior, time is limited. Every day brings me either closer or farther from medical school, depending on an exam grade or internship opportunity. Let me start from the beginning…

As a high school student, I was hard-core pre-med. Like many of you, I volunteered at the local hospital, I went to Health Care Professionals Camp, I was in the Allied Health Club in school, I did summer research at a university, took all the science AP classes, blah blah blah. When I came to Penn, it was like veils being lifted off of my suburban upbringing. Investment banking! Medical Correspondent! Management Consultant! Pharmaceutical Marketer! These were career options that I have considered over the past 3 years. As a Wharton student, the lull of money is very strong. I see my classmates going through OCR and realize that in about 2 years, my peers will be making six figures. So….why am I taking Orgo and suffering through MCAT class and coming out with $200K in debt? I’m not really sure, but I intend to figure it out.

I gave myself a compromise: I would do the whole “20-somethings, no responsibilities, young professional with money” thing for a year or two, and really make sure that I want to go to medical school. But on the other hand, am I wasting 2 years of my life? Not really sure about that either. Talking to the pre-health advisors, the average age of matriculating med students is 25. Obviously I am not the only one who needs some time off to think about it.

If you know for a fact that medicine is where you want to be…then great! Apply and rock those applications! For the rest of us… just go with the flow and eventually we’ll figure it out. And no, our lives will not be ruined. I hope…?