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Originally Posted by zoltan
1- These questions would be better answered by the graduate admissions coordinator at the U's to which you are applying.
2-Grad and med schools are different beasts. The extracurricular nonsense is much less important for grad school.
3-fwiw, I didn't decide to apply until like late October to grad school and got everything together for a January deadline. Since admissions committees have to schedule multiple people around busy schedules, it's likely that meetings will be delayed, and might give you a few extra days here and there. Again, admissions coordinators will have better answers.
The difficult thing about getting good letters of rec for me is that I had a plan on how I would get them, but I have yet to fulfill it. Basically I was going to ask one letter of rec after a 2 years of research with a postdoc, one letter of rec from a professor after 1 year of research and 2 more letters from professors that I will be teaching assistants for this year. Basically all these letters need to wait until the middle or end of the school year for them to be as good as I want them to be.
This was going to be the biggest leak in my medical school application so I thought that by doing research in 2 labs/being a teaching assistant, I would be able to get great LOR's, which would still likely be the case but now I am only probably going to be getting 1 decent LOR. I have put so much time into volunteering/research/other activities this past year that I never went to any of my professors office hours. I know I am the one to blame for this, but since applying for graduate school basically pushes up my LOR deadlines by 1 year how should I go about getting the other two?
I am currently in 1 class right now (Biochemistry Lab) where I have a 100% in the class half way through and I feel that I have spoken a lot with the professors in the past 5 weeks of class. If I really push myself to go to his offices hours I may be able to get a decent LOR from him as I am going to explain my desire to get into biochemical research.
I could try to get an LOR from a non-science class as well. I could email professors from past classes were I had done really well but I doubt most would even remember me.
Argh, why did I decide grad school so late!
Edit: Another LOR I could get is from the hospital, but that LOR would be more about "character and diligence" than my academic ability. I think 1 letter from a "professional" and 2 letters from a "professor" is what the schools am I applying are looking for.