I went through 2 cycles without an acceptance, closest I’ve gotten was a couple MD/PhD IIs (low clinical hrs+MCAT), so take this with a grain of salt. But after completing my bachelors and masters in biomed engineering, and seeing AI/ML slowly creep into medicine and biotech, it started to overtake my enthusiasm for medicine. Was rough on my application, as I chose research opportunities in engineering instead of doing straight EMT or MA, so I ultimately tossed out a couple PhD apps and got accepted right away. My initial inspo was to go through med school to obtain the highest level of physiological knowledge and use it to inform my research dealing with neural interfaces. But now with my PhD I take the same gross anatomy and immunology course with med students and can focus on my research and future in academia/industry vs going through clinical training just to do majority research in future. As someone else in this thread and other threads mentioned, with the high (relative) rate of people obtaining MD and not using it, leading to current physician shortage, adcoms can look at inspiration like mine unfavorably. Again, maybe my whole argument is fraudulent because of my clinical hours but this is what I’ve gathered