Helpful Resources

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The Pre-Health Advisors

Welcome to the Pre-Health Website! Check out the different sites and please feel free to contact us with any questions.

One-on-One Advising

We will help navigate you through our online information, draft a four year plan, and answer any pressing questions you may have.

Please check the websites of the specific schools, entrance exams, and application systems in which you are interested for the most current COVID-19 information.

Please note that most health professional schools will accept the CR grading option for their prerequisite courses ONLY for this Spring 2020 semester. Please note that earning a CR for a course does NOT affect your GPA. Therefore, we suggest that you review your current GPA to decide whether to switch to the CR option or keep the letter grade. If you are doing well in the course and the letter grade improves your GPA, you may choose to keep it. If the course in question is one that you are repeating, the repeat policies remain in effect. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

Health Fields

How to prepare for an Entrance Exam

Taking entrance exams are an essential part of preparing to apply for medical schools. This weeks resource is How to Prepare for an Entrance Exam in more resources under Entrance Exam here. This resource entails subjects like; when to study for an entrance exam, when to take an exam, and how to study for exam. In addition, this resource has entrance exam prep scholarship opportunities.

Taking a Gap Year

Are you thinking about taking a gap year or wanting to know more about what a gap year is? It is important to have a plan of how you make the most of your gap year to improve your application to health professional schools. Check out our gap year webpage here to learn more! Stop by our office to meet with one of our peer advisors or make an appointment if you have any questions here.

Shadowing a Health Professional

Are you looking for more ways to get experience in the field you're interested in? Do you want to gain potential strong and detailed letters of recommendations? Then, shadowing a health professional might be a good idea! If you are having trouble getting started, need some guidelines, or need an organization to contact please visit our page here. You can also make an appointment with a pre-health advisor here for any additional questions!

CVs and Resumes

Do you know the difference between a CV and a resume? Is yours ready to go for applications? If you answered "no" to either of these, check out our CV and resume resource page! A resume or CV is the first impression a reviewer gets of you, so its important that your resume or CV is the best it could be. If you need more assistance on your resume or CV, you can make an appointment with our director or see the Manoa Career Center!

Medical School Admissions Requirements (MSAR)

Are you a pre-medical student looking to apply to medical school this upcoming cycle? If so, our office highly recommends using the Medical School Admission Requirements (MSAR) to research your schools. This is an online database created by the AAMC that provides detailed information about all allopathic medical schools in the US, and a few in Canada. The MSAR includes information such as tuition, application deadlines, pre-medical experiences of the first year class, and competitive GPA and MCAT scores. The subscription fee is $28 per year, but you may come into our office anytime to use our subscription. This is a great resource for organizing your short list of medical schools!

Pre-Health Orientations and Workshops

PAC offers a variety of orientations and workshops each semester. This Spring 2019 semester, we will be hosting the following workshops: The Gap Year, Applying to Medical School, ʻImi Hoʻōla Post-Baccalaureate Program, Applying to Health Professional School, and The GREs. To find out more about our workshops, please click here. To RSVP, please click here.

PAC Kaplan Scholarship

PAC offers a Kaplan scholarship every semester to students who are planning to prepare for an entrance exam (GRE, GMAT, LSAT, DAT, OAT, PCAT, MCAT). The scholarship will provide a course-waiver (excluding one-on-one tutoring). Applying students will need to compose an essay (5,000 characters max.) on why you are interested in applying to this type of professional school, for which you are taking the test. To be eligible, please email your essay to Dr. Kiana Shiroma (kianak@hawaii.edu) by April 1st, 2019.

Pre-Health Courses Across the UH System

This webpage is a table that shows commonly required prerequisites for health professional schools and the corresponding course names at different UH system institutions. This is a great resource for students that take classes at multiple UH institutions and want to check how they transfer between these institutions. Please click here to view this resource.

Checklist for Professional School

This resource contains the Eight Steps on the Pathway to Professional School. Within the eight steps is everything that is needed to successfully prepare and apply to medical or professional school. The Eight Steps are: coursework, personal development, experience, entrance exams, researching schools, applications, interviews and financial aid. This resource also has links to experience opportunities, internships, clubs, organizations, an overview of entrance exams, and financial aid opportunities. In addition, this resource has information on the interview process, how to prepare for an interview, and opportunities to learn interviewing skills. For more information, please lick here.

Still unsure if the health field is for you? Shadow a health professional to experience the career first hand!

This webpage gives advice for students who are looking for a health professional to shadow. Whether you are curious as to how you should ask the health professional, what you should be doing while you are shadowing, or the steps that should be taken after you shadow! This webpage can give you more insight into all of these areas. If you want to find out more, click here.

Planning on Taking the MCAT Soon? Learn How to Make a Study Plan!

This webpage contains many tips and official AAMC resources for students looking to create a MCAT study plan. Know what to consider when creating your plan and what steps you can take to prepare for the exam. Check out the resource here!

List of Sample Interview Questions

For students preparing for interviews, check out our sample list of interview questions! We have both general and school specific questions that have been known to come up. Just as a reminder, you can schedule a mock appointment with our Director or at the Mānoa Career Center.

Time to start looking at Medical Schools to apply to? Look at our long list of medical schools.

This is a great resource for students to look at lots of medical schools in one place start forming your reach, match and safety school lists. This list has schools organized based on GPA and MCAT averages as well as showing number of out-of-state students accepted and if the school is a private school or not. Check it out here.

Looking to meet others interested in the same field as you? Look no further! Visit the Health Clubs and Organization webpage!

This webpage is a great resource for students who are looking to meet other students interested in the same field as them. They can start networking early with health care professionals through the clubs, possibly create study groups for a particular class, get volunteer hours, and more! Please click here to view the list of all the clubs and organizations.

Wondering how medical schools look at multiple MCAT scores? Visit our Multiple MCAT Scores webpage!

This resource shows how almost all of the allopathic medical schools in the United States accept multiple MCAT scores (superscore, most recent score, holistic, etc.). If you have taken the MCAT multiple times and would like to know how medical schools will view those scores, this is a great resource for you! Please click here to view the webpage.

Studying for entrance exams? Visit our Lending Library!

We have a Lending Library full of resources for current UH Manoa students. Our library includes reference books for researching schools and test prep books such as those for the GRE, MCAT, DAT, PCAT, OAT, and more! We also have good reads that are relevant to the health field. Come into PAC and borrow a book today! For more information or for a list of books we have, please visit here.

Join our Monthly Newsletter!

Our office provides a newsletter once a month that includes information on scholarships, enrichment opportunities, webinars, internships/job, etc. that are available to students. If you're interested in being added to our mailing list, click here.

Pre-Health/Pre-Law Advising Center

Pre-Health