Kathleen Kolberg, associate dean for the College of Science and assistant director of the Center for Health Sciences Advising, and Kristian Lax-Walker, associate advising professor for the Center for Health Sciences Advising, have expressed excitement at Notre Dame’s efforts to improve undergraduate preparation for medical school applications through highly-involved advising.
Notre Dame says that “84% of Notre Dame pre-med graduates are admitted to medical school — that’s twice the national average.” While this number is high in comparison to other institutions, the Center for Health Sciences Advising is looking to further improve its involvement in the application process and transition to medical school for their undergraduate students.
Kolberg said that medical school admissions counselors are looking increasingly away from the traditional GPA and into a holistic approach, like undergraduate institutions’ admissions processes.
“We are not downplaying the importance of the science, but when you get to the heart of why you do medicine, it’s the empathy, the compassion, the ‘I want to live a virtuous life’ and my gifts allow me to do this for people. There’s a lot beyond classwork. The classwork is actually pretty straightforward, yes: chem, orgo, bio, biochem, physics, English, psychology, right? So pretty straightforward. The part that’s less straightforward is knowledge of medicine,” Kolberg said.
Kolberg and Lax-Walker highlighted the increasing involvement of the Center for Health Sciences Advising, starting from the initial indication of “pre-med” or “pre-health” classifications for freshmen.
“We’ve started being more proactive in how we approach our first-year students. And as our [email list] has grown, we have to kind of shift it, because as they move out of first year into their sophomore years, they’re not going to get the same communications,” Lax-Walker said.
The two emphasized the connections between the Notre Dame College of Science and medical schools across the United States. Lax-Walker said 28 undergraduate students recently attended a visit to Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine.
Increased visits to medical schools are a major goal of the advising team. Kolberg also encourages students to get clinical experience.
“We’re saying from the first time we meet with people that you have to get clinical experience in order to get into med school. In every college around the country, we’ll have people with outstanding grades and test scores that don’t get in, and feedback is often similar to, ‘well, we know they’re smart enough to finish med school, we don’t know if they want to be a doctor,’” Kolberg said.
The Center for Health Sciences Advising is also increasingly encouraging students to consider taking a gap year between graduating college and medical school to increase the number of hours of clinical experience that they have. Both Kolberg and Lax-Walker expressed that this will not negatively impact students, if used wisely.
“Another piece that people probably don’t often think about is that an extra year or maybe two, if they decide on two, is a growth year for them personally. There’s maturity that happens in that time frame that allows them to enter medical school with just a little bit more experience,” Kolberg said.
Luis Lopez, a sophomore in Morrissey Manor, studying neuroscience on the pre-med track, weighed in with his thoughts about pre-med advising.
“They tell us what to do and we do it,” Lopez said. “They tell us the options that are available, like volunteering and the research.”
