Medical School- The Numbers, The Facts

I am in the process of applying to medical schools. This morning, I discovered something interested when reading a NYtimes article called "Getting Into Medical School Without Hard Sciences." It turns out that Mount Sinai in NYC, one of the med schools I applied to, offers medical school slots to students who studied liberal arts during undergrad, didn't take hard sciences and didn't take the MCAT. The part that fascinated me- The leaders of that Mount Sinai program just produced a peer-reviewed study that shows their "liberal arts" students perform as well as students who stressed hard over the MCAT and organic chemistry.

Here's the study:
"Challenging Traditional Premedical Requirements as Predictors of Success in Medical School: The Mount Sinai School of Medicine Humanities and Medicine Program," by David Muller, MD and Nathan Kase, MD. Published in Academic Medicine, 85:5, August 2010.

Although the metrics of success could be expanded a bit, I think the study is very useful.

I earned my B.A. from McGill University, and took premedical courses at Montana State after I graduated. It's always been hard for me to believe that the students in my class whose lives revolve around their statistics on paper (GPA, MCAT score etc.) were going to make good doctors. I still believe in learning the fundamentals of science before going into medical school, just because when I switched from mostly liberal arts to premedical courses it took me a while to get the hang of how to learn scientific concepts. But the study fits with my intuitive understanding of what makes a good physician. My self-bias about the study is huge because my own statistics on paper are not competitive with many of my peers, yet I'm pretty sure that I'm going to thrive in medicine.

This is what my application would look like to people who are focused on just the statistics:

Cumulative GPA: 3.41
Science GPA: 3.39
MCAT: 26 M. i.e. 9 in verbal, 7 in physical sciences (general chemistry + physics), 10 in biology (biology + organic chemistry), and M in writing (scored w/ J-T, low to high).

This is more like what my app might look like to people who look beyond the statistics and/or understand what makes them:

1.) I went to an undergrad institution where arts classes were usually challenging
2.) Ever since the summer after I started at MSU I have worked as a caregiver, day and night shifts
3.) Engineers Without Borders has been just as much of a time commitment for me as my premed classes. When I'm sitting in premed classes, many of which are taught by rocks of professors who are often symptomatic of a broken feedback loop in which they are completely clueless about the mediocre quality of their teaching skills, it's so much more tempting to throw myself into the kind of work that I will be able to do in medical school and beyond- directly helping people.
4.) I decided to move back home with my parents for the first year of my premed studies. That saved money but costs me a lot of time and energy, as living there is a lot of emotional work.