Hello and welcome! This is Part 0 of my “Navigating Pre-med” series that I will be publishing on my blog. It’s split up into several parts, which I will update and add here as I go!

Next Part: Coursework
Parts will be added as they are posted!

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Purpose & A Caveat

I thought it would be cool to document my pre-med experience thus far (yah mom I’m still pre-med!) as well as maybe provide an avenue of information for those of you who are considering pursuing pre-med at Cornell.

Please note that this is MY personal experience, and I’m not attempting to tell you that there’s a single certain way to go about doing pre-med. Though I will offer some advice and mention things I’ve learned in this series, it’s important to take all of this with a grain of salt. There’s about a million ways people have gotten into med school, and I have not applied yet, nor gotten into a med school (so, technically even though I am at the end of my journey at Cornell, it’s still pretty early in the process for me).

Who this is for: Prospective Cornell students/High school Cornell admits interested on going to Cornell for pre-med, people currently at Cornell and considering pre-med, people who just want to see how someone else (me) did it.

So, without any further ado, here we go!

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My Background

Some background information: I’m currently a second semester senior majoring in Biometry and Statistics concentrating in General Statistics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) with a minor in music.

That basically just means my required coursework includes that of the statistics major and of pre-med, which isn’t any different from say, if I were to major in biology (my coursework would have to include that of the biology major and pre-med). The only difference is that there is less overlap between the statistics major and pre-med and I have to take a lot more math classes than what applying to medical school would require.

I will dive into the nitty-gritty of the specific courses I’ve taken at Cornell in the next part.

The Process So Far…

I spent a lot of my undergrad wondering and deciding whether the med school path was right for me–I would say I “committed” to this path rather late, so you will see plenty of my “exploring career options”, the most influential being consulting. Thus, as I’m describing my journey, it’ll seem like I started kinda late–even though I was taking the courses required from the very beginning, the rest of it was slow to catch up.

So, what else did you do?

Besides the coursework, here is also a brief overview of the things I have done in my time at Cornell related to pre-med, many of which I will of course, talk more about in the later sections of this series.

• Research
• Work as a teaching assistant
• Orchestra
• Volunteering (Hospice and Retirement Homes)
• Summer work experiences such as consulting and doing research at the CDC

What’s next for you?

MCAT, more shadowing, gap years working, and then the application process!

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Intrigued? Click here to go to the next part where I talk about my coursework: Next Part: Coursework