Education
Could a postbac program boost your chances of acceptance to medical school?[Show summary] Dr. Barry Rothman, an Accepted consultant with 19 years of experience in health professions advising, shares his expert guidance for applicants considering postbac programs and medical school. Learn how this admissions cycle will differ from other cycles, and how you can best position yourself for success. [Show notes] Dr. Barry Rothman is a former health professions advisor and Director of San Francisco State University's pre-health professions certificate program, which served pre-med, pre-dental, pre-nursing, and other pre-healthcare students who were preparing themselves to apply to their graduate professional schools. Today, he helps Accepted's clients in all aspects of the application process to graduate healthcare programs and graduate schools in the life sciences. How did you get involved in pre-health advising at San Francisco State University? [2:22] I was being a good tenure-track faculty member, and I was given the opportunity to be the health professions advisor because the previous one had retired. I had no idea what I was getting into. I thought, "Oh sure, it'll be an interesting sideline." Little did I know that I would fall in love with it. Within a few years, I would be working with many health profession students and pre-health profession students, and that they would want more service than our school was offering, especially the ones that were postbac. With their support and help and with the support and help of my dean, we created, from nothing, a postbac program that's been highly successful the last 14 years. Most of the applicants were premeds. Then when it was successful, I realized that it could expand into other areas. We expanded into a dental postbac program, in collaboration with UC San Francisco's School of Dentistry. We expanded into a nursing postbac program, which was also very successful and very unusual. There are very few nursing, dedicated postbac programs. In your opinion, who should consider a postbac program? [3:52] There are two major types of postbacs. One is called a career changer. Some people really don't figure out what they want to do, career-wise, until partway through, or maybe even all the way through undergraduate school. There's a certain kind for career changers that will take them through all the medical school prerequisites and hopefully a few upper-division electives. They basically need all the coursework, or almost all the courses, that medical schools require. There's another kind of career changer, which is somebody who actually completed their undergraduate degree, went out into the workforce, and then got the epiphany that they wanted to go into a health profession. Interestingly, many of them are children of physicians. If you're a child of a physician or a healthcare provider, you want to make sure you're making this choice on your own, not because mom or dad is in healthcare. Sometimes, you have to really convince yourself of that, by becoming an art history major or a political science major or a public health major, going out into the workforce, and then realizing that, "You know, inside of myself, I really do want to do this and I've certainly been exposed to it, but it's not just because of mom or dad." I think it's very valid. I think it's really good to make sure it's your decision and not just because you're being influenced. And of course, you have a tremendous advantage because you've seen what the home life is of a physician or a healthcare worker, the good and the bad of it. You've probably worked in the office during a summer or something like that, and so you really are well-informed; you just needed to make sure it was your own decision. Those are the career changers. Then the vast majority of people who show up for postbac programs are what we call academic enhancers. Those are people who knew for quite a while that they wan...