How do I decide where to apply?
From Student Doctor Network Wiki
When/Where to Apply
Now that you have become the Best Applicant, you should use that clout to get into the best medical schools. First, you need to see how you compare to the competition—to find out where you fit in, numbers wise—then you need to examine your personality and learning style and decide which schools fit you as a person—where would you be happy? What follows is an explanation of how I decided where to apply.
Contents |
AAMC and Medical School Admission Requirements
The Association of American Medical Colleges represents all 125 accredited medical schools in the United States, as well as 17 Canadian medical schools. To apply any universities outside of the state of Texas, you must go through AAMC. You will quickly notice that the Association’s website is the best resource for information about applying.
Each year, the AAMC publishes a book titled Medical School Admissions Requirements that, according to the Association, “provides the most up-to-date information on entrance requirements, selection factors, curriculum features, current first year expenses, financial aid information, application and acceptance procedures, and applicant statistics.” It is the guide to use. Starting with a potential list of all 142 schools, you can easily narrow down your options to about 30–40 with this book. It also contains a mini profile of each school so that applicants can get a feel for the school’s personality—i.e., are you willing to attend a conservative Seventh Day Adventist school? Do you care if you live in a urban area with no parking? When you’re eager to get just one acceptance to a medical school, these questions may not seem important now, but just recall that you will have to spend four years wherever you decide to go. Also, the geographic location of your school is often a factor in where you go to residency and where you finally practice medicine.
Your Competitive Score
The first step to applying is to see how your MCAT and GPA stacks up to the competition. This handy formula, called the Competitive Score (CS), gives a clear indication of rank.
Competitive Score = (GPA * 10) + (MCAT Composite)
Let’s say that I have an undergraduate GPA of 3.5 and an MCAT of 30. My Competitive Score would therefore be 65. Notice that the highest possible Score is 85 (4.0 GPA and 45 MCAT).
This formula, while crude, is a good indication of what the schools are looking for when they initially glance at your application. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the rankings published by The U.S. News and World Report make up the most prestigious list of the medical schools’ stature. Given that GPA and MCAT are the only sections of the rankings that students influence, admissions committees are eager to fill their classes with students with high Competitive Scores. While I cannot reproduce the U.S. News list here out of respect for copyright concerns, some free content is available online at US News and World Report Rankings Guide. With 125 medical schools, let’s say that there are 5 tiers, each with 25 schools. U.S. News freely lists the first two tiers. Using your Competitive Score, this table gives you an idea of where you can apply.
| CS | Eligible Tier |
|---|---|
| 70–85 | 1 |
| 65–70 | 2 |
| 60–65 | 3, 4 |
| 55–60 | 5 |
This table gives a rough idea of where you would be considered competitive. There are certainly many people who get accepted to higher tiers every year, just as there are people who get rejected from lower tiers. However, I’ve found that this list is by far the quickest indicator of how I compared with everyone else. You will also notice from this table that if your Competitive Score is below 55, you should not apply. You must take a year or two off and seriously consider if you want to attend medical school. You should do whatever you can to get your scores up, either by attending graduate school, taking courses as a post-baccalaureate, or retaking the MCAT.
Websites
Once you get a feel for the “hard” portion of the application (the numbers), you should then focus on the soft portion. The Internet is the greatest resource for examining a school’s personality. You should take your list of 30–40 schools that you generated above and visit all of their websites. Read everything that the dean and admissions committees posted. The college’s history and value statements should give you a clear indication as to whether or not you’ll be a good match.
Further, check to see the training structure that is available. The two most popular are traditional (didactic) and problem-based learning (PBL):
Traditional/Didactic
training resembles the stuff that you are used to from college. You sit in a lecture hall with 100 other students while a professor teaches from the front. The advantages to this approach are that the professor gives you all of the information that you need and that students are already familiar with this style.
Problem-Based Learning
is a relatively new trend in teaching. Instead of lectures, students are given case studies from which they have to figure out all of the necessary information to solve the problem. For example, you might have to look up information about metabolic pathways to understand a particular disease. PBL schools emphasize small work groups and individualized study. Business schools use a similar teaching style. The differences between these two approaches may not be important to you. However, some students are very particular about which system they want to learn under. Each school’s website will tell you what to expect.
