Nick, thanks for the your feedback and thoughts. It may be a bit challenging to find verifiers for some of the more remote things in my job history especially since many of the businesses I was employed by do not even exist any more! I am unsure how to approach this issue... I will definitely check out EK. The annotated reader is a great idea for me too as I did not take any humanities courses this year.... I took the higher level science courses as its stuff I am really interested in and as a result enjoy studying. I doubt that I would be able to do well in humanities courses. Oh and by the way Street Fighter > mortal combat!
One of the issues I was also thinking about is how to talk about my clinical experience in areas like transplant medicine and critical care... As a tx coordinator, your job is essentially being a cross between a R1-R2 medical resident and a medical secretary. I see patients in clinic and also review patient files and look at blood work, imaging reports, procedure reports, clinic letters, discharge summaries, etc... put a summarised clinical picture together for our attending doc and get them to make decisions. In most cases however, if I know what to do I simply execute this and document my rationale and actions taken. I frequently am consulted by tx patients family MDs or ER MDs regarding their Hx, management suggestions, etc. I obviously refer them to our attending MD if I am unsure about what to suggest. Usually though, I am more than happy to suggest treatment guidelines, and give information about drug interactions, immunosuppression therapy changes, etc. as long as I feel confident in my knowledge base.
Similarly in areas like ICU where you have a hemodynamically unstable patient in multi-organ failure, if an MD is not around, the non-MD components (mostly RNs and RRTs) of our team have a reasonable idea of what to do to keep a patient alive until the MD can come by. This includes things like starting vaso-active infusions, initiating respiratory therapeutic modalities like a BiPAP mask as a bridge to intubation, etc. Our RRTs will intubate if required to. One time during a code on a medicine ward at 3 am in the morning I gave 3 amps of epinephrine (he had asystole or a very fine v. fib) down a guys endotracheal tube (no BP and no vascular access) as the MD residents were being quite indecisive about what to do... it actually brought him back. I love working in these areas as you have significantly more autonomy than an RN in the most traditional sense. Over the years, the attending docs also come to trust your judgements and in the end it just makes their jobs easier and hopefully results in better patient care.
I am a bit apprehensive about discussing my roles in these clinical areas, as I am not sure if it would be construed as over-stepping boundaries of what an RN is supposed to do, etc... I am really unsure how the U of C admissions committee would see this... Would it be prudent to minimize the emphasis on the autonomy when discussing these areas on the application?
Bearpuppy and Nick you guys both know how to make a man feel inadequate with those crazy MCAT scores!! Thanks again for the input and suggestions. I really appreciate it!