Pre-Health Requirements

Most students who succeed in applying to professional health programs prepare for two to three years before they apply. Not because the process is gatekept, but because building a competitive application takes time: prerequisite coursework, real exposure to healthcare, demonstrated leadership, and the personal qualities programs are looking for.

Which means from the moment you step on campus, what you do inside and outside the classroom is already part of your application.

What Programs Look For

Professional health programs evaluate applicants holistically. No formula guarantees admission, but programs consistently want to know two things:

• Can this student handle the program's academic rigor and pass board exams?
• Will this student become the kind of healthcare provider others want to receive care from?

The first question gets answered through objective factors. The second gets answered through subjective ones.

Objective Factors

The measurable parts of your application. They function as thresholds: meeting them keeps you in consideration, missing them takes you out.

• A strong science GPA and overall GPA, typically 3.5 or higher
• A competitive entrance exam score (MCAT, DAT, GRE, PCAT, or OAT, depending on the profession)
• Completion of most or all prerequisite courses for your target program
• Substantial exposure to healthcare through shadowing, clinical volunteering, or healthcare employment, totaling at least a few hundred hours

These are the floor, not the ceiling. Competitive applicants exceed them rather than meet them.

Subjective Factors

Harder to quantify, and often the difference between a competitive applicant and an admitted one. Programs assess these through your personal statement, letters of recommendation, interviews, and the activities on your application.

• Emotional intelligence and maturity
• Interpersonal and intrapersonal skills
• Genuine concern for others
• Critical thinking skills
• Demonstrated passion for healthcare
• A clear sense of fit for the profession you're pursuing

A student with these traits and weaker numbers can still be competitive. A student with strong numbers and no evidence of these traits usually isn't.

Healthcare Exposure

Hours are an objective factor, but how you get them is where the subjectivity comes from. Shadowing is where you find out whether the daily reality of a profession matches what you imagined, and it's where the specifics come from that make a personal statement land.

Before any of it counts, you'll complete a one-time training and report each experience to Career Services. Keep your own record too: dates, supervisors, hours, specific procedures with the correct terminology, and what you actually thought. You'll draw on those notes for personal statements two years later, and you will not remember the details.

Required Training and Reporting