Friday, July 29, 2016

MCAT Struggle

1 comments
Hey everyone -- I know it's been an extremely long time since my last post. I was actually contemplating writing
this post for a while. Since the beginning of this year, things have been, in a word, "interesting". Lots of things have happened to me personally and professionally, both good and bad in both areas. And maybe I'll open up about it all in another post, but the main focus of this post is my MCAT struggle.

I had originally planned on taking the MCAT in January. I didn't stay on track and ended up delaying it to March. There were several deadlines with my masters as well as severe personal medical conditions that erupted in these past few months. I eventually took the exam at the beginning of July after a couple months of much needed stability.

I've always had a struggle with the MCAT. My previous score was a 496 and while taking practice tests this time around, I was barely hitting the 502 range. While I don't know my score for the July test yet, I'm sure I didn't even hit the 500-mark. My goal for this post is to get advice on how to better take this test. From everything I read, and from my experience with practice tests -- I don't seem to have a problem with content; it's my reasoning skills that need work. I'm missing information that I should have been able to reason out from the passage information. Most of the posts I read are advice on how to score higher, 509+. But I don't see any posts on getting around 505. I hope this post reaches someone who struggled to get to this point.

I know these numbers are lower than the majority of what medical students are trying to aim for, so please keep any, negative, non-helpful comments to yourself. If you have any constructive criticism or advice on how to approach my studying for the MCAT please comment or email me!

Thank you so much!