Non-Academic Criteria

[Guest 0T6]

Hi there, I'm a little bit curious as to what medical schools are looking for after grades. Let's say a hypothetical student applies with a 4.0 GPA, how far will this take a student? Will there need to be an outstanding extra-curricular profile to prove that this GPA was achieved by doing more than just studying and if so, what are med schools looking for? Is volunteering at a hospital, co-op experience, intramural sports, and lab research experience enough or do they want to see an individual who's gone to Guyana with Doctors Without Borders.

 

Any help is appreciated and good luck to anyone who has exams to write.

 

Thanks

0T6

[Guest kellyl20]

don't think that you have to do out of the country volunteering

[Guest cheech10]

1. A 4.0 GPA without extracurricular work will get you rejected. I know an applicant who had a 3.98 GPA and wasn't even interviewed (and he had excellent EC's, so it really is surprising).

 

2. Do whatever you enjoy. Things will look better to the interviewers if you are enthusiatic about what you did, and what you got out of it. All the examples you mentioned are good examples (but going out of the country is fairly rare).

[Guest Shahenshah]

hi cheech10..do u have any idea y the person was not even provided with an interview..I mean if you do have a 3.98 AND good ECs, then y not even an interview?..did he make the mcat cut-offs? this has got me really curious..is med school admissions really a lottery system?

[Guest cheech10]

He was WELL above the MCAT cut-offs, had stronger extracurriculars than I did, and his grades were obviously excellent. I still can't figure out why he wasn't interviewed, and consider it a grave injustice. The story does have a happy ending, as he is attending one of the other medical schools.

 

Basically for admissions, you just have to get your application to it's best possible level, and then hope that you are lucky as well. From my experience, it seems that most of the really well-qualified applicants do get in, but you can't predict where that will be wih any certainty. I don't really know any more about it than that, despite having gone through it.

[Guest aneliz]

I don't think it is necessarily a lottery system...but it definitely isn't easy to figure out 'what they are looking for'. (If we had figured that out we would likely be selling the answer by now to pay for our outrageous tuition!)

 

Even those of us that got in have no definitive answers on what they were looking for or what gave us the edge to get in over some other very well qualified people. Of course everyone has heard a story that goes kind of like this: " I have this friend with a 4.0 GPA and a 39T MCAT, who volunteers every night of the week, saved three starving street children and spent the summer with Mother Theresa. They are an olympic athlete and a professional violinist....They also have 6 published papers and have been volunteering in a nobel prize winning lab since they were 10 years old and they DIDN'T EVEN GET AN INTERVIEW!!!! Therefore, I can tell you with 120% certainty that med school admissions are a crap shoot." Most people have also heard a story similar to this: "I have this friend that applied with a 3.1 GPA, who volunteered in the hospital gift shop for 2 days before they got tired of it, have no other significant extra-curriculars and just scraped the MCAT cut-offs. AND THEY GOT IN FIRST ROUND. Therefore I can tell you with 120% certainty that the application procedure is a lottery"

 

Now both of these 'friends' are a little overdone....but I know I had heard similar versions to both stories. Don't let them freak you out. To get in you need to have a good balance of academics (ie if you blow your GPA you aren't gonna get an interview) but you also have to have a life too. And, probably one of the most important things....you need to learn how to write well so that you can present your acheivements to the ad comm well enough to get them to grant you an interview. In my opinion, this is where a lot of very qualified people miss the boat - they don't write very well! A candidate with a 4.0 GPA and good extra-curriculars that can't present these qualities well in an essay will probably not get an interview over somebody with a 3.7 GPA and average extra-currics that can really sell it on paper.

 

Of course there is always an element of luck/chance/fate involved too (ie who read your essay and what kind of mood were they in). The major problem is that there are far more qualified people than there are seats....so, somebody that should have gotten in is always going to get a rejection letter and sometimes, somebody that probably shouldn't have gotten in is going to slip through....that's the problem with admissions....and we could debate all day what should be done about that........

[Guest 0T6]

Thanks Aneliz!

What first or second year course could I take to give me a good writing base? Would it have to be an english, or maybe a course like Bioethics?

Thanks Again.

[Guest Shahenshah]

thank you cheech10 and aneliz for your input on this...it really does scare the daylight out of us everytime we hear such stories...but regardless of what we think or do, the ball lies in the court of the adcom and we just have to abide with their decision I guess..Its a shame that one's 'mood' can potentially affect many lives..I have to keep reminding myself not to keep complaining about this though, since most of us have heard such stories before starting our undergrad and yet chose to follow this path..

[Guest UWOMED2005]

To offer a different perspective, a couple of years ago, I had the great fortune of interviewing 120 potential frosh leaders for 60 positions. It was a great eye-opener into what someone on the "other side" of a job/med school/residency/whatever interview experienced.

 

The way I saw it, roughly 20% of the applicants stood out enough to be chosen on the spot. Roughly another 20% were bad enough to rule out on the spot (including one who actually showed up to the interview stoned, which was definitely worth a bit of a chuckle.) But for the majority, 60%, the differences really was a matter of picking between apples and oranges. And once I'd made the choices, I must admit I really could have second guessed a number of people who were borderline for being rejected or accepted.

 

My point is, med schools applications aren't a "lottery," there is a correlation between how good you are and whether you'll get in, but for many applicants the differences in quality is determined by apples and oranges (ie would you rather have someone who did more research versus someone who was captain of their university varsity sports team.)

 

That's why I'd highly suggest NOT worrying about it if you've already applied. Your application is already in, there's nothing you can do about it, and chances are you're in that 60% that has a great shot of getting in. There's not much more you can do at this point.

 

And, I'd also highly suggest that if this year of applications doesn't work out as you had hoped, DEFINITELY apply again next year. It might have been just a matter of not gelling with the interview committee as well as someone else, or having a particularly critical assessor of an essay, or something else beyond your control. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be in medicine. . . some of the BEST students in our class had to apply more than once before getting in.

[Guest aneliz]

Any course that makes you do some writing is good enough! It doesn't have to be an english....it doesn't have even have to be an arts. I got some of my best writing practice in a couple 4th year science courses where we were expected to produce very content heavy papers reviewing a 'field of research' in the ridiculous (and strictly measured) word count of 1200 words. I think that teaches you more about writing a med school essay than spouting on until you are done in a philosophy paper....(where in one class the length guideline was 1 sentence - max 20 pages, go nuts.) I also enjoyed bioethics as well as more general philosophy....to improve your grammar, learn another language....read a lot....all of these things will improve your writing....not just english courses!

[Guest 0T6]

GREAT!

Thanks a lot for all your help, I really appreciate the feedback. I'm in the middle of first year and academically I'm doing great, I just want to make sure I've got the whole package without doing stuff blatantly "just for med school".