For those of you who have followed this blog over the past few years, you might recall my 3rd year of undergrad when York went on strike for a few months. When the strike was over and school finally resumed at the beginning of 2009, we had to make up a lot of lost time, leading to an unusual schedule. This included our Winter exam period being pushed from the normal December period to February.

However, this coincided with medical school interview season. I remember clearly how my Queen’s interview on Feb. 27, 2009, immediately preceded my Molecular Biology final exam on Feb. 28, 2009. That was actually the only exam I had to do, and I had a week to study for it. That also meant I had a week to prepare for my Queen’s interview.

What did I do? I ended up spending the entire week preparing for my Queen’s interview, and only started studying for my Molecular Biology exam the morning after my interview. I had a 100 average going into the exam, and after the exam, I ended up with an A in the course, obviously because I wasn’t well prepared for the final exam.

Same Situations, Difference Choices

A lot of people end up in similar situations with many pieces to juggle in their lives, and given an unlimited amount of time, everyone would probably make the same decision to take care of everything and achieve everything to the best of their ability. However, we don’t have unlimited time.

There are only so many hours in a day, and for most of us, we can only work for so many of those hours. We all have a long list of things we’d like to do, but the reality is that most of us simply don’t have the time or energy to achieve all of them.

What actually happens is that we make choices and prioritize our list of things to do, and these choices can end up significantly affecting the outcome.

If I had unlimited time, maybe I would have spent 1 week studying for my exam, and 1 week preparing for my interview – and maybe I would have gotten an A+ in the course and still been satisfied with my Queen’s interview preparation. But I didn’t have unlimited time, and therefore, I made the choice to give pretty much no time to my exam preparation.

I am sure some other people in my shoes might have spent more time studying for the exam and less time preparation for the interview. Everyone prioritizes differently.

I’m not going to defend my choices, mainly because I don’t think the decision is actually all that clear cut in my case. But the point I’m trying to make is that the way you prioritize is inevitably going to affect the outcome, and it is true that depending on what outcome you desire, some people are going to prioritize differently than others.

So how do we prioritize?

Example: Prioritizing as a Medhopeful

Applying to medical school is tough. The process is long, the competition is fierce, and there are so many hoops to jump through:

• GPA
• MCAT
• Extracurricular involvement
• Volunteer/community work
• Research
• A million other possible things

Given an infinite amount of time, all applicants would be able to do quite well in all of these components. But again, getting back to reality, no one can be perfect in all of these. There just isn’t enough time. So, how should you prioritize these aspects?

Start by looking at key outcomes: for example, getting a medical school interview. As I have mentioned many times over, academics are the most important thing to work on because a good GPA and MCAT are what get your foot in the door of medical schools. At many Canadian medical schools, if you are GPA and MCAT aren’t good enough, then it doesn’t matter how good your research, community work, or extracurricular involvement is – no one will even see it (for example, Queen’s and Western’s medical schools which use a hard GPA and MCAT cutoff to decide on interviewees).

Despite this fact, I can’t count the times I have seen friends or other medhopefuls stress themselves by piling EC’s and community work onto their plate at the expense of getting good grades – making their road to medical school that much longer once reality hits after a few years. The obsession with being a star medical school applicant often clouds an applicant’s judgment, and subsequently, the way they prioritize. It also doesn’t help when applicants try to compare themselves to prior successful applicants, and start to think they need to be involved more and more to have a shot at medical school, failing to realize that that shot begins and ends with strong academics.

These are applicants who could very well have been great physicians, and who very well could have gotten into medical school if they simply prioritized better from the beginning.

One Last Example: Picking my Undergraduate Experience

Prioritizing is not always easy, but I do think it is definitely worth the time, investment and mental energy. Putting yourself in the right direction from the start can save you a lot of headache later on.

I attribute a lot of the success I have to prioritizing well and making good choices/decisions. As you know already, I spent hours preparing for my medical school interviews at the expense of my marks in my 3rd year of undergrad. Even in retrospect, I believe it was the right decision for me. I wanted to end this article by sharing one more example of a time where I believe I prioritized well, and how that impacted a positive outcome for me.

One of the most common questions I get asked is “Why did you go to York University for undergrad?”. And when I get this question, I know exactly why I get it. People are surprised to hear that a medhopeful would choose to go to York, when options like McMaster Health Sciences or UofT were available.

Funny enough, when I was deciding on where I wanted to go for university, my thought process was primarily based on which choice would give me the best chance at getting into medical school. I made sure to do my homework/research, so I knew that Canadian medical schools did not discriminate based on undergraduate program or institution. The reality is that York University’s science program did not have the public “prestige” that a school like UofT did, but I did believe the workload would be more manageable based on my conversations with peers and friends. And to me, having a manageable workload, not over stressing myself and ultimately maximizing my chances of getting into medical school was a much bigger priority than how other people viewed me and the degree I would obtain. Certainly this was not the only reason I chose York, but when it came to comparing York and say UofT, this was definitely the main point of comparison.

If your goal is medical school, then without a doubt, prioritizing your medical school chances over the perceived “prestige” of your institution is the right move. I give this advice probably more often than any other piece of advice I give to medhopefuls. Fortunately, there seems to be a trend towards more high school graduating medhopefuls accepting and trusting this advice. If you really know what your priorities are, don’t be afraid to act on them.

Very often we all have the same options. Take the time to consider your goals and how those goals should affect your priorities, because how you prioritize will directly affect whether you get outcome you want.