The MCAT

The Medical College Admission Test is a necessary evil to becoming a doctor.  Months and months (not hours) of endless studying.  Four and a half hours of pure joy.  You get to pay (a base fee) of $230 to enjoy it.  It is composed of four sections - Physical Sciences (cry of despair), Verbal Reasoning, Biological Sciences, and a Voluntary Trial section (they decided to replace the Writing section this year).  Each section is graded on a 15-point scale.  Breaking it down even further goes like this:

1.  Physical Sciences
   • 70 minutes
   • 52 multiple choice questions
   • All about your math skills and how well you know physics and general chemistry
2.   Verbal Reasoning:
   
   • 60 minutes 
   • 40 multiple choice questions 
   • They're similar to the critical reading questions on the SAT/ACT
3.  Biological Sciences
   • 70 minutes
   • 52 multiple choice questions
   • All about basic biology and organic chemistry
4.  Voluntary Trial
   
   • 45 minutes
   • 32 questions
   • You apparently get rewarded with a $30 Amazon gift card (whoop-de-doo $30 to fry your brains out even more) for taking this section because it's voluntary.  It's to help the people who make the test see the worth of future questions, so it won't be scored (but you get feedback)

Because it's graded on a 15 point scale if you score a 40-43 on a section it may be changed to 11 or a 44-46 may be changed to a 12.  They do not take penalties off for wrong answers (thank goodness).  Any overall score that is 30 is pretty good and 35 is pretty amazing, but medical schools do look at what you scored on each section (so if you absolutely bombed one section they might reconsider).  On top of your score you should have gotten at least a 3.0 in college (a 3.5 is a pretty good, solid GPA), but your MCAT score is the first thing the medical schools look at when you send out your application.  Not only do medical schools look at MCAT scores and your GPA, but they look at your extracurricular activities as well - the ones you have done in college (high school counts for pretty much nothing once you get to college).  So while you're studying and dying from schoolwork, make sure to get in some community service hours and join some clubs.  All this work and testing...what absolute fun!

Inspiration

With the career presentations that just came up, I had decided to focus my attention on a specific kind of doctor and I had chosen cardiology.  When analyzing rhetoric, I found a quote from a doctor that really struck me.  It was a quote from a cardiology medical director, Douglas Pearce, "I wanted to make a difference in someone's life.  Although I like everything about medicine and it was difficult to decide, I knew I wanted to do something in critical care medicine...I didn't want to just do procedures and not see the patient again.  I wanted to be able to sit on the edge of the bed and hold a patient's hand and make a difference in their life".  Connecting with the patients and truly understanding them in order to help them is what I want.  It's exactly as he said, sitting with the patients and being the doctor that they trust; not the doctor that they are grudging to see.  To be able to be the doctor that they see more of as a friend rather than a doctor.  Even though becoming a doctor - especially a doctor who specializes in a certain field - is very rigorous, the knowledge that you have affected someone so greatly has to be absolutely fulfilling.  I still have to choose a field to specialize in...but now I think I have narrowed it to one where interaction with the patients is a major part of it.  There are so many options in life; I just hope I choose the correct ones.