MCAT Mastery

Just a month before her exam date, Kayla was scoring at a 500 on her practice exams. Although this wasn't a position that she wanted to be in, like a lot of us, she maintained her motivation and decided to push through to her exam. However, at that point, Kayla also realized that she didn’t have to go through her final prep month alone-- and that’s when she reached out to us for help. From there, she started working on her approach to the exam but was still only scoring at a 503 two weeks before her exam. Still, though, she didn’t let up with her prep-- and even with such a short amount of time to improve, Kayla was eventually able to raise her score to a 513 by her exam date!!

Overall, Kayla increased her score by 13 points in a month, with 10 points of that improvement happening in just the final two weeks before her exam, so in this interview, we’re dive deeper into exactly how she became a top scorer, focusing on how she studied, what she did to increase her score so quickly, how she scheduled her prep, what strategies she used for each section, and so much more…

Show Notes

Just a month before her exam date, Kayla was scoring at a 500 on her practice exams. Although this wasn't a position that she wanted to be in, like a lot of us, she maintained her motivation and decided to push through to her exam. However, at that point, Kayla also realized that she didn’t have to go through her final prep month alone-- and that’s when she reached out to us for help. From there, she started working on her approach to the exam but was still only scoring at a 503 two weeks before her exam. Still, though, she didn’t let up with her prep-- and even with such a short amount of time to improve, Kayla was eventually able to raise her score to a 513 by her exam date!! Overall, Kayla increased her score by 13 points in a month, with 10 points of that improvement happening in just the final two weeks before her exam, so in this interview, we’re dive deeper into exactly how she became a top scorer, focusing on how she studied, what she did to increase her score so quickly, how she scheduled her prep, what strategies she used for each section, and so much more…

What is MCAT Mastery?

From plateauing MCAT scores, and having to retake, to breaking down days before exam day, all 70+ MedLife Mastery Mentors suffered the frustrations and disappointments that come with MCAT prep. Yet we ALL ended up getting 90+ percentile MCAT scores and are on our way to (or already in) med-school! Now we want to help you do the same!

If you're struggling with the MCAT, need some extra motivation, want to know how top scorers before you studied and learn their best strategies, this show is for you. You have what it takes to beat this exam. We’re here to make sure of that!

Hi everyone! I'm Monica and welcome to another MCAT Master interview. In the series we talk with MCAT top scorers just so that we can find out what strategies help them the most in their process and obviously inspire you as you're embarking on this journey as well because we know how difficult it can be. So many students struggle with the MCAT but that doesn't mean they can't find a way to achieve their dream score. So we want to show you how top scorers are finding success so that you can do it too because ultimately as a community the way we help each other is by sharing tips and spreading all this knowledge that we're gaining as we go through the MCAT. So with all of that I'd like to introduce you all to Kayla Zentmeier. Kayla welcome to the series and thanks so much for joining us. Hi I'm so happy to be here. Yeah we're so excited to have you and hear your story and everything. I just want to give our listeners a little bit more information about your background and everything before we start. Just a month before her exam day Kayla was scoring at a 500 on her practice exams. Although this is not a position that she wanted to be in like a lot of us she maintained her motivation and decided to push through to her exam. However at this point Kayla also realized that she didn't have to be in her final month alone and that's when she reached out to us for help. So from there she started working on her approach to the exam but was still only scoring at a 503 two weeks before her exam. Still though she didn't let up with her prep and even with such a short amount of time to improve Kayla was eventually able to race her score to a 513 by her exam date and wow that is so impressive. Yeah yeah yeah congratulations again on that amazing increase. It can be really difficult especially with you know a short amount of time left so I know a lot of students will be able to relate to that. So overall in summary Kayla increased her score by 13 points in a month with 10 points of that improvement happening in just the final two weeks before her exam. In this interview we're just going to launch into understanding exactly how she achieved this focusing on how she studied what she did to increase her score so quickly how she scheduled her prep and what strategies she used for each specific section as well. So with all that let's go ahead and get started. So Kayla why don't you just start by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself before we get into the MCAT. Sure okay hi everyone so I'm a recent graduate from Wesleyan University I graduated in May. I double majored in neuroscience and behavior as well as psychology and got a concentration in cognitive science. I'm getting ready for my gap year now which will be with the AmeriCorps and I will be working for the literacy laboratory of Massachusetts and the objective of this organization is to decrease the achievement gap in underserved communities by providing resources to those in need. So I'll be working with three-year-olds the third graders and I'm really excited for that but I have another