The traditional path to becoming a physician in the US includes 4 years of undergraduate training, 4 years of medical school, and 3+ years of residency and fellowship training. It’s a LONG journey. However, the non-traditional path has become the norm as more and more students decide to take a gap year before medical school. In fact, the gap year has really become gap years as the average age of first-year medical students is now 24. This means that on average, premedical students take a 2-3 year break between undergrad and medical school. Because there are soooo many ways to utilize a gap year before medical school, students often have trouble choosing what's best for them. To help anyone considering a gap year before medical school, I’ll give a rundown of what I did during my gap year and also provide a list of other options for you to consider.
My gap year before medical school
My gap year before medical school was easily one of the best years of my life. I really optimized that year to travel, engage in business endeavors, and to RELAX (I watched A LOT of Netflix)! Here’s a breakdown of how I spent the year.
Applied to medical school
I technically started applying to medical school during the spring of my senior year of college. I needed to get my letters of recommendation in order, work on my personal statement, organize my list of extracurricular activities, and make a list of schools to apply to. Senior spring got pretty busy, and I honestly just wanted to enjoy my last semester with my friends. So, the medical school application tasks that I should have done prior to graduation, bled into the summer after I graduated.
Teaching Fellowship in Hong Kong
A few weeks after graduating from Harvard, I flew to Hong Kong as a fellow in the Crimson Summer Exchange Program. This fellowship brought together students from Ivy League schools, Oxford, and Cambridge, to teach at The University of Hong Kong and a few other institutions on mainland China. As someone who spent two out of three summers teaching in college, the chance to teach at the university level was a welcomed opportunity. I taught a curriculum on the use of art as a means of social change to rising sophomores at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China as well as to high school students in Hong Kong.
Teaching stint in Japan
After a summer in Hong Kong, I spent a couple of weeks in Japan teaching an introductory global health curriculum to high school students there. This teaching opportunity was through HLAB – an organization run by Harvard students. While in Hong Kong and Japan, I worked on my primary and secondary applications for medical school.
Medical school interviews
Once I returned stateside, it was time to finish up my secondary applications and start the trail of medical school interviews. Living at home in Newtown, PA was a blessing because I was so close to the majority of the schools that I applied to. This really helped to cut down on costs since I didn’t need to pay for plane tickets to most of my interview locations.
Tutored the SAT and other academic subjects
In high school, my sister and I started Jordan&Jordan Tutoring as a way to help reduce summer learning loss for elementary school students. I utilized the base that we had established to reach out to students in PA, but also across the country to provide tutoring services for the SAT, MCAT, and K-12 academic subjects. We have since scaled down Jordan&Jordan Tutoring to one-off tutoring and college admissions consulting, but this was an AMAZING way for me to flex my entrepreneurship muscles during my gap year.
Worked in administration with a healthcare startup
During my gap year, my parents started a healthcare business, and I joined as their first employee! Again, the entrepreneur in me was super excited to express my interests in business, this time with a medical relevance! As an employee in the startup space, I got to see what it takes to start a healthcare business from the ground up. My tasks ranged from marketing and accounting to even delivering in-home patient care.
Backpacked around Europe
After the tiring road of medical school interviews, I found out that I was accepted to my top choice for medical school, The Perelman School of Medicine at The University of Pennsylvania!!!!! From then on, my thoughts shifted to how I could maximize the remaining few months of my gap year. I’d learned a lot through my tutoring business and my healthcare startup work, but I started to get an itch to travel. I finally decided that a 2-month long trip to Europe would be the perfect way to round out my gap year. I bought an outbound ticket to London and a return ticket from Istanbul. Everything else I did in typical Atasha travel form…I TOTALLY WINGED IT! I spent the first couple of weeks in England, Scotland, Belgium, and France with my brother. Then I eventually wandered across 13 countries over the course of the summer before I made my way back to the US with just a couple weeks to prep for the start of medical school.
Is a gap year before medical school right for you?
Now that you have a sense of what I did during my gap year, you might be thinking….Wow, that seems like a great year, but I’m not sure that it’s right for me. There are a few factors to consider when choosing between going straight through from college to medical school or taking a gap year before medical school.
Reasons to take a gap year before medical school and activities to help you achieve your goals
1) Take a break!
As I mentioned before, the path to becoming a physician in the U.S. is LONG. You’re looking at 11+ years of post-secondary education. That’s A LOT. And before you even get to medical school, you would have already completed 17 YEARS of schooling. I don’t know about you, but even as a freshman in college I knew that I’d want to use a gap year before medical school to just take a break from academics. The medical profession is one of life-long learning. Think about it: those board (re)certification exams don’t take themselves…So if you’d like some respite from studying, a gap year could be for you.
Explore the World Through Travel
A gap year before medical is a chance to take a break, but what you do during that break makes all the difference between an okay and an amazing year. Exploring the world through travel is, in my opinion, a wonderful way to spend a gap year. When will you ever have another similar period in life with the freedom to do what you want, when you want? To me, travel is a great way to gain exposure to new cultures and new perspectives about life. I encourage you to consider some of the many travel opportunities available to recent college graduates. I’ve listed a few below.
Fellowships
There are sooooo many travel (and non-travel) fellowships available to graduating seniors. Through fellowships, you can conduct research, or work in communities abroad, by teaching or medical volunteering, for example.
I’ll highlight the Fulbright Program because I was very interested in pursuing the Fulbright route, and I could answer some questions if you have any. I'll also shout out the Crimson Summer Exchange, the fellowship in Hong Kong that I mentioned above. Otherwise, if you want the chance for funded travel, I’d definitely say to utilize Google fully. Also, make sure to maximize the career services department at your school. In addition to the many fellowships you’ll find on Google, your career services department may have access to some fellowship information for fellowships specific to students at your school.
