Welcome!

Hello and welcome! This is Part 4 of my six-part, “Navigating Pre-med” series that I will be publishing on my blog. I took a little break from this series, but since then I’ve taken the MCAT and found a gap-year position–so I’m back with more to share! (woohoo!)

If you are new here, be sure to check out Part 0: My Background to learn more about my motivations for publishing this series, and information that would give a LOT more context to the information that I will be discussing!

Previous Part: Summer Experiences

And if you missed it: Part 0 – Part 1 – Part 2

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When, Where, & How?

I took the MCAT right after my senior year. Initially, I was worried because I would’ve just graduated! How am I gunna find the focus to study? Turns out, it actually wasn’t such a big deal in the end; I just gave myself about a week of a break after graduation, and got onto studying.

I had about 10 weeks (Started studying after Memorial day, end of May, and took the exam August 17th), and I studied pretty much every day, and in total about 480 hours. I know some people on the internet do full 8-hr days and do a rest day a week, and I did try that, but it didn’t really work for me. I did mostly 5-6 hour days, every day. There were some days where I’m a little lazier (so only logging 3-4 hours), and especially in the beginning of my study period. In general, I would say that I was more “chill” than a lot of these online guides, but ended with fairly similar results (520; 129/132/129/130).

As for where, I studied mainly in my house (lame I know). I think I tried studying in my public library, but it just wasn’t open early enough or open late enough for me to make driving there worth it. Plus, I’m super nervous about people stealing my stuff, so I would be scared of going to the restroom and leaving all my stuff there… so it’s not really ideal for me. (lol TMI sorry!)

General schedule of a typical MCAT day:  

9:00/10:00AM — Wake up, eat breakfast (usually oatmeal/scallion pancakes + coffee, sometimes fruit as well)
10:00-11:00AM — CARS
11:00AM-12:00PM — short break, go over CARS results
12:00PM-1:00PM — break, lunch, hang out with my sisters
Afternoon — Content review, maybe some UWorld (depending on the day)
6:00/7:00PM — Dinner with family
Evening — Depending on whether or not I was concentrated in studying in the afternoon, I might do an evening session to finish up content review or practice. If I felt good about what I accomplished in the afternoon (which became more rare as the summer studying went on, lol, because I was starting to get burned out), then I skipped this. If not, I try to get another 1-2 hours in of studying before bed.

Obviously this is a very rough (and ideal lol) schedule; I think more generally, I did about 2 hours of work in the mornings (usually CARS), 3-4 hours in the afternoon, and maybe 1-2 in the evenings depending on the day. I know it’s a good day if I can get 3 hours in in the mornings!

Resources that helped me:

When I think of “premed resources”, I immediately think of “MCAT-related” resources. There are a LOT to share regarding this topic, and one of these days I do plan on writing a more robust “guide” to MCAT (breaking down my score, resources, schedule, etc!), but for now I will just be sharing a few things that worked for/helped me:

Kaplan 7-book review set

This is the holy grail book set amongst premedditors. I think it does adequately cover topics on the MCAT, and doesn’t go into unnecessary detail like some other book sets.

Whatever material you need to supplement, you can do it with Khan Academy Videos!

I will say that the only book I didn’t like/find useful was the Psych/Soc. Use the 86, or 100 page Khan Academy Video notes from Reddit, make Anki cards, and don’t waste your time.

The way I used these books was: I’d read through it once, make Anki cards while I read, drill the Anki cards, then a week or two later, revisit all the conceptual questions and the multiple choices questions at the end of each chapter. I reviewed questions again about two or three weeks before the actual exam.

DO NOT–get bogged down on the content! I am the type of take detailed notes in class, but you need to get through the content review and hit questions, so I would say do not spend more than 90 mins reading each chapter. (Preferably < 1 hr!)

Last note: I used the 3rd edition. There’s really no need to buy the newest edition haha. Save your money!

UWorld

Uworld is an AMAZING resource, I cannot recommend highly enough! It has amazing explanations, it’s in the AAMC format, though I would say some topics are a a little bit low-yield, it’s a great way to get practice questions in.

I will say it’s a bit on the pricier side, but definitely worth it.

SDN Post for CARS

This is MY holy-grail resource. A post will come about this later, but I do attribute my perfect CARS score to this!

I did not follow the schedule to a T, but the OP of that SDN post did break down how to review your CARS score answers, how to get the timing down, and how CARS can be broken down like any other MCAT section.

MCAT Reddit

Who can forget Reddit? Honestly this was my #1 resource in planning out my MCAT study plan and also trouble shooting any AAMC problems that I didn’t understand. Take this with a grain of salt though, I have definitely been “sucked in” to reading advice posts and panic threads and all sorts of nonsense that is not at all studying-related. You can easily end up comparing yourself to a 520+ scorer or panic because so-and-so said xyz.

Anki

It’s not for everyone, but I was really surprised how well this worked for me. I have never been a flashcard person, but using Anki during the MCAT changed my life. I swear by Anki/flashcards now, and I am sure I will be using this as a med student in the future.