couple weeks to go so until then I've been working at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center as a COVID access screener. Yeah yeah lots of stuff going on which is awesome congrats on graduating this past May that's awesome. And a fellow psych major too psych and several other things but I was a psychology major so respect there. So on that note what made you interested in wanting to become a doctor in the first place? Yeah sure I mean it's actually kind of a totally random crazy story. I was actually planning on becoming a teacher until the seventh grade but I was babysitting my neighbor and she had a three-year-old son at the time and she was also pregnant and she started going into labor as I was babysitting and I lived. Oh my gosh. Yeah so like I was like oh my god I don't know but I live in rural New Hampshire and my neighborhood isn't close to town at all it's about a half an hour at the closest if you're speeding. So I ended up calling my mom as well as an ambulance and my mom made it over to my neighbor's house before the ambulance did and she actually ended up delivering the baby on my neighbor's kitchen floor. It's the craziest thing I'll ever in my entire life I'm sure but so that moment was really just so inspiring to me because she had no practice no medical profession or anything she was a third-grade teacher so after all that I got super into medicine especially OBGYN. Wow yeah that'll do I guess. So random is crazy but fun. That is such a fun story and a really happy one too like watching a baby get born that is such a powerful and meaningful thing to witness and so young too so that's really cool so that's that's the motivation that kind of got you on this path in the first place so something that comes up after that is what is on this path what do I have to accomplish to ultimately get there so that's where the MCAT comes in as you started your journey for the MCAT what was going on in your life as you began your prep. Yeah so I started preparation last summer and I was thinking I was going to take the exam last August actually and so I was applying for accommodations for the MCAT because I am severely dyslexic and there are a lot of complications that are involved with accommodations for the MCAT and this whole scenario actually led to me having to be re-diagnosed for my learning disorder which significantly delayed my MCAT exam and also was just a pretty discouraging moment but I ended up taking the exam in April of this year after my accommodations were approved and although at first I was pretty frustrated about the whole experience and I really wanted to take it over the summer because I didn't want to have to spend my last year at Wesleyan studying for the MCAT the whole year I'm actually super thankful that I got this extra time to study and I think I performed a lot better because of it but anyways last summer when I started the whole process I was working at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center's simulation center I was working with mannequins and standardized patients to give medical learners more experience in the clinical aspects of medicine in a mock setting so it was safe for them to make mistakes so that was really a great learning experience and then I also started getting involved in the access screening for COVID at that time and yeah but then after September I went back to Wesleyan and tried to finish my degree up and so yeah I ended up taking the MCAT the last semester of my senior year which wasn't the goal but it all worked out yeah exactly sometimes you don't know where you're gonna end up on the journey but you just have to have to go with it I guess at any point your prep did you have a certain like score goal in mind that you were trying to reach I was really hoping to score a 5-10 or above since this just seems to be the magic number when it comes to being accepted in medical schools I don't have a dream school or one place that I can directly compare myself and try to match up to directly but just from all the YouTube ads you know saying like you got to get a 5-10 and all my prep stuff saying like 5-10 guaranteed or get your money back I kind of had that number in my head you're right that number really does show up a lot so that's something a good starting place especially with the MCAT yeah you can dream for like a big score but a realistic score is also good as well or just any score to really help you find success which it seems like the 5-10 is like marketed to be that range I guess that you need so in regard to I kind of mentioned this already but there were some unplanned things that you know came up during your prep or things that changed so when you started what was your plan at the beginning for the study schedule yeah I worked at the simulation lab from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and I'd have one hour lunch break which I spent studying during that and then as soon as I got home I studied from about 4 30 to 10 p.m. every day during the summer pretty tiring summer but it got done and it got a little more complicated when school started up again not going to lie the first semester back at Wesleyan I definitely slacked a little more than I would have wanted with studying just because I had some really difficult prerequisites that I had to complete so it was really hard for me trying to find a balance between when to study so during the first semester sometimes I would just like get in this zone and study for like 10 hours straight just nothing else and then there would be days where I just did nothing and that just like wasn't a good idea so once I went back home for Thanksgiving break I created more of a organized game plan and I said I simply have to study four hours a day every single day up until my exam and I just it's not the healthiest technique but like if I get less