 So you want to get into medical school but the MCAT just didn't work out. What should you do? In this video guys I'm going to give you those answers right after the centrum. All right guys what is going on guys? Lux here for an MD journey helping you succeed on your medical journey with less stress. Today we're going to be talking about a topic that's not so pleasant but I know a lot of you guys have a question which is MCAT just didn't go well like are my dreams over? Can I be still becoming a doctor and get into medical school? So first let's talk about what is considered to be a low MCAT score. So the average of the MCAT currently is of a new score it's about right out of 500 and for people applying to medical school the average is anywhere from a 504 to a 505. Now the average of people that get accepted into medical school is anywhere from a 510 to a 511 as I'm making of this video. So if you are below the 504 range then you're probably considered to have a lower than the MCAT score. So if you're feeling stressed out and discouraged I totally understand but I want you to take a deep breath and let's get into the step-by-steps on what you should be doing. So first thing you should do is to ask yourself how much of an improvement could you make on MCAT? So think about back to your practice test. How far from your actual score were you scoring? If they're pretty close then that means you performed you know on par on test day but if you're far off maybe you were getting excessively high numbers on your practice test and your test stage didn't go well. That may be an indication that would be worth taking the test again and so think about that. Item number two is to ask yourself if the test state was reflective of your practice exams could you actually make an improvement and could you make an improvement of four to five points? So if you're at like a 503 could you get to a 508 which would make you relatively competitive more so than you are right now that would be a big enough difference for you to probably want to take it again. But if you're at like a 504 or 505 and you don't think you can get past that 508 mark then it may lead you to think otherwise of taking the test again. So let's talk about how you should know whether you need to take the test or not. First is look at your GPA. You know med school is unfortunately a numbers game and so they do look at your numbers so they'll look at your MCAT but look at your GPA. So the average GPA of somebody applying to med school is right a little bit over a 3.55 and people that get accepted are about a 3.7 to a 3.8 and I'll have all this data linked down below but you want to ask yourself where are you in that range. If you're closer to that 3.7, 3.8 I feel a little bit better if I was you because you have at least one number working for you. If you're closer to the other number or even lower than the average then we need to talk about boosting up your application even more. So we can talk about that in a different video of what to do with a low GPA. Then the next step is to look at how competitive you are based on your extracurriculars and research and community service compared to your classmates and your peers. Do you have more? Do you have about the same? Are you doing the same ones? Or do you have less? If the answer is you're doing about the same where you're doing less then again your MCAT is not helping you and your extracurriculars probably don't help you. You'll be able to sell yourself at some point. So you want to see can you do something to your extracurriculars, add another experience, do another research project that's a little bit unique that we put on your application and people can look at it and say oh that's interesting. And finally another place that you can attract attention on your application are through your personal statements and your recommendation letters. So if you've had a really cool experience with somebody make sure you have them write you a letter of recommendation if that's your professor or put that into a personal statement and make sure you sell that experience tell the story. Make somebody say I'm interested in meeting this person because I think they'll be a good doctor. The last thing that guys that you want you to understand is having a low MCAT score isn't an end-all be-all when it comes to getting into medical school. It's just not going to help you get into medical school. That's essentially where we are. But you want to see what other portions of your application whether that's your GPA, your recommendation letters, your personal statements can help sell you and if none of those can then you need to talk about either taking a gap here to improve your GPA or to improve your experiences. If you're below 500 for example which is average definitely retake the MCAT especially if the rest of your application is about average so above average. But if you have other things in your application you're doing just at the average for the MCAT it's not going to be a big deal. You know I promise you there are many people that I've mentored and coached who have had okay MCATs that didn't really help them but the rest of the application did and they got to becoming a doctor. So hopefully guys this video helped you guys out. If you do guys have more questions about MCATs just let me know. Comment down below. Send me an email at themdjourney.com at gmail.com. I'll be happy to help you on a personal level. But make sure first of all you hit that like down below and subscribe to the channel. Thank you guys so much for watching. I'll see you guys in the next one. Take care guys.