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[boopbeedoop]

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[indefatigable]

Generally, GPA is the biggest component, BUT A lot of schools have specific weighting schemes for GPA - try adding your course load breakdown too.  You might have a chance at Western, especially with a MCAT rewrite which could help for McMaster too.  You'll need to really excel on CASPer to have a chance at Mac.   

Usually improving undergraduate GPA is the highest-yielding strategy for increase med school competitiveness.  I'm not sure how easy it would be to do well in an accelerated nursing program, but that otherwise sounds like a good idea.  I think people get fixated on med as the only way into health-care when there's plenty of decent opportunities in other areas too.  Your non-academics are ok and working this year should help - Dal really weighs non-academics heavily.  Ontario is really competitive - sometimes applicants consider moving provinces to increase their chances.  

tl;dr you seem to be in a border-line competitive range for ON - it'll take time and patience to improve your application, but it's definitely feasible...  

[boopbeedoop]

14 minutes ago, indefatigable said:

Generally, GPA is the biggest component, BUT A lot of schools have specific weighting schemes for GPA - if you give a year by year breakdown, with course load, then it'll be easier to give specific advice.  You might have a chance at Western, especially with a MCAT rewrite which could help for McMaster too.  You'll need to really excel on CASPer to have a chance at Mac.   

Thanks so much for your reply. I updated the post to show my GPA consecutively: 3.41, 3.84, 3.93, 4.0 with full course load each year. The reweighting helps me quite a bit for some schools, which is why I’m wondering if it’d be more beneficial to rewrite MCAT for CARS to help with western and mac, rather than focus on GPA. Or maybe a one-year program would be beneficial. Just nervous I’ll somehow bomb the MCAT because I think its a decent score if only CARS was a point or two higher D:

[bearded frog]

I don't think your GPA is unreasonable, you would get much farther with a better MCAT, especially at Mac, and your casper strategy is wrong - you should be evenly distributing your time among all three questions, they are all weighted equally and while the whole 3 question prompt is graded on a Likert scale, you're leaving a third of your answer blank. A reasonable answer to all three prompts will do better than a great answer to the first prompt and a blank last prompt. Think of it like an interview - you're given 5 minutes to answer 3 questions and you're basically refusing to answer the last one.

[indefatigable]

31 minutes ago, boopbeedoop said:

Thanks so much for your reply. I updated the post to show my GPA consecutively: 3.41, 3.84, 3.93, 4.0 with full course load each year. The reweighting helps me quite a bit for some schools, which is why I’m wondering if it’d be more beneficial to rewrite MCAT for CARS to help with western and mac, rather than focus on GPA. Or maybe a one-year program would be beneficial. Just nervous I’ll somehow bomb the MCAT because I think its a decent score if only CARS was a point or two higher D:

The full course-load really helps - your last two years give you an excellent GPA for both Queen's and Western.  If you end up having to commit to something new, just make sure it's something that you'll be happy with no matter what  i.e. a research Master's is usually a two-year commitment and often doesn't help that much with med school competitiveness so I wouldn't consider it unless you really like research!  Good luck!

[boopbeedoop]

13 minutes ago, bearded frog said:

I don't think your GPA is unreasonable, you would get much farther with a better MCAT, especially at Mac, and your casper strategy is wrong - you should be evenly distributing your time among all three questions, they are all weighted equally and while the whole 3 question prompt is graded on a Likert scale, you're leaving a third of your answer blank. A reasonable answer to all three prompts will do better than a great answer to the first prompt and a blank last prompt. Think of it like an interview - you're given 5 minutes to answer 3 questions and you're basically refusing to answer the last one.

Yeah I realized afterwards that it was probably not the way to go hahaha D: I'm thinking that I should probably rewrite the MCAT. Sigh. Thanks so much for your advice I appreciate it!