The Student Doctor Network
Another valuable website to use is the Student Doctor Network, available at www.studentdoctor.net. It is an independent site that runs off of donations and user-written responses. It contains a section entitled "Interview Feedback" where students who have been lucky enough to make it to the interview stage can post reports as to what they felt about visiting the campus. You should take your list of remaining schools and compare them with the feedback on Student Doctor Network.
Where to Apply
List of US Allopathic Medical Schools.
List of US Osteopathic Medical Schools.
By now you’ve narrowed your list down to about 10 schools that you feel would be worth attending. You should apply to all of these schools as well as every medical college in your state. Seriously, apply to all of the schools in your state. Given that most universities give preference to in-state residents and that only 1/3 to 1/2 of all applicants get accepted, your best chance for admission is to apply to every school in your home state. Further, given that the AAMC reports that students apply to an average of 11 universities, you should be no different. As a rule of thumb, I recommend that you apply to at least 4 schools from your eligible tier, a minimum of 2 schools from a lower tier, and no more than 2 schools from the next highest tier. Naturally, applying to and getting rejected from a school that is out of your league is understandable. However, every year applicants with competitive scores of 75 and above are surprised to be rejected from a Tier 5 university. Please note that these lower tier schools generally do not want to be made into a backup choice. They are interested in interviewing and accepting students who match well with their current classes.
The Ivy League Do you think that you have what it takes to apply to the Ivy League? To get into a Tier 1 school, you’ve not only have to have a high Competitive Score, but you’ll also need to follow all of Chapter 1 exactly.
Further, graduates of the Ivy League are expected to continue the research tradition well into their careers. If you want to become a family practice physician who never sees the inside of a lab again, I would recommend staying away from the top tier. (However, speaking as a senior medical student at an Ivy League institution, many - if not the majority - of my classmates are not interested or involved in research. Neither are we "expected" to continue the research tradition. If you are interested in a top tier school, apply! You obviously will never be accepted to a school that you don't apply to.)
Finally, and most importantly, does the ranking of your university really matter? Think about every doctor you’ve ever encountered. Have you ever asked them where they went to school? In the rankings, is there really a big difference between the college that is listed as 25th and the one that is 35th? Everyone who graduates from an American university is eligible for the same residencies and same licensure. In summary, if you go to medical school anywhere in the country, you will still be a doctor no matter what happens over that four year period.
When to Apply
You become a pre-med the moment you decide to become a doctor. That title will stick with you until the day you start medical school. While most people realize that they want to be physicians before graduating high school, there are always non-traditional applicants who decide later in life that they want to become doctors. So long as you complete the requirements from Chapter 1, you are just as eligible as anyone else. While there is a bit of age discrimination that occurs in the admissions process, few schools can turn away a fully qualified applicant on the basis of age alone.
Below is a timeline of the application process. I assume that you have taken all of the pre-med classes by the end of your junior year of college. While you can complete the prerequisites anytime before matriculating, the MCAT will be a lot easier if you have completed the required classes (see Chapter 1).
| Semester | Action |
|---|---|
| Junior Year, Spring | Register for and take MCAT |
| Line up letters of recommendation | |
| Junior year, Summer | Apply through AMCAS |
| Begin filing secondary applications | |
| Senior Year, Fall | Finish secondaries |
| Begin interviewing | |
| Senior Year, Spring | Finish interviewing |
| Gain acceptance to medical school |
Though covered in more detail in Chapter 3, you’ll see that there are primary (AMCAS) and secondary applications. Once you receive a secondary, you should commit to completing it in under two weeks. The AAMC will make the primary application available online around May 1st. You must complete it before October 15. However, I recommend that you finish it as soon as possible. It may be a long application, but the faster you get it done, the better of a shot you have to getting accepted since schools will have fewer applications to consider at the beginning of the admissions cycle.
Since the AAMC controls the application process, all universities have to play by certain rules. For example, they cannot accept someone before October 15. Likewise, you have to play by certain rules, too. If you get accepted to multiple medical schools, you are allowed to hold as many acceptances as you would like until May 15. After that date you must give up all of your spots and commit to only one school—let’s call it College A. You will be permitted to hold on to waitlists after this date, however. If your top choice—College B—decides to accept you off of the waitlist during summer before matriculation, you can relinquish your acceptance to College A—the school to which you were committed—and pick up the new acceptance to University B. In doing so, you’ll free up a waitlist spot for someone else who might want to attend School A.
![[Main Page]](/wiki/sdnwikii.gif)