sleep then I get less sleep I need to complete my schoolwork but I need to make this a priority so learning to balance that and also it was kind of a good learning opportunity because you learned to be more efficient with your other schoolwork if you're taking the MCAT during the school year so although I would have wanted to have studied material longer and I normally would have I realized that you know sometimes it's just not as necessary if you're just super efficient with your time and yeah it all got done but it was definitely a lot yeah yeah definitely time management just in general is something that I think comes with having to take on something as big as this whether it's learning to manage the things outside of the MCAT better or even the MCAT itself so yeah lots of balance required a balance act I guess so kind of on that note too was there a certain like did you do in the beginning content only and then like transition to practice I know a lot of students have questions about like that kind of distribution that's exactly what I did so I started off taking a Kaplan prep course and this was good for content however I really just wasn't getting the scores that I wanted to I thought I had really mastered the content I'm a huge Quizlet fan so I made Quizlets with thousands of terms and I was getting them right every time but it wasn't really until that last month of my studying which was also the same time that I reached out to you guys for your tutoring that I realized I cannot study content anymore and I should not I wish so badly that I had come to this realization before I honestly am not sure I would have even purchased my Kaplan prep course if I had found you world earlier so you world the best resource I've like ever come across ever in terms of any kind of studying so they had a ton of practice problems and it's really really easy to learn from your mistakes because they give a lot of background information and you can just keep practicing in areas that you're not as strong and so I also bought some practice tests so I bought the blueprint for those tests and then I bought four double AMC practices exams as well as did their three ungraded practice exams so I did nine in total and these were really really helpful and it was good like just sitting down and taking it all at once and that is definitely a strength but you world really helps you focus in on what you need to learn and does a great job of just helping you out in every capacity for that way so like psych I really didn't need to focus on as much so you world really helped me go into like my chem section which was harder for me and bio bio chem was originally my hardest section but you world totally changed that so yeah my biggest biggest suggestion for everyone is start doing practice problems right away like even if you feel like you need to do some content at the same time you can go back from your practice problems and see what content you need to learn but start that ASAP yeah yeah I'm a big believer in like the importance of practice so yeah the earlier the better honestly sounds like a good idea and I know you've kind of been mentioning like a lot of different resources too which is great are there any resources that you didn't mention that you found to be really helpful or if you want to like emphasize any of the ones that you already mentioned too that's good yeah I definitely you world can't emphasize it enough I think there's also merit to trying to switch to more online practice problems with just kind of helping you with the format so my content course with Kaplan there were some online aspects to it but I was mostly learning my content from books and it's just kind of a different feel so yeah practice problems I did the practice problems in the books it just wasn't the same thing definitely like the interactive aspects of online practice problems rather than this is a right and this is a wrong answer and a lot of the online practice problems whether you're taking the practice exam I found blueprint to be more helpful than the double amc practice exams because they gave really amazing explanations for why each of the options answers were wrong and why the answer was right while as double amc could sometimes give kind of vague answers and not even fully explain why an answer is wrong so interactive online things such as blueprint and new world were amazing awesome yeah thanks for explaining on that I yeah the resource scene of the MCAT can be really overwhelming so like recommendations honestly are like the best way to find out about a lot of the best resources so so moving back to your MCAT journey in general what do you think were your biggest challenges or struggles as you were going through and how did you overcome those to your to get to your score that you eventually got well I've definitely mentioned time management as something that I definitely needed to work on and this was kind of the surprising thing to me because I personally have really organized person I've never had an issue with time management this is something I've always kind of felt good about myself for but when it came to MCAT it just like came crashing down which was just totally not great but also just the fact of taking it during the school year it was really hard for me socially because it kind of felt like an isolating process I had friends who were applying to med schools at the time I had friends that were also taking practice exams and getting ready for the MCAT and it can be really really helpful to just create a little community of support for one another I found that really really important because I don't know I socially it was really hard for me to I was living with non-science majors and they were just having the best senior year ever typical you know senior fun things and I was just spending all my time in the libraries