How to be Pre-Med: A Harvard MD's Medical School Preparation Guide for Students and Parents

by Suzanne M. Miller

How To Be Pre-Med assists high school, college, and non-traditional students interested in becoming physicians by describing the pre-med route from start to finish using the Six Buckets model Dr. Miller developed through over a decade of medical school admissions advising. This guide is equally helpful to those hoping to pursue a medical career and to loved ones, such as parents, spouses, relatives, and friends, supporting a pre-med.

Dr. Miller created How to be Pre-Med to serve as a prequel to the best-selling The Medical School Admissions Guide: A Harvard MD's Week-by-Week Admissions Handbook because readers frequently provided feedback wishing they had received similar expert guidance sooner in the pre-med process.

How To Be Pre-Med covers all information required to excel as a pre-med and prepare for the medical school application process. I suggest you read this book as soon as you decide to pursue the pre-med path to help strategize selection of undergraduate or post-baccalaureate experiences. Then return to it each year to assess how you are filling up the Six Buckets.

Once you have decided to apply to medical school, pick up the latest edition of The Medical School Admissions Guide and follow the weekly steps required to create the best application possible to maximize your chances of admission.

Genres: Medical

226 pages, Paperback

First published February 11, 2013

About the author

Dr. Miller was raised near Washington, DC and studied history and science at Harvard College. While attending Harvard Medical School, she began admissions consulting as a Pre-Medical Tutor and then Co-Chair of the Eliot House Pre-Medical Committee. After receiving her MD, Dr. Miller trained at Stanford University in Emergency Medicine.

Dr. Miller now lives in Washington, DC where she works as an Emergency Physician and runs MDadmit, a medical school admissions consulting service. She also serves as a clinical instructor at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. Dr. Miller enjoys teaching and traveling internationally, providing medical coverage for the Washington Wizards’ and Capitals’ games, and serving as a medical director for Racing the Planet adventure races.

Reviews

[Ella Meier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helpful! But depressing lol I am not doing enough

[Elizabeth Dickinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a freshman going to college in the fall of 2018 as a premed. My parents are not doctors and I have no doctors in my family, so it was extremely helpful to have the premed journey laid out simply for me. The author gives 6 categories of things one needs to be successful in getting into med school: academics, research, volunteering, extracurriculars, clinical experience, and application skills. There is information on the MCAT, the parts of the med school application, ways to find volunteering and research opportunities, and graphs depicting how competitive certain schools, test scores, and gpa’s are. It’s nice to have a structure to fill in with my experiences while going through premed.

This book was published in 2013, but has information on the new MCAT and what changed in the test.

[Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book. It clarified the path to medical school and simplified it. Reading real applications of people who have been accepted was incredibly helpful because you realize that you simply have to be yourself and do what you love best to get in. This realization makes the process *almost* easy as you are bound to excel at things you are passionate about. One of the main take-aways of this book is that there is no cookie-cutter applicant. Sure, there are certain experiences (research experience and clinical exposure) and academic standards you must meet but the "what" of what you choose to study/research/volunteer at are unlimited. Thank you so much for this book! It saved me so much time and angst!