Brief Profile:
Chemical Biology major (no one seems to know what chemical biology is).
3 summers (40h/week) research at Texas Children\'s (various X-omas, bioinformatics, backend design, etc) - Designed a Java toolkit for integrating genomic platform data (sent for publication, 1st author) 1.5 years research in Brenner Lab - nonsense medicated mRNA decay - applications, exceptions, validation of rules Phi Beta Lambda business club - State Lead Webmaster - coord. state events, IT troubleshooting, site design - Business Technology committee leader - investing workshops, tech. workshops, some quantitative finance work (volatility measures for levereaged ETF positions, etc) - Various 1st place awards in national competitions Prager & Sealy paid employment - ruleset creation and dynamic backend for organizing nonprofit financial transactions Other computer hackery stuff
// Applications //
Application Cycle One: 07/19/2009
Undergraduate college: UC Berkeley
Undergraduate Area of study: Biological/Life Sciences
Total MCAT SCORE: 519
MCAT Section Scores:
B/B 130,
C/P 132,
CARS 127
Overall GPA: 3.95
Science GPA: 3.96
Summary of Application Experience
Deja vu all over again. The school that I was set on - Baylor in this case, and that I did everything for -- research, pandering to professors, getting tons of references there, meeting with people on the freaking ADCOM committee before interviews, etc -- rejected. This was exactly what happened back in college, with a Stanford reject even after professors \"assured\" that I would get in, a recommendation from the freaking campus principal, and after attending tons of summer programs there. The acceptance came out of left field -- Berkeley for undergraduate, UTMB Galveston for med school -- and in the case of the latter, a quick tour quickly dispelled any notion that the research or teaching there is second-rate (the weather, on the other hand...).
Overall, the experience was \"enjoyable\", if you consider slaving over essays and having semi nervous breakdowns before interviews a form of masochist entertainment. Seriously, meeting with people in their own labs, talking about XML abstractions with interviewees, hearing about opinions on all sorts of things from Obama to public health care to the Baylor-Rice merger to good parking spaces on campus -- you really can\'t beat that, even with an internal nervous breakdown when someone spams you with a question of how cin8-590 retains native activity after chopping off half of the protein from the C-term (that is UTMB, if you\'re curious). These are your professors, your teachers, your mentors, your future colleagues, maybe one day even your patients.
In the spirit of \"open access\", I\'ll be making most material (essays, ideas, etc) public after all acceptances/rejections come in, in the form of an Evernote notebook.
Jim Hsu took the old MCAT and scored a which is in the percentile of all old scores.
We converted this to a on the updated scale which is in the percentile of the updated MCAT. We also converted Jim Hsu’s section scores as follows:
Jim Hsu scored a 12 on the Biological Science section of the old MCAT which is approximately equal to a 130 on the Biological and Biochemical Foundations of Living Systems.
Jim Hsu scored a 14 on the Physical Science section of the old MCAT which is approximately equal to a 132 on the Chemical and Physical Foundations of Biological Systems.
Jim Hsu scored a 10 on the Verbal Reasoning section of the old MCAT which is approximately equal to a 127 on the Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills.
