Useful Pre-Med Resources
The American Medical College Application Service® (AMCAS®) is the AAMC’s centralized medical school application processing service.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (www.aamc.org) provides all kinds of information for applicants and advisors, including important stats for each medical school: number of seats, total number of applicants, number of applicants interviewed, average GPA & MCAT scores of people who are granted admission, break down of resident vs non-resident, & tuition.
The AAMC charges for this information: you have to pay $25 for an online subscription.
This link has a lot of useful information on MCAT preparatory courses.
This link from Pacific Medical Training also contains some valuable info.
The Kaiser Family Foundation has a tremendous amount of great information regarding big public health issues: health care spending in US, disparities in health care, insurance, health reform, etc. You could easily spend a number of days navigating through all information. It does provide a lot more detail and insight than you typically get in a news article.
Fred Friendly Seminars: Ethics in America: These are fascinating round table discussions with people from all areas: judges, doctors, politicians, political activists, clergy, professors, journalists, etc discussing difficult, ethical dilemmas. Of course there is no right answer, but the key is to get an understanding or appreciation of the different issues and viewpoints. The videos can be viewed for free, but it’s hard to navigate through the Anneberg education site (use the link above to get to the page with the videos on demand). We would recommend at least viewing the episodes Do Unto Others and Does Doctor Know Best, but honestly they are all good.
iTunes U is a great resource. University of Pennsylvania has an online bioethics course. Arthur Caplan directs the course and is a very well known bioethicist. The amount of information on iTunes U is vast and growing daily, so it might be worth browsing around for awhile.
The Student Doctor Network is a nonprofit educational organization that offers links to personal accounts and general application info that is useful to premedical students, predental students, and students interested in other health science careers. Its resources include students’ descriptions of their actual interviews, searchable by school.
The UW School of Medicine (UW SoM) Admissions Resources page is a helpful tool for premed students, with details about applying at UW, as well as general information and resources to consider when applying for medical school.
The UW ethics in medicine page will assist you in understanding the legal obligations that physicians face. Such bioethics questions often are asked in interviews. The topics even have several cases to test your knowledge.
The UW Summer Medical and Dental Education Program (SHPEP) is a free summer program, offered at UW and other campuses around the country, for students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds, who are considering medical or dental careers.
The mentorship program run by the Washington Academy of Family Physicians matches pre-med students and mentors together: https://wafp.net/professional-development/leadership-development/mentors-for-pre-med/.
Here’s some sound advice from a fellow Lute, a UW medical school graduate:
Visit the American Medical Association and spend some time in the future months/years reading through policy, ethical, medical, and political issues from the AMA. You can subscribe to the online version of AMNEWS. We would HIGHLY recommend that you spend time each week reviewing the latest.
Finally we might recommend subscribing to an email list for a medical journal (e.g., JAMA, NEJM, Nature Med, Lancet). Read newspapers (or follow online news) and scan for health care related issues. Sometimes the articles are pretty superficial, so you may need to do a little digging to carry your understanding beyond the headlines. NY Times health section is probably a good resource to scan every couple of days.