<p>@texaspg
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<p>Most of the schools where I interviewed only gave soft ranges for decision dates. Very few have hard dates. I anticipate that starting in about two weeks, the following interval of about three weeks should answer a lot of questions. :eek: and then there are the few that make you wait till spring :(</p>
<p>I forget, is CCLCM full ride or full tuition?</p>
<p>I do agree that there are wrong reasons to go to CCLCM. It had different goals that other typical schools. There was no way I was ever going to attend CCLCM since I’m not interested in pursing a research career. And taking an extra year for med school just isnt for me (and the loss of an extra year of earning potential).</p>
<p>^Full tuition for 4 years and tuition and stipend for the 5th year. CCLCM offers a nice 'tweener option to MD and MD/PHD.</p>
<p>Looks like Baylor is dishing out its first decisions today. Hope the Tx kids out here got calls today…</p>
<p>With the exhilarating times of interview invites and acceptances behind, it looks like this cycle has decidedly entered a dead period. Many schools Duke and UMich are filling up their last few interview slots and some have started sending out massive batches of rejections. </p>
<p>Boy, Johns Hopkins cleaned house today and wiped out a vast majority of the regular posters on that thread including one poor soul that had a LizzyM score of 81 another with a LizzyM of 79! I am so grateful that my son some how snagged an interview invite from them last week. He is interviewing on Thursday. He will head out to New Haven for his Yale interview, right from the JHMI.</p>
<p>Congrats to all with good news!! </p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>My D has not had any interviews yet, she just has a couple of rejections. She finished her applications in the last month.
Does that means her hope is very little? Looks some schools have filled up their spots.
Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!</p>
<p>^I do think her chances are pretty slim. My school is already filling out Jan/Feb interview dates. But you never know. </p>
<p>(This is why we stress getting applications in early)</p>
<p>I think she should take a good look at where she applied. </p>
<p>Did she apply to schools within her stats ranges?
Did she complete applications in a timely manner? (If she just finished recently, that answer may be “no”)
Did she apply to all schools in her home state?
Did she follow the advice of her premed committee? (Assuming the committee is knowledgeable)
Does she have a competitive application? (Does she have 1 or 0 major deficiencies in the categories of grades, extracurriculars, letters, essays?)</p>
<p>If the answers to all of those questions is “yes,” then there’s a chance that she may still receive interview invites. The frustrating thing is that some schools, as you mentioned, have already filled spots in their new class, so sometimes “later” interviews (Jan, Feb, etc) are essentially interviewing for wait list spots. </p>
<p>If I were in her shoes, I would be worried but not hopeless. Of course it would be nice to have already been invited for interviews, but it is surely possible that she could still receive some assuming she applied to an appropriate number and variety of schools. Has she done anything to follow up her applications? Perhaps inquiring about the status of her application would be worthwhile if it is unknown at multiple schools.</p>
<p>If she does get rejected from all the schools she applied to, there’s always the possibility of applying again in the future. It will theoretically be more difficult to be a reapplicant because schools will expect that you have done something substantial in the meanwhile, but there are many students who are rewarded for persevering. I can easily think of a good number of reapplicants who are currently students at my school.</p>
<p>Summary: Be concerned, but not hopeless. If she needs to reapply, figure out where the application was lacking and improve on those areas before applying again.</p>
<p>Your D was complete very, very late in the cycle. Most medical schools close their applications between Oct 15 and Nov 1. So she just squeeked in under the wire. Her late complete date has diminished her chances at getting an interview, but how much depends on her stats (if her numbers are higher than the typical applicant that helps some) and the list of schools she’s applied to.</p>
<p>There are double handful of schools that have completely filled all their available interview dates already. So she’s outta luck at those places, but most schools do hold interviews thru March.</p>
<p>IIRC from D1’s application cycle–the period from now thru mid-January is pretty quiet, (Adcomms don’t sit and don’t interview over winter break. They probably only meet once–if at all-- between Thanksgiving and mid Dec.) There was a minor flurry of IIs again after the winter break.</p>
<p>So I wouldn’t expect any IIs–if any-- until after New Years.</p>
<p>FYI, D1 found there were a ton of schools that simply sat on thousands of applications until April or later, then sent out mass rejections. (One of D1’s schools didn’t officially reject her until July–about a week after she had already started classes at the med school she currently attends.)</p>
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<p>It feels like D is in application purgatory for some of the AMCAS schools. She keeps reading about waves of rejections already sent out, but she’s received nothing…no interview or rejection…at some of these schools. 
