Need some advice

[thoimis]

Hi everyone,

 

Long time listener, first time caller.

 

So I am a dual Canadian/U.S. citizen and am thinking about applying for some U.S. schools this year. The trouble is that I was not planning to originally, as I was not expecting to do as well as I did on the MCAT (35Q). My overall GPA puts me a bit behind the curve (3.42 and climbing!), but I do have some pretty good ECs (residence advisor for 2 years, president of psychology students society, team captain of soccer team for 3 years, peer counsellor, treeplanter for 5 summers including one summer as health and safety officer). Anyways, now that the season of plentiful (a.k.a. early admissions season) has come and gone, I'm wondering if it is worth my money to still apply to some California schools or just wait until next summer and apply super early?

 

I am looking to apply to:

UCSF

UCSD

UCLA

Harvard (I know it's not in California)

anywhere else people think I might get in

 

 

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

 

Cheers,

thoimis

[angel-60]

I think since you are American citizen, you have chance more than any Canadian with your stat but your GPA is not that great, your MCAT is great though, if you have good EC, you are going to be ok for mid or lower med school not Harvard though! but you have to apply early

 

Good Luck

[thoimis]

Thanks for the info! Do you know where I can find info as to which schools are mid to low-level?

 

Thanks,

thoimis

[moo]

I would not waste my time on the UCs or Harvard. You have a great MCAT, but so do these other applicants, with awesome GPAs as well. I'm assuming you don't have Cali residency; they accept very few OOS.

[Moderate]

hi,

 

I am in agreement with everyone else.

 

1) It's too late to apply for 2011 entry

2) Cali schools are very competitive (I guess Cali = Canadian med school, approximately. this is purely my subjective analysis)

 

I think it's worth it to apply to all the Ivy leagues, just because they can offer scholarships that other schools can't. Sure it's an almost impossible long-shot, but it's always worth having tried.

 

I would apply to Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, and maybe a couple of others.

 

On the flip side though, do you really want to be competing for class rank among the kinds of superstar students who were accepted at Ivy league schools?

 

Residency could bite you in the back later on.

 

My ideal scenario would be to go to a solid mid-tier school with good clerkship rotations (where you actually learn) and then rank higher in the class for residency matching.

 

My 2 cents.

 

Also see this thread. I found it very valuable.

[thoimis]

Thanks for the advice guys! FYI, I am not a resident of Cali, so maybe you are right in that I should look elsewhere. In fact, I grew up in Vancouver (dual-citizen), so I am not a resident of any state. I am in the 3rd year of my second degree program at UBC (Physics), already the holder of a B.Sc. from UVic.

 

 

That was a very interesting post Moderate! Definitely made me reassess some of my ideas about what schools to go to. I liked the story about trudging to rounds in the snow at 4 a.m. and not caring about what the building looks like. An ugly building full of good teachers is still full of good teachers. The only issue I have is that I am hoping to go into Aerospace Medicine, which is a rare subspecialty and tends to be associated with only the large academic centres. Granted, I won't learn anything about it while in the M.D. program, but having the residency ranking success behind me would be nice as well as the connection networks. Of course med school is med school.

 

Anyone have some good suggestions for mid-level schools?

 

Thanks again for all the help guys!

[thoimis]

Also, I am thinking more and more that waiting until next year would be the best use of my resources, but the info would still help!