Section ideas:
Application Process
Recommended Prerequisites
Additional Resources
Motivation for Medicine*
As you consider pursuing a career as a physician, it is important that you reflect carefully upon your motivations for pursuing medicine. Medicine can be an immensely rewarding career. In fact, many physicians feel they were 'called' to medicine, that it is more than a career--it is what they were 'supposed to do' with their lives. At the same time, it is a very long and difficult road which will consume a full decade or more of your life just to get to the point of actually practicing medicine.
Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivations
Those who typically enjoy and thrive in medicine are those who have found internal, personal reasons to pursue the profession--they care profoundly about the suffering and well-being of others and want to reduce suffering and improve health. They genuinely find their courses to be intellectually challenging and interesting. These are intrinsic or internal motivations. Students who possess these kinds of attributes tend do better in and enjoy medical school. To learn more about developing compassion prior to becoming a physician, we encourage you to read this article. Additional articles about physician characteristics can be found here and here.
Medicine also can provide some extrinsic motivations such as status, prestige or financial benefits. Although most physicians likely enjoy these kinds of extrinsic benefits upon completion, they are likely not sufficient to sustain a student through the rigors of years of intensive training. Those students possessing more extrinsic motivation tend to do more poorly in medical school and report greater exhaustion in medical school.
Medical schools encourage you to shadow and engage in patient contact and community service to help you determine if and demonstrate that you have the intrinsic motivation, compassion, and commitment necessary to succeed in medical school and to be an excellent physician.
As you begin your preparation for medical school, start with your motivation for pursuing medicine. Why do you want to be a doctor? What character traits, commitments and values do you hold that qualify you to be a physician? In several years when you apply for medical school, you'll be expected to clearly know and have demonstrated through your preparation your reasons for becoming a physician.
*This section comes from the Pre-Professional Advisement Center's website.
Visit the Pre-Professional Advisement Center
BYU's Pre-Professional Advisement Center has several advisors assigned to help pre-med students. In their words, "The mission of BYU Premedical Advisement is to help you 1) determine if you want to become a physician and 2) get admitted to the best possible medical school for you. We do this by helping you understand the coursework and extracurricular preparation that you need to complete in order to become a competitive applicant. Although premed students are very bright and self-motivated and can generally understand the process, we believe that your odds of admission are better if you use our services. We regularly consult with admissions committees at various medical schools. We know the data on who gets in and who doesn't. More importantly, we often know WHY students don't get in—despite having met the general criteria. We know which applicants get the most offers and how they stand out from the crowd. Come let us help you become and then shine as the best applicant you can be."
Visit the Advisement Center's Medicine page for more information and to get in contact with an advisor.
Grad School Prep Class
The university offers a course to help students apply to graduate school. The course is called STDEV 318: Graduate School Preparation: Practical Strategies for Becoming a More Competitive Applicant. In the course, students explore graduate school programs that match their career goals, learn personal branding skills to help them articulate their experiences on application materials, and practice interview skills. You can learn more about STDEV 318 in the Undergraduate Catalog.