Self-funded travel
In addition to a fellowship to Hong Kong, I self-funded my travel to Europe during my gap year before medical school. Using the money I saved from tutoring (and by being insanely frugal), I traveled for 2 months in Europe spending just $5.5K! Self-funded travel gives you the most flexibility because you can do exactly as much or as little travel as is comfortable for you.
Work abroad
What’s better than travel? Traveling WHILE making money. Though it might not be easy to conduct a job search from abroad, if there’s a particular industry that you’d like to work in and a place you’d like to do it, I think it’s a great idea to look for job opportunities abroad.
2) Gain new skills
A gap year before medical school is a great time to gain some new skills. Just because you’re taking a break from school, you don’t have to sit and let your brain rot for a year.
Get a Job
A job is a perfect way to gain new skills. As a premedical student, you have a lot of options. You can do bench or clinical research. You can work at a hospital as an entry-level administrator or as a scribe. If you want to do something a little more out of the norm, you can apply to industry jobs in healthcare - med devices, insurance, pharma, and home healthcare to name a few. To be REALLY adventurous, there are many job options outside of medicine altogether. I know friends who have done Teach for America, investment banking, and consulting during their gap year before medical school.
Pick Up a New Hobby
The free time of a gap year also gives you time to gain new skills through a hobby. Always wanted to learn to do interior décor? Crochet? Paint? Kickbox? Whatever your interest, the gap year before medical school is a great time to pursue it.
3) Improve your resume
College isn’t a breeze for everyone. Some people are able to get amazing grades and MCAT scores with minimal effort. Others work tirelessly and seem not to be able to crack the 3.0 GPA mark. Then, of course, there are students who fall within that spectrum. I’d say I worked really hard and had okay grades – not amazing, not bad. So, I definitely understand and can relate to the fear that many premedical students have about how grades and MCAT scores could hinder their chances of acceptance to medical school. For those who are in need of a resume boost, there are many options out there. (Feel free to reach out to me by email or leave a comment below if you have more specific questions).
Academic Resume Boost
I’ve seen students try to improve their academic resume post-college in a few ways. As a fair warning, my friends and mentees have seen mixed results from these pursuits (i.e. some have gotten into medical school and others have not). Here are a few options for ways to improve your academic resume during your gap year before medical school.
Post-baccalaureate program
Post-baccalaureate programs are tailored for students who did not take pre-med courses in college or who have been out of school for a while. These programs are typically one year long and cram in all the biology, chemistry, and physics needed (or not...) for your science foundation for medical school.
Master’s degree
A LOT of my medical school classmates used their gap year(s) before medical school to earn another degree. They had master's degrees in public health, public policy, and bioengineering to name a few. A master's degree before medical school can help you to focus in on what aspects of medicine interest you most. The degree could also serve to help boost your GPA when you apply for medical school.
Science classes at a university (without a degree)
In some cases, it is possible to take science courses at a university to gain a better foundation in a subject and to help boost your science GPA. For this option, I would make sure to reach out to the pre-med advising program at your school to get a better sense of which types of classes at which schools could count toward improving your science GPA.
At the end of the day, make sure that the option you choose to boost your academics includes 1) classes that will count to your science GPA and 2) won’t make you go broke.
Extracurricular Activities Resume Boost
I’m including this section to highlight the fact that medical schools care more and more about WHO you are as a PERSON and not just what grades you can achieve. As a previous member of the UPenn admissions committee, I’ve seen MANY students with great grades not get accepted because they seemed like really bland people. No shade if you’re in the category of folks who need to beef up the personal component of your application, but the reality is that great grades alone are not enough. There are enough people out there with stellar/near-perfect grades that schools are looking for other ways to differentiate their candidates. All of the fellowship, work, and travel opportunities that I listed above are ways for you to boost your extracurricular activities resume for your medical school application.
4) Make sure you want to practice medicine
Last but not least, one of the most important things that you can do during your gap year before medical school is to reflect on the reasons why you want to go to medical school. I can't emphasize this enough. Medical school is LONG journey. Medical school and residency are TOUGH. Make sure that this is truly the profession for you before you invest the time and money to become a physician.
During your gap year before medical school, revisit the decision to become a physician. Reflect on it frequently.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the decision to take (or not take) a gap year before medical school is completely up to you. You will weigh what’s most important to you about your life experiences as a young adult to make that decision. In the end, I hope that this post helped you to see how GREAT a gap year could be. You might take a gap year before medical school to
- Take a Break
- Explore the World Through Travel
- Gain New Skills
- Improve Your Resume, or
- Make Sure That You Want to Practice Medicine
Because of all the things you can do, your gap year before medical school has the potential to be one of the best years of your life. It certainly was for me!
Peace and blessings,
Atasha Jordan, MD (to be)
Really liked the way you said, “As a previous member of the UPenn admissions committee, I’ve seen MANY students with great grades not get accepted because they seemed like really bland people.”
To build off of that: there’s a fine line between 1) lighting a fire under your butt to remain competitive with your peers (i.e. trying to keep up with/mirror their choices) and 2) failing to properly recognize and package the pieces of your “identity capital” (a la Meg Jay) that differentiate you from someone else – ESPECIALLY when both of you are pretty accomplished on paper. Even in the case of travel, there are some people who are so well-traveled yet still somehow so boring… it makes me think they only chose something like travelling because someone said it was a good idea, and they undervalued something else they were truly more passionate about.
(Rambling aside, loved the post and how you’re putting ideas out there for those coming after you!)
Author
Thanks Jane!
You bring up a great point. Resume padding for the sake of looking good on paper can be pretty easy to spot. When I interviewed students I could pick up on who was passionate about their activities versus the ones who did it just to be attractive to med schools.