For those who don’t know what Anki is, it’s a smart flashcard app/webapp/program on your computer. It’s free (unless you are on iOS… lol–but a lot of people told me it’s well worth the money), and you simply make cards as you normally do, and what’s beautiful about Anki is that it schedules the cards for you. You can set a number of cards you want to learn a day, and with each card, once it shows up and you answer, you can pick between “Easy”, “Good” or “Hard”–depending on which option you chose, the card will show up again in that interval of time. (So for example, if you selected “Easy”, the card will show up again in 5 days, “Good”, it might show up in 3, “Hard”, it might show up it 2. This you can all customize!) As you get better and better at a card (ex, you answered it with “Good” multiple times in a row) the time interval gets longer and longer. What I love about this is that you continue to review this card, and it becomes part of your long-term memory.

There are also some amazing add-ons available for Anki, such as image occlusion or the Anki heatmap. I can do another entire post on this subject.

FLIP

FLIP is an App on my phone that I use to keep time. You can set the amount of “focus time” that you want, and if you don’t stop the timer before the focus time, then you get a “focus score” of “A”. If you stop it before, then your focus score is obviously lower.

Why I like this app: you might have heard of another app like this one, called Forest. Basically you can set how much time you want to focus without the phone, and you basically grow a tree each time you focus–if you stop the timer before your focus time is done, your tree dies. I did not like that app at all–my trees would die if someone called me, and I dunno, that just made me feel so bad even though it wasn’t my fault. In addition, you cannot navigate off the Forest app without getting penalized. That might be helpful to some, but I know when I was studying for finals, I wouldn’t bring anything except books and my phone with me to the library–if I needed to Google something, Forest would penalize me, while FLIP would not. The “honor code” system for FLIP worked for me–I just wanted to keep track of the amount of time I’m studying (to help me feel motivated)–NOT something that would bar me from using my phone (I generally don’t feel those impulses).

If you need something to stop you from using your phone, Forest is better. If you just want a timer to keep track of your time over your studying months, I highly recommend FLIP!

Khan Academy

KA partnered with the AAMC to bring a ton of material for the MCAT. Do I recommend watching every single video or do  every single problem? no. However, if there is ever a particular topic you don’t understand, KA breaks it down for you extremely well.

In addition, there is a 100-page and 80-page summary document available for the psych/sociology section! I wish I exclusively did Khan Academy for P/S instead of Kaplan. It’s pretty comprehensive.

General Advice/FAQs

Which full-length exams are better?

• AAMC, hands down–use source material if you want an experience of what taking an actual MCAT is like! In my opinion it was pretty representative of the actual exam.
• I also used Kaplan’s exams–you will see a lot of info on how “Kaplan is deflated”–and that’s true, people’s scores on the real exam will usually be higher than their Kaplan scores. However, I feel like that’s deceptive because generally people do these exams earlier on than their AAMC full lengths and of course the actual exam. (I did 2 Kaplan exams about a month away from my MCAT… so of course my actual MCAT score is higher!)

Predict my score?

• There are tons of “score predictors” out there and people trying to predict scores from the Reddit MCAT data. Here’s a link more about it:
  Converting 3rd Party MCAT Scores.

Mental prepration

• One of the things that my dad told me while I was growing up was that it’s important to visualize success–I tried to visualize myself reading MCAT passages every night before I went to sleep (until I drifted off to sleep) fast and well, and I visualized myself knowing all the answers and finishing everything on time. I can’t say that this made “all the difference” but it definitely helped!

A general note on timing…

• Something I did during my MCAT, for EVERY section, was to do the end of the section first. What I did was I would go to the LAST set of stand-alone questions in the section, start there, and finish to the end. Then, I’d go back to the beginning and start there. This gives me a slight feeling that I’m “ahead” (because I already did the end!) and it seemed to actually psychologically help me.

What I wish I did better…

• More UWorld–I wish I finished this! I also wished I finished all the AAMC material I bought. I think in the end, what I did was “enough”, but I kind of feel like I wasted money on the materials since I didn’t “use it up”.
• Don’t do the Kaplan P/S–it’s literally a waste of time–opt for the 86 or 100 page KA document and make Anki flashcards. That’ll definitely be better than doing any Kaplan!
• Stop reading Reddit! and stop comparing! Reddit is fine and all when you start preparing your MCAT studies, and it can even be a great resource in terms of getting better AAMC explanations when you start doing full lengths. However, I found myself psyching myself out and comparing myself with those other premeds, and even trying to “predict my score.” Don’t read Reddit the night before you do a full length, and definitely don’t read them the night before the actual MCAT! Just do you and trust that you have done good preparation.

Final Thoughts

I think the MCAT is definitely the biggest “hump” you have to get through in terms of pre-med (other than the actual application process of course). But if you can get through the Cornell course curriculum, you can definitely get through the MCAT! You got this.