2009-2010 Med school applicants

<p>I still haven’t seen anybody answer what is UG? Is it a school or some application term?</p>

<p>Under-graduate. As in “Under-graduate admissions”.</p>

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<p>the good:
the super long thread with tips on how to enter work/activities
secondary threads
last year’s secondary threads (which have the secondary questions)
the interview feedback!
you can track the application process quite accurately on there …i was able to guess when i’d be verified pretty accurately</p>

<p>the bad:
the neurotic premeds (submitting your primary in july isn’t “late” and you do NOT need to turn around secondaries in 24 hours)
the people with good stats dominate SDN and see it as a way to wave around their e-phalluses<br>
there is ALOT of bad advice to sift through and many people who don’t know anything who speak with absolute certainty about topics they know nothing about
the second a thread turns into a MD vs DO debate or a URM debate it’s going to end up being dozens of pages long and absolutely useless</p>

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<p>SDN</p>

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I agree . I’d say the same almost word for word.</p>

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<p>Oh, I’m sure there are many more than just that one who are just as neurotic on SDN - they just don’t advertise as much :D</p>

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<p>The biggest piece of advice to be given re: SDN is to critically screen what you read there. There is a ton of useful information there, but it doesn’t by any means represent your typical med school applicant. Just like CC, SDN is a microcosm of of the med school applicant population and is heavily skewed towards the overly neurotic variety. Don’t freak out just because everyone on SDN claims to have a 4.1 and 46 on the MCAT.</p>

<p>Ah, Shraf beat me to it - and is dead on. I especially second the usefulness of the Interview feedback page (separate from the forums there). Amazingly helpful when you’re going to interviews.</p>

<p>A sea of neurosis to be sure, but in a couple of instances, you can use that to your advantage. ;)</p>

<p>Follow along with some of the most prolific posters (last year shemarty, this year ksmi) .They do yeoman work organizing…uhhh…well, everything. And my D is a huge LizzyM fan.</p>

<p>You all are right - SDN is a absolute gold mine if you know where to look (which I didn’t until Curm sent a great link!). I can hardly keep up with all the info on CC - I’m going to have to get up at the crack of dawn to add SDN into the mix! </p>

<p>Thanks again everyone - the people of CC are just great!</p>

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<p>If I remember it correctly, there was even an appreciation thread for her! (Did she go to UCSF?) I have no idea who ksmi is. (I have visited SDN about a dozen times only.)</p>

<p>Shraf: No, my kid is not hispanic.</p>

<p>ksmi117. This year’s shemarty (who is still around helping a bunch BTW).</p>

<p>Two quick thoughts.</p>

<p>1.)

If your child is an Asian of some kind, I wouldn’t worry about this. Most saavy Asians know better than to report their race to medical schools. There are probably a lot more than 4. For example, Duke Med had only two Chinese matriculants (I think) reported the year before I applied, but I happened to know seven personally and there were probably a lot more than that.</p>

<p>2.) As for being too involved, my hope has always been that these boards would reassure worried parents and help them stay less involved by assuaging their worries. At a minimum, I would hope that it helps keep them informedly involved; if a parent is going to meddle anyway, it’s better for them to do so with correct information!!</p>

<p>Curm and SM are two of the best examples I can imagine for parents. They both give plenty of space to their kids, but nudge and steer them when appropriate without being (as far as I can tell) overbearing. Like my own parents, whom I greatly appreciated during my medical school applications, they seem to provide support rather than pressure.</p>

<p>And I like to think that this board plays a small part of that.</p>

<p>Thanks for the kind words, BDM ;)</p>

<p>Yes, kids need to do it themselves, my DD is doing the work and the tests and the ECs and the apps herself. But unlike the big H, she attends Berkeley and their advising is not ideal. Their campus is big, it is much more difficult to connect with staff, to beat the curve, to be known by your profs etc.</p>

<p>SDN & CC have been life savers for my DD.</p>

<p>I used to attend sports functions, now I am an empty nester so I have time and energy to do some research.</p>

<p>No, I probably would not have begun this out of the blue, but like Curm I discovered CC in the good old UG days…2000 to be exact…and I stuck around when my last one headed away to school this year.</p>

<p>After having missed the mark on my first DD, I learned so much from CC that my other two had wonderful options for UG and I like to stay around to pay it forward.</p>

<p>I do that I can learn all I can to help my DD with med schools apps- she would not have known to apply in June (websites give a due date of Nov/Dec) and she would not have realised how widely she needed to apply. </p>

<p>I can read SDN over months and months, a bit at a time and filter the good & bad info so I can give her a report and she can make her decisions. She wrote the essays, she described the ECs, she pushed submit, she made the list, she got the LORs, she got the paid (with benes thank you very much :D) job in a university lab…I can just shine a light on the possible paths and give her more info to choose wisely, the choice is up to her.</p>

<p>Her MCAT is low, she has an LD so standardized tests are a challenge, but she also gets A+ in upper div classes, so if she can slog through the testing she will be an excellent doctor.</p>

<p>The process is incredibly over the top, it is nice to have some one (me) who understands what she is doing and I like having Curm & BDM & NorCal & BigRed and others who have helped. I would almost never post on the SDN board, it is too kid centric, though I have PMed a few people some helpful suggestions…just paying it forward.</p>

<p>Psst: H’s advising SUCKS. =) (Unless you meant “husband” or something instead of “Harvard”.)</p>

<p>Nah, my Husband’s advising sucks, too, he’s “not worried at all” because he does not get how difficult it is to get in. ;)</p>

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Why? While it’s optional for AMCAS, your name is still visible, I think it’s required on a lot of secondaries, and they’re going to know your race when you interview. Leaving it blank is fine, but I doubt it’s any help.</p>

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<p>Several years ago, there was an article on Newsweek (or another magazine) about college applications. An example the author wrote about goes like this: A seasoned college application consultant persuades one of his clients to change her last name and to move her family from a comperitive, wealthy school district to a poor, low performing school district for the last two years of her high school years so that the college admission officer would not be able to tell her race and she could more easily “stand out”. She was also asked to pursue an EC that is not popular for her ethnic group. (She succeeded in getting into her dream school, according to that article.) </p>

<p>Sigh…We may as well go back to those days (80 to 100 years ago) when the college would ask for the birthplace of student’s parents and grandparents, when the elite colleges (and their alumni) believed they had admitted too many students from a particular ethnic group that are perceived as “not fit” (too brainy, not well-rounded) for their college. Ironically, a very high percentage of the professors and presidents of these elite colleges today are from those students who ran the risk of being deemed as “unfit” at that time. Recently, there is another article written by an author from that ethnic group: After they have climbed up the social ladder in the society, they prefer their offsprings to be more well-rounded (e.g., more involved with art, sport, music, etc. – but not as aspired professional musicians.) – exactly those characteristics that they themselves might be lacking (or being accused of being lacking) when they applied to colleges a generation or two ago.</p>

<p>It is said there are two topics that are not politically correct to talk about it: politics and religion. Maybe the race issue in college/professional school admission is another taboo. Let us just leave it like that.</p>

<p>As parents, we try to avoid talking about these controversal issues with our child. When we learned that four of his closest friends in college happen to be from four different ethnic groups, we are happy for him.</p>

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<p>I did not know how difficult it is to get in just a couple of years ago. Thanks to the help from the members on this premed forum, I now believe it is almost a child-abuse crime for any parent to think that it is not difficult to get in!</p>

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<p>Because the admissions committee isn’t the group you’re really aiming at here; you’re aiming at their superiors. As long as you don’t officially check the box on the paperwork, they don’t have to report you as an ORM. So you can have an ethnic last name, and they’ll know at the interview, but they won’t have to include you when they file their diversity reports. That gives them added flexibility. If they admit 12 Asian kids, they’ll get in trouble; if they admit 2 Asian kids and 10 kids with Asian last names who look Asian but are officially listed as “Unknown,” the report reads “2 Asians” and nobody gets in trouble.</p>

<p>In other words, you’re giving the admissions committee plausible deniability.</p>

<p>Anecdotal-only, my circle of friends had a few who checked boxes and a few who didn’t. Those of us who didn’t did a lot better. Un-anecdotally, you can see for yourself that the numbers reported in the MSAR are ridiculously off. That reflects a high proportion of students who are refusing to answer the questions, so at a minimum a lot of folks believe it’s useful.</p>

<p>I am not looking to name drop, but I have found Harvard’s advising to be awful all around.</p>

<p>I would have agreed up until a year ago, when my D’s premed advisor was “reassigned”. Since then the advising has been quite good - premed wise. In terms of concentrations , that may be another matter.</p>