Jack Westin MCAT Podcast

MCAT registration opens this week, and for 2027 there’s a big change: every test date opens at once. Here’s how to get the date you want, and what to do if you don’t.

In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly start a new chapter on strategy with a full walkthrough of MCAT registration. Both hosts have been through the process themselves, including a booking site crash, a scramble for a test center, and a long drive. They cover what to prepare beforehand, how the waiting room works, how to choose a test date, and what to do if your first choice is gone.

MCAT registration opens this week, and for 2027 there’s a big change: every test date opens at once. Here’s how to get the date you want, and what to do if you don’t.

In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly start a new chapter on strategy with a full walkthrough of MCAT registration. Both hosts have been through the process themselves, including a booking site crash, a scramble for a test center, and a long drive. They cover what to prepare beforehand, how the waiting room works, how to choose a test date, and what to do if your first choice is gone.

Get started with our resources!

📌 Success Advising (get clarity on where you are and on what support and resources are necessary for your success): https://calendly.com/academic-advising-4/jack-westin-academic-advising?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

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A congressman covers his microphone and whispers, “Say yes.” What does that moment have to do with the main idea of an MCAT CARS passage?

In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Hunter and Molly work through the Economists and Politicians passage from October 15th. Economics and politics are two of the topics students dislike most in CARS, and the passage is a good case study in a trickier skill: choosing a main idea when several ideas are all true and all supported.

Get started with our resources!

📌 Success Advising (get clarity on where you are and on what support and resources are necessary for your success): https://calendly.com/academic-advising-4/jack-westin-academic-advising?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

💻 Try our Chrome Extension (expert solutions to every AAMC passage): https://tinyurl.com/4jw5pad8

📚 Free QBANK: https://jackwestin.com/qbank/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

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The AAMC released 166 new CARS questions across 27 passages. The whole team did the material over a weekend, ran the numbers, and compared notes. Here’s what changed, what didn’t, and how to adjust your strategy.

In this special crossover episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Molly and Hunter are joined by Mike from the MCAT podcast to debrief the new AAMC CARS Question Bank. They compare it to the older CARS material and AAMC Full Length 6, covering what shifted in the passages, the question types, and the way arguments are built. They also cover what that means for your mapping, timing, and review.

You’re basically a tube. Everything inside your digestive tract is technically still outside your body, and your cells only get what makes it across the lining.

In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly walk through the digestive system from mouth to anus. They cover where digestion happens, where absorption happens, and how the accessory organs and hormones coordinate the process. After three immunology episodes, this one starts from how the stomach’s acid is itself an immune defense.

Get started with our resources!📌 Success Advising (get clarity on where you are and on what support and resources are necessary for your success): https://calendly.com/academic-advising-4/jack-westin-academic-advising?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast💻 Try our Chrome Extension (expert solutions to every AAMC passage): https://tinyurl.com/4jw5pad8📚 Free QBANK: https://jackwestin.com/qbank/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast🎓 Live Sessions: https://jackwestin.com/sessions?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast👨🏻‍🏫 Courses (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/courses?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast🙋 Tutoring (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/services/live-online-mcat-tutoring?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

Your innate immune system handles 99% of threats without you noticing. But when it's not enough, your body builds a custom-made response, one specific enough to remember an exact enemy for years.

In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly continue their immunology series with the adaptive immune system: the slower, highly specific branch of immunity that brings memory, precision, and long-term protection. Building on the last episode's innate immunity foundation, this episode walks through exactly how B cells and T cells get activated, how the body finds the right defense out of millions of possibilities, and why HIV is so devastating to this entire system.

Get started with our resources!

📌 Success Advising (get clarity on where you are and on what support and resources are necessary for your success): https://calendly.com/academic-advising-4/jack-westin-academic-advising?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

💻 Try our Chrome Extension (expert solutions to every AAMC passage): https://tinyurl.com/4jw5pad8

📚 Free QBANK: https://jackwestin.com/qbank/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

🎓 Live Sessions: https://jackwestin.com/sessions?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

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Witches, football, legal systems, grammar, motion in physics… what do any of these have to do with morality? Everything, if you're a philosopher trying to make the same argument five different ways.

In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Hunter and Molly tackle a philosophy passage on moral relativism, a topic that might make some CARS students groan, but turns out to be a genuinely useful case study in a different skill: recognizing when a passage is repeating itself. This passage stacks analogy after analogy (motion, witchcraft, football, legal systems, grammar) to defend one consistent position, and knowing when NOT to add something new to your map is just as important as knowing when to.

Get started with our resources!

