Paul J. Silvia

Finding research opportunities.

You may have joined your undergraduate program knowing that you want to become a Doctor, or you may have come to that realization later in your university life. As soon as you have made that decision you should work with your student clubs, academic advisors, career advisors or pre-health advisors – whoever you have access to to strengthen your chances of gaining entry to medical school. The more proactive you are in your pursuit of a medical education the stronger chance you have.

Writing personal statements.

When selection committees sit down to look at applications, they have to weed lots of them out. The first weed out is easy—they eliminate any applications that are incomplete, that don’t have the right test scores, and/or that have questionable GPAs. They also weed out personal statements that exceed the word limit or that do not directly address the question on the application. You want to have a kind of “last man standing” outlook on your application. You have to overcome all of the selection committee’s possible objections so that you make it to the final round.