4 Key Characteristics of Successful Medical School Applicants

Looking to stand out amidst a multitude of applicants presenting their remarkable profile before the medical school admission committee? It’s not an impossible dream to achieve if you add these five key characteristics of successful medical school applicants on top of your qualification.

Compassion

Have you learned the act of compassion? This value entails profound concern, and empathy for patients, colleagues, and self despite individual behavior, race, ideology, and social class.

This trait is non-negotiable in medical school applicants because beyond medical mastery, patients rely on their doctors for care, understanding, sympathy, and assurance when the situation gets critical. 

Moreover, it takes more than merely including your volunteer service at a regional hospital in your essay to exhibit your compassion skill to the admission committee. Future medical students must be able to demonstrate practical compassion lessons acquired from volunteer services and other personal experiences. You have to establish that you’re not just going to be an intelligent physician but a genuinely caring one, too, through your ability to deal with complicated patients and look beyond the differences between you and your patients.

Dedication Towards Learning

In medicine, it’s expected that you obtain new knowledge continuously through current medical journals, and complement such information with your analytic prowess and intelligence for the improvement of your patient care. Therefore, your MCAT scores and GPA matters at some point. Having high scores is ample evidence of your dedication towards learning, and a proof that you can review information, synthesize and apply it continuously.

Furthermore, your medical school admission committee would be impressed to see that you’ve partaken in some academic medical research. Your research background also highlights your devotion to scientific papers, and your tendency to contribute to the medical profession as a physician. You need to be able to show your genuine interest and passion for medicine by learning about the most recent clinical procedures.

Resilience

In medical school, the adage that when the going gets tough, only the tough gets going is considered to be true since resilience is what keeps medical students in the field. So the admission committee would always want to see if a prospective medical student can stand the heat of medical school and the profession altogether.

How determined are you to succeed in your study and career; can you miss those meals just to get an answer to a medical puzzle? How about observing night vigils just to study hard? Can you sacrifice your comfort to revive a dying patient? Only resilient individuals thrive in this course and career. Thus, you’ll need to have a viable and healthy coping mechanism that fuels your energy when things get discouraging.

We advise that you engage in some extracurricular activities. Social clubs, volunteer works are some of the ways you can balance your life and take a break from medicine. Engaging in all of the above exercises will help keep you both mentally and physically fit as a medical student and doctor in the nearest future.

Being an excellent medical student isn’t just about your intelligence. Your dexterity can also make you a great doctor and surgeon. Engaging in a hands-on course like woodworking can go a long way in boosting your manual dexterity. For instance, getting a portable table saw, or even the contractor saw, depending on how good you are, can curb your clumsiness. Such tools are great for mastering your eyes and hand coordination. This way, you wouldn’t have to wait to get into the surgical room before mastering your dexterity. Another woodworking tool like a wood router can help boost such a skill. Simply find the one that can bring out the craftsmanship in you and ultimately horn your dexterity.