or at our house studying and it just felt really really isolating so I think just going into that knowing that although this is a really stressful time and you can feel alone it's really important to just reach out to other people in similar positions and I think it's also a really essential thing to tell your non-science non-pre-med friends and family about the experience although they might not be able to understand it to the full capacity of your stress and struggles just being really open with how you're going to use your time socially and just having really open communication can be really helpful in maintaining your social relationships and just understand like there are going to be times where you have FOMO like you want to go out and party but you got to prioritize the MCAT you just simply have to and you're going to do this during the school year it can be really really difficult but having fun little breaks is really important but definitely if you are going to have something fun I wouldn't allow it to be some spontaneous thing that you don't know like what time you're going to get back or anything like that just limit yourself but make sure you just kind of incorporate things into your schedule that will keep you sane right right it doesn't mean you can't have fun but you definitely need to have boundaries or like discipline and things like that which is also something that will help you later in life too when you have to work all the time and you need to like it's management again is is the thing but I like what you said about a support system in a community as well because I think that's something that people it's easy to forget so glad you mentioned that too so getting more into like the strategies for the MCAT if someone wanted to increase their score like you did and like a small amount of time up to like the score that you got what strategies or methods do you think like we're the most helpful for you in doing that sure yes so definitely practice problems like I've been saying really really important because even though you think you totally understand a concept applying it is a totally different process and it's pretty eye-opening to see just like how much further you can get into a topic by instead of just memorizing some term or a single application you know but also another thing in terms of content review that I found just so incredibly helpful and I wish I'd started working on earlier or mnemonics so there's this one site on YouTube there's so so many great resources for mnemonics on YouTube especially for bio biochem and I believe the guy's name is Ken like mnemonic Mondays something like that and he would give like a minute long mnemonic explanation everything of all these amazing things especially I found that hormones and just like big processes like crud cycles all those things where it's like multiple things in order just going through and having mnemonics practicing that over and over and over can be super super helpful and you can make your own mnemonics too so just like you can make it fun like that was something I actually looked forward to if I found a concept or a process really difficult I would try to apply it to my life and just bring my friend's names into it and just make it something that works for you and it makes the whole thing so much more enjoyable and also just really useful I ended up using multiple mnemonics up to 10 times during the actual mcat for the bio biochem so just look online for mnemonics for those kinds of things and it's crazy crazy helpful yeah yeah that's something that's again so easy to overlook but it's so like it's right there in front of you right and there's so many resources and ideas that people come up with that can help you so yeah definitely you don't have to know what you can there you know I'm sorry I just heard one strategy that really helped me with increasing my time so I'm a super super slow reader I'm dyslexic whatever even with my time accommodations I'm incredibly slow one thing that really made the difference for me was I realized that you don't always have to read the full prompts to answer questions and this is especially the case for chem fizz so there are a lot of questions that you can answer that are just entirely related to content unrelated to the prompt and this saved me so much time when I first started taking my practice exams I just could not finish this section for the life of me and once I found this little strategy I finished every single time and usually had some time to left like look over and check everything so that's that's another strategy no awesome I'm glad you cut it like a more strategy better and timing is a huge thing too so always always down to hear more about that so was there anything else that that you wanted to mention that no sorry I just wanted to double check if you one more opportunity so eventually in your prep you did decide to get tutoring from us so what kind of led you to that decision sure yeah so like you said in the little intro I was getting scores low 500 500 to 503 the highest I actually got was a 507 and that was the week before my exam I was so proud of my 507 because it just was so much higher so then getting my 513 the next week was just the best thing in the world but so my friend told me about mcat mastery and she was also taking the mcat and so this just kind of ties into the whole having a community of resources can be just so so helpful and you'll learn so much more and group effort is always going to be better than doing something on your own so my friend suggested it and I started right away because I was super desperate to get any kind of improvement that I could and so I did this the last month before my exam and I'd say the biggest thing I got from this was learning about concept diagrams especially for the bio biochem drawing those out can be