📌 Success Advising (get clarity on where you are and on what support and resources are necessary for your success): https://calendly.com/academic-advising-4/jack-westin-academic-advising?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

💻 Try our Chrome Extension (expert solutions to every AAMC passage): https://tinyurl.com/4jw5pad8

📚 Free QBANK: https://jackwestin.com/qbank/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

🎓 Live Sessions: https://jackwestin.com/sessions?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

👨🏻‍🏫 Courses (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/courses?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

🙋 Tutoring (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/services/live-online-mcat-tutoring?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

99% of the pathogens trying to infect you right now are stopped before you ever feel sick. You just never notice, because it's working.

In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly kick off their immune system series with the innate immune system, the fast, nonspecific defense network that handles nearly every infection before it ever becomes a "sickness." After spending the last two episodes on how viruses hijack our cells, this episode flips the perspective: how does the body actually fight back?

Get started with our resources!

📌 Success Advising (get clarity on where you are and on what support and resources are necessary for your success): https://calendly.com/academic-advising-4/jack-westin-academic-advising?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

💻 Try our Chrome Extension (expert solutions to every AAMC passage): https://tinyurl.com/4jw5pad8

📚 Free QBANK: https://jackwestin.com/qbank/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

🎓 Live Sessions: https://jackwestin.com/sessions?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

👨🏻‍🏫 Courses (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/courses?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

🙋 Tutoring (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/services/live-online-mcat-tutoring?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

A 9,300-year-old skeleton. A magazine headline calling it an "invasion." A scientific debate that became a political battleground. How do you read a CARS passage where every paragraph is fighting over who gets to tell the story of the past?

In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Hunter and Molly break down the Kennewick Man passage, a dense, multi-layered piece about archaeology, colonialism, Indigenous rights, and media sensationalism. This one is packed with long sentences, buried parentheticals, and several groups with competing interests, making it a great case study in separating what's core argument from what's supporting detail.

Get started with our resources!📌 Success Advising (get clarity on where you are and on what support and resources are necessary for your success): https://calendly.com/academic-advising-4/jack-westin-academic-advising?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=podcast💻 Try our Chrome Extension (expert solutions to every AAMC passage): https://tinyurl.com/4jw5pad8📚 Free QBANK: https://jackwestin.com/qbank/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast🎓 Live Sessions: https://jackwestin.com/sessions?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast👨🏻‍🏫 Courses (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/courses?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast🙋 Tutoring (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/services/live-online-mcat-tutoring?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

A virus isn't even alive. It's just genetic material in a protein coat. So how does something that basic manage to take over an entire cell?

In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly tackle viruses, the topic their last two episodes on cellular trafficking were quietly building toward. Now that the mechanisms for moving things in and out of a cell are established, this episode shows exactly how viruses exploit those same pathways to infect, replicate, and spread, with a deep dive into the single most MCAT-tested virus of all: HIV.

Get started with our resources!📌 Success Advising (get clarity on where you are and on what support and resources are necessary for your success): https://calendly.com/academic-advising-4/jack-westin-academic-advising?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast💻 Try our Chrome Extension (expert solutions to every AAMC passage): https://tinyurl.com/4jw5pad8📚 Free QBANK: https://jackwestin.com/qbank/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast🎓 Live Sessions: https://jackwestin.com/sessions?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast👨🏻‍🏫 Courses (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/courses?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast🙋 Tutoring (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/services/live-online-mcat-tutoring?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

Were Neanderthals hunted to extinction, or did they simply become us? A special guest returns to help break down one of the most fascinating CARS passages yet.

In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Molly is joined by a returning co-host, Jack Westin himself, for a passage on the Vindija Neanderthals. It's a passage built around a genuine scientific dichotomy: the "common picture" of Neanderthals as brutish and driven to extinction by modern humans, versus new archaeological and DNA evidence suggesting interbreeding and coexistence. Molly and Jack model exactly how to track an author's evolving argument across six paragraphs, without getting distracted by all the geography, dates, and researcher names along the way.

Get started with our resources!

📌 Success Advising (get clarity on where you are and on what support and resources are necessary for your success): https://calendly.com/academic-advising-4/jack-westin-academic-advising?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

💻 Try our Chrome Extension (expert solutions to every AAMC passage): https://tinyurl.com/4jw5pad8

📚 Free QBANK: https://jackwestin.com/qbank/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

🎓 Live Sessions: https://jackwestin.com/sessions?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

👨🏻‍🏫 Courses (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/courses?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast

🙋 Tutoring (guaranteed to improve your score): https://jackwestin.com/services/live-online-mcat-tutoring?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast