Is It Possible to Work or Volunteer and Study for the MCAT at the Same Time?

To be a competitive applicant to medical schools, you will need to make sure you have more than a strong GPA and MCAT score. Most medical schools will evaluate a student’s candidacy holistically. This means that a student’s GPA, MCAT, volunteer work, research experience, leadership opportunities and extracurricular involvement (among other factors) will be taken into consideration.

Therefore, as a pre-med, you want to spend your summers (when you’re not engaged in full-time studies) building towards a strong profile that shows your well-roundedness! So what are the other activities you may want to engage in?

To best approach how to spend your time, you should be balancing between activities that will bring you growth and fulfillment with those that would shape you to be a physician. Ask yourself what activities you really enjoy or areas/skills you would like to learn. With these in mind, assess your academic and personal trajectory thus far. Are there areas that you don’t have too much experience in? Perhaps you think developing leadership skills would be best; from becoming a camp counsellor to TA-ing a course at university, there are many different ways you can build in this area.

KEY TAKEAWAY
Aim for diversity in experiences and be consistent with your volunteer/work hours. There are many activities you can spend time engaging in. Students try to participate in as many as they can to show medical schools their capabilities. While this approach may show diversity, medical schools are also looking for consistency! Demonstrating growth in a few key activities over long-term commitment is a testament to your dedication. Rather than engaging in short spurts of many activities choose a few and show how you’ve developed and grown through these.

At this point, you’re probably wondering, ‘can I volunteer/work/research while I study for the MCAT?’

There is no right answer to this question!

Some students work or research full-time and study part-time during evenings and weekends, while others work or volunteer part-time and study full-time during the day.

To understand how you can best balance your study time with other activities, you’re going to have to do some introspection and clearly define your goals. Here’s what we mean: Every school has varying criteria for what MCAT score and GPA are acceptable or competitive. Do the research. Know exactly what score you would need then estimate the time you think you will need to achieve that score. For some students, 2 months of full-time studies will be sufficient. For others maybe 3.5 months will get them where they want to be. Your goal is to quantify the number of hours you think you will need to achieve your target score. This is not a small undertaking and you may find that your estimate is completely off the mark. This is why we recommend sitting a mock MCAT exam at the beginning so you know your baseline performance levels.

Once you know how much time will be necessary for you, you should take a look at your profile – try to identify your strengths and your weaknesses. You should be able to explain what strengths shine from your experiences thus far, areas in which you may perhaps not be a strong candidate and be able to understand whether you have focused too much on a single activity or area. Most medical schools have core values that are essential to their program, this is the criteria by which they design their curriculum and also select candidates that are a fit for their program. By knowing these you will be able to self-evaluate better and choose activities that are right for you.

Now, having quantified both the time you need to study and your application profile, you should ask yourself how many hours (if any at all,) you will be able to dedicate to activities outside of studying. Then go ahead and embark on all of those goals!

One of the main things to remember when assessing your time availability is to take into consideration some variability. Remember, you are estimating the time required to study. In actuality, you may need far more time or less. Below are some factors you should consider to realistically assess your time:

1. Engage in activities that you may be able to pause or lessen your weekly time commitment towards. Committing 25 hours per week in a research lab that will require a journal article submission in 2 months is probably not the best idea. What if you find that you need more MCAT study time but can’t let your lab supervisor down? Now you’re in a position to perhaps sacrifice time on one of these two activities and that is a tough choice. By engaging in activities that are flexible in terms of a time commitment (that you can increase later if you’d like to) is probably the best. Also, know your priorities: which of the activities is the most important for you and your goals.
   
2. Periodically check in with yourself and track your progress. Are you tracking your progress on a certain subject or topic and are you gaining mastery in it? If not, maybe you need more time than you may not have factored into your study plan. By being aware of your progress and end goal you can reassess your study time and tailor as needed.
3. Figure out your system. You may have available study time every afternoon after a morning or volunteering or doing research at the lab. However, if you are not the type of person who can study well after a busy morning, then regardless of how much available time you have, you will not be able to use it effectively. Understand what time of day is the best for you to study, whether your focus drops as the day goes on and when you can reap the most out of the time. Rearrange your activities and make yourself available during the time when you study best, this may require changing everything including your sleep, work and extracurricular schedules.