really helpful in order to better understand how everything is connected to each other so like how an enzyme will affect a part of the body or whatever just lots of arrows making sure anytime some crazy name or abbreviation is mentioned you know how it connects to the other parts of the prompt and then it was also just really great to connect with another student who had recently taken the mcat getting their advice and just having moral support because you know as I mentioned that mcat can be a really isolating process yeah definitely that's something we're really big about too is just like having tutors who can relate to students on that front and build that moral support on top of like the strategies as well that like you mentioned they're both really really important yeah we were about tutoring you know was able to be a part of the um so yeah so getting into the specific sections now starting with psych soh that was your high score where you got a 131 which is amazing how did you study for that section um and what advice would you have for students who might be struggling with it yeah sure so I majored in neuro and psych as I mentioned in college so I had a stronger foundation to start with for this section I think my social psychology course prepared me the best for this so if students have the time to take this course after hearing this or just do some extra reading or whatever have you on social psych definitely suggest um so unlike the chem and the bio sections I did find that the best way to study for this was through making a big quizlet because instead of more abstract application like I found it would be with the biochem and chem is I found that a lot of this was just memorizing terminology like couple key words to really tune into like functionalism and there's the couple big social psych words that they always ask about so yeah quizlet was really big for this mnemonics came into play doing practice problems is also super important especially if this is something you're struggling with but I think I was just lucky that my interests really coincide with this part of the exam and then one thing I did notice so in my nine practice exams almost everything was covered through my social psychology class and sociology which I didn't end up taking but a lot of overlap between social psych and sociology however on my actual mcat exam I found that there was a good amount of neuroscience on it as well and I hadn't prepared for this since I hadn't received a single neuroscience question during my practice exams but I was really fortunate just by the fact that I'm majored in it but going off of my personal exam for the mcat I would be familiar with the eye as well as the visual pathways to the brain just having that as a background because all the neuroscience questions I think I had like five or six related to the eye on my exam which every exam is different but just anyone out there that gets similar just something to know but definitely focusing on primarily social psychology for this section would be great yeah I love that breakdown of what kind of course areas that someone might want to focus on that's really helpful so that they can have more focus studying so your next two high scores were 128 in cars and bio bio so let's start with cars because a lot of students struggle with this section so how did you study there and what advice would you have so this is definitely not something I've heard from others but I actually didn't actively study for cars besides taking the practice exam sections because I found that although there could be types of questions like history versus like getting towards the tone it's pretty hard to just work on practice problems for this and have it apply I think timing is more important or it was for me with this section and what worked the best for me I only finished the car section once my entire time and that was during the actual mcat so my nine practice exams I did not finish the car sections and I was previously working off what I had heard working on the easy sections first and then going to the hard section saving those for last but I found that this actually really didn't work for me because I'm a really generally pretty anxious person and the times where I was focusing on the easiest sections first and then going to the long sections I found that I just didn't have enough time and I was super flustered and anxious trying to get all these super long questions and answers done in time and so that really stressed me out but what I found actually helped me a ton was going through the hard things first and just focusing in because I had more time to look at when I saw the timelines and was going back and be like okay I still have all this time this is all working out and the reason why I ended up finishing was because that's just the way my mcat was formatted all the hard long sections were first but by the time I was at the end of the section it was just the shorter passages this was entirely by luck but since the passages were shorter and I had some easier ones at the end even though I didn't have as much time I wasn't nearly as stressed and I was able to zoom through those so I've heard a lot of different techniques and I've heard a lot of people say start with the easy first but it worked out better for me the other way around so yeah and that's just a testament to everyone is different and just because you do something differently than someone else doesn't mean that it's not effective or it can't be successful although there are some like proven things that maybe no one is doing which but that's great advice for people who might be in the same situation so moving on to bio bio then where you also got a 128 so how did you study for this section and what advice would you have there sure so this was the section I had the most improvement there was one