</p>
<p>On a different note, TX prematch is tomorrow. D has elected to wait until Saturday night to check. Fingers crossed!</p>
<p>Best of luck, jc40!</p>
<p>best of luck to JC40’s D! It just takes one and we have plenty to go around in Texas.</p>
<p>Thanks, UrbanG and texaspg! She has 7 possibilities in TX so we’ll see!</p>
<p>Wishing your D great success in the pre-match, jc40!</p>
<p>Many thanks to trapezius, Kristin5792 and WayOutWestMom. I will show your comments to my D.
Her major is BME, and her GPA is a little bit lower compared to other applicants.
Another question, if she will re-apply medical school in the next year, is there a way to improve her GPA? Retake some core courses in her college?
Thanks!</p>
<p>AMCAS doesn’t permit grade replacement. Instead they include any retaken class together with the original grade in her overall GPA or sGPA so retakes may or may not be beneficial for her. She can get the same GPA improvement from taking new classes as doing re-takes. (And it looks better to adcomms too–to take new classes.)</p>
<p>If she already has a lot of credits on her transcript it becomes increasingly difficult to significantly improve GPA in a semester or two. She should try playing around with a GPA calculator to see if retaking a few classes will make that big of a difference.</p>
<p>AACOMAS (osteopathic medical schools) will replace an older grade with the more recent one. </p>
<p>It’s easier to improve GPA/sGPA for DO programs than it is for MD programs.</p>
<p>I think it will be challenging to make a meaningful improvement in her GPA in a semester or a year. The reason is that she already has many years of (whatever her GPA is) so an additional semester, even at a perfect 4.0 GPA, probably won’t make an impressive difference.</p>
<p>Obviously, any little bit helps. Taking classes and doing well (A or A+) in them will surely help her GPA some and will probably demonstrate that she’s a good student. Doing well might also contribute to an upward trend of her GPA, which is probably a good thing and definitely is not a bad thing. It’s hard to quantify how much improvement in GPA matters, but I think everyone here would agree that as far as GPA is concerned, the higher the better.</p>
<p>As far as retaking core courses goes, that is probably not in her best interests. On the one hand, if she retakes it and doesn’t get an A, it will probably “look bad” to the admissions committee. You should also know that AMCAS does not allow grade replacement regardless of university policy, and it’s the AMCAS GPA that matters to med schools. So if she got a C+ in statics and retook it and got an A, both the C+ and the A would be calculated into her AMCAS GPA. Knowing that, you can see that it would probably be better to take additional coursework and do well in it rather than retake a class you didn’t do well in in the first place. An exception to this rule would be if you did poorly in a premed prereq (like organic chemistry) and got lower than the required passing grade (which I think is C-) in that class–you would be required to retake that class in order to meet the requirements of medical schools.</p>
<p>So I would say…yes, improving GPA is a worthwhile thing to do, especially if it could use improving. I would recommend accomplishing this by taking additional coursework rather than retaking classes that you didn’t do so well in.</p>
<p>If your d needs more classes than she has left to improve her gpa, consider SMPs which are master’s programs basically geared towards improving people’s chances at med school.</p>
<p>Thank you all – WayOutWestMom, Kristin5792, and i<em>wanna</em>be_Brown. Very helpful info.
I’ll talk to her to see what she can do.
Thanks again!</p>