of my exams I got a 121 on this and it was just the saddest thing because I didn't know what to do but the concept diagrams are really really helpful just making sure if you come across some big long word and then the abbreviation like make sure you make the connection that those are the same thing as well as just like drawing arrows and understanding how all the little pieces fit together super super important there were some questions like I was saying for the chem fizz section that I could just answer based off of content just knowing the background behind the question without having to look at the prompt so that was something useful for me but my biggest suggestion again practice problems because you don't really know what you don't know until you come across it and that was huge you world I completely just thank so much I'm so grateful for definitely suggest that resource but also the mnemonics really came into play all the different cycles the reactants and products you can find so many different mnemonics for as well as the hormones I had a ton of hormone questions and it wasn't actually until the night before that I was finding all these mnemonics for hormones and it just so happened to have like a lot of questions about it so mnemonics are a really efficient way to learn because they're super quick but they cover a lot of content right exactly again efficiency and managing the time that you do have left and I will say that the science is in general like bye bye and come and fizz which we'll get to in a second a lot of students do struggle with the content on these sections and like learning how to apply all that so maybe like mnemonics can be something at least that can help among the other things that you said so lastly we have chem and fizz so kind of like cars a lot of students do end up struggling with this section so how did you study for this section yeah so this was the most frustrating thing about my actual real MCAT exam I am very happy with my score I'm very proud of myself however my chem fizz section on all of my practice exams was my second highest I was regularly scoring in like 128-129 for these sections so what the 126 I was kind of bummed but my biggest takeaway from this so what helped me in all the practice exams was going through you don't have to read all the prompts look for the questions that you don't need to constantly refer back to the passage there's some things you simply have to memorize especially when it comes to organic chemistry which a lot of my practice exams emphasized something that if I had to go back and study again I did not focus on physics nearly enough my MCAT exam was very very heavily physics related and I just totally didn't place enough studying time on it to be completely transparent I focused on chemistry and organic chemistry and biochem for these sections and I was really good at them and I was kind of preparing for a quarter or less of physics and all my practice exams had had very few so I was like oh okay this isn't the best way to use my time I should focus on what I'm going to have more questions on but it was a good wake up call being like you know you never you never know you might have more physics so definitely don't knock it even though chem and organic chemistry are usually what's highlighted on the MCAT yeah there are always other things and things to know for each section like again about the distribution of what's going to be covered and how to get those extra points if you can on a section like this so that makes a lot of sense so moving on now to like your experience of the MCAT itself so August three year your MCAT test day how was it for you so I'm pretty anxious in general all my MCAT practice exam days I was always freaking out but I actually found that on the day of my exam I just accept them like you know I really can't do anything about it like I just have to try and coming to the realization although it's super easy to hear but really hard to internalize it's like once you get there it's just a waste of time to stress you can't really get that much don't try to cram that morning unless you want to look over your mnemonics which I suggest but that's a little simple review you kind of just have to recognize your stress on exam day is just going to take up more time from you and won't allow you to answer to that capacity that you have so just take it as if it's like you know this is just like another practice we're just going to see what happens you know there's always another time this is just a fun learning opportunity who make sure you listen to your favorite like hype song that really helped me make sure you're super hydrated I suggest bringing Gatorade for your your break because that'll keep you awake and it's healthy you know electrolytes great yeah so yep just try to relax I somehow was able to do it and I think that probably was a huge reason I had such a big increase was because I was freaking out during all my practices but during the actual thing like okay it's fine and yeah so just try to internalize that like you can do it yeah yeah acceptance almost yeah and that just goes to show too that you kind of were aware of all the work that you had put in and like what the journey meant to get there so maybe it's good to be in that kind of place once you get there even though it is such a nerve-wracking journey on the way speaking of nerve-wracking after you got out of the exam how was it waiting for your score to come back oh my gosh so okay I took my exam April 30th and my scores came out June 1st and so as you guys probably know the first day you can kind of like send in your primary applications for medical schools around like May 27th so I had already applied to all of the schools that I was intending on applying to which is really really really scary so one piece of advice I probably unless you're in a crazy weird circumstance where like accommodations or whatever have you tried to get your exam scores before you send in your primary application because I ended up applying to such a wide range I applied to 44 schools just because I had no idea what kind of score I was going to get and unfortunately the scores do have such a important part of how you're evaluated you know so I was pretty I was pretty stressed I had no idea I was hoping to get my 507 since that was the best I had done on practice exam the week before but I was anticipating a lower score since I was mostly scoring around a 503 with my lowest of a 500 so I was definitely stressed um yeah wasn't great but it all it worked out yeah so then you got your score back and that was everything that you thought it was going to be yeah I restarted my computer twice because I just didn't believe it um it was really really rewarding and just really great to see something that you work so hard on actually work out because I was just expecting doom to be honest yeah it was really rewarding yeah exactly it's the culmination of such a difficult journey so that must have felt amazing and congratulations again on that score it really really is an awesome accomplishment yeah so I know you mentioned you're you're taking a gap year and you're going to be doing AmeriCorps after that what are you planning to do you said OBGYN right are you still thinking yeah so I'm definitely interested in doing that I had a couple volunteer abroad experiences where I was working in Jamaica's mandible regional regional hospital as a volunteer and I worked in the maternity ward that was one of the best experiences I've ever had extremely again rewarding and yeah so I think OB yeah and or pediatrics also something that sparks my interest but probably OBGYN and I'm hoping to volunteer in some clinics and underserved communities as well as do a lot of volunteer work with schools in under resourced areas to provide a better sexual education supplement to students because there's so much research just supporting like in countries such as Norway where they're more sexually permissive and they talk about sexuality and safe sex a lot earlier as early as like kindergarten for some places in Europe there are a lot fewer unplanned pregnancies as well as sexually transmitted infections and diseases so just going into schools and kind of giving student informing them about safe choices and just expanding about this whole sexual health arena I'm hoping can make a difference yeah definitely that's so cool and interesting and I feel like it's great based on what you've done in the past and where you want to go it's like all these things are really related and that shows that you're doing really passionate about which is amazing um so congratulations again on your score and I think that is all we had time for in regard to questions for the interview so thanks for like going through all of that before we end do you have any final thoughts I guess for anyone who might be listening to this and is feeling discouraged about the MCAT because we've all been there yeah seriously my biggest thing is even if your score goal just seems completely unattainable don't act like it's unattainable just act like everything you're doing is a part of a big process and each little thing that you do is an accomplishment and you got to recognize and validate yourself for all of your efforts and you know the only time that you're actually failing is when you give up so even though you're getting discouraging scores every now and then just know that it's possible I was in the same position so many people are you can take the exam again if you really need to anyways but amazing things can happen in such a little amount of time of all the people I've talked to there's always been like two weeks right before the exam there's something magical happens and like you connect with it a little more and just it clicks so even if you're getting down on time also know that like if things aren't clicking in those past like two weeks rescheduling is always an option and so I was going to take my exam last august and I can guarantee that I was so much better prepared having taking it later so just know you have options but you're gonna do it at some point you got it exactly well thank you so much again Kayla for answering all of her questions and just walking us through your journey and finally to all of our listeners as well good luck with studying Kayla and I both believe in you and you guys got this one this is Monica again and before you go I just want to remind you that if you're not receiving our daily free MCAT strategy and success story emails yet definitely be sure to sign up for those at MCATmastery.net slash free course in addition to that if you feel like you might need personalized help with the exam and would like to have an MCAT mentor look at your situation and help you identify exactly what's holding your score back you can look into that too at MCATmastery.net slash mentors and lastly and most importantly we just want you guys to know that you have what it takes to succeed on this exam we know the MCAT is intimidating and when you get a score that's lower than you expected on a practice or on the real thing it's so easy to feel discouraged or frustrated or even hopeless about the exam we get it a lot of us have been there so we want to give you the guidance that we wish we'd had when we were in your shoes and that's what these interviews are for that's what our emails are for we want you guys to be able to feel confident again and most importantly be able to see that med school mission is possible and it's not out of your reach at all so thanks again for listening and remember that every top score every med student and every doctor made it through this journey so you can do it too you guys got this