People give that advice about undergrad, because most med students don’t get merit. and the merit offers given, usually aren’t large enough to mean that actual costs aren’t still high.
for undergrad, a student can target schools that are known to give merit for certain stats. It’s really not that way with med schools.
Also, who knows if a med school applicant will have multiple acceptances? The “free tuition” students that we’ve heard about here were students with like 39/40 MCAT 4.0 GPAs who were accepted at tippy top med schools, so a med school ranked a few spots below offered free tuition to poach the student.
And those with high stats can’t even count on getting accepted, much less with merit, at lower ranked med schools because they’re often rejected because the schools think they’re being used as safeties.
I think my son was offered merit by the private SOM because it knew that he was holding acceptances to his much cheaper instate publics. And, once the public SOMs knew he was holding multiple acceptances, they offered as well. It seemed like a game of strategy. I doubt he would have been offered anything if he only had one acceptance. He had med school worthy stats, but not amazing stats.
that said, even with his merit offers (he didn’t go to the cheapest choice), med school is still costing a good bit of money. (One cost that seems to be often much higher for med school is living expenses. If the student had modest dorm costs before, those costs can be much higher as a med student. )
If undergrad had also been costly, the total would have been a lot, so the suggestion of holding down undergrad costs still can hold true.
"What are the profiles of the merit scholarship recipients? "
It largely depends on medical school. Adcom of D’s med. school called her pre-med adviser in UG to express the hope that she and her classmate will attend there. They apologized that they cannot offer Merit award to neither because of the very high caliber of incoming 1st years. Later we learned that 1st year student body included PhD from Harvard, several Master in Science from the very top schools in the country, several lawyers…etc, not to dismiss the very top graduates from various Ivy’s while the number of graduates from Berkeley beat all others in D’s medical school class. D. still decided to attend there despite of no Merit, turning down Northwestern (her original #1). However, her UG classmate has decided on Northwestern. Offer of Merit could have made a difference in his decision making. However if school wants to attract PhD’s, MS’s and lawyers, they must offer them the incentives.
D. was offered a tiny Merit of $3k / year at one of the in-state publics, which did not make a dent in her decision making.
She has been very satisfied with her choice. It took her awhile to make a decision.
Merit seldom covers the full cost of med school. $2000/year while nice and an honor doesn’t go far when the COA is over $85K/year. Huge merit (full tuition, for example) is exceedingly rare and only is offered in truly exceptional cases.
And the COA doesn’t even really cover all the expenses your child will incur in med school. He’ll need extra for professional clothing/shoes, additional study & test prep materials, professional journal subscriptions/professional membership fees, transportation (at most schools, a car is needed to travel to clinical sites in MS3-4), residency interview travel. And med students don’t have the time to work during the academic year and don’t get summers off.
You can’t assume now that your son will be a top applicant for med school in 2 years. There are just too many unknowns yet. And you cannot even guess what his competition for a any particular school will look like. (Even at our mid-ranked state med school, there are bio/neuroscience PhDs from UCLA and JHU with sky high MCATs in D2’s class.) Like mom2 said—there are no guarantees of one med school admission, much less multiple acceptances. Med school admission is idiosyncratic and each med school has a different mission to fulfill through admission.
Unlike undergrad, there are no med schools “known” for awarding merit to attract students–in part because admitted student stats don’t affect med school rankings nearly as much. (Research funding is a much bigger factor.) And med school is a seller’s market at the moment with 20+ applicants per available seat at most schools. (10,000 applicants for 200 seats is pretty common even at mid-ranked schools…) Med schools don’t need to “buy” students with merit awards. They can easily full all their seats multiple times over.
IME (or rather that of my daughters’) med schools simply award merit with no explanation and no special application.
Been so engrossed in the Interview/Acceptance/Rejection and mostly silence I hadn’t visited here in a while. Had some serious catching up to do.
Congrats to all the parents with 2020 Med Students!!!
With two acceptances (one from a top 10 and the other down the list) this has been an interesting ride. Rejects from schools ranked above 50 kind of threw me a curve ball. There is No Such Thing As A Safety Med. School. May be they knew D would get into a higher ranked school. As for IS Public Schools there has been total silence except for the one in the top 10 which was a Reject.
The last few posts are interesting read as they are about finance. Neither of the schools that has accepted her have given any form of Scholarships or Aid. D still has three Interviews and those are from lower ranked schools. Trying to guess if one of them will offer her Scholarship to snag her away from a higher ranked school is worse than trying to figure out what process the ADcoms use to send Interview Invites.
FA offers (not scholarships specifically but the final FA package) won’t come until April after the student (& parents at many schools) have filed FAFSA and NeedsAccess (which is Profile for med schools).
At Ds med school, there was a one page scholarship application, with no essay. Students didn’t find out until late May if they got anything. D got a small scholarship, but honestly it made no difference in her decision. Affordable housing close to school is at a premium in this city, so she and her roommate deposited on an apartment way before May.
Another thing to consider is the competition is quite different for available scholarships in med school than it was for undergrad. In undergrad, most students are coming right out of high school, are of similar ages and similar experiences. It is easier to distinguish yourself. Some students in Ds med school class are like her, straight out of college, but many have been out a few years and have been doing research, getting graduate degrees, working in other careers, have been in the Peace Corps etc. Some have quite interesting and compelling life experiences. By virtue of getting accepted to med school, pretty much everyone is academically successful and high achieving. Accepted students are so diverse that if more than MCAT and GPA are considered, it’s tough to know how you stack up.
There was not an appreciable difference in the costs of the three schools D was accepted to. There were differences in curriculum (how it is delivered, not what you learn), grading (p/f/h compared to A,B,C,D,F), research opportunities, clinical rotation sites, desirability of location, and these are what D considered when making her decision.
This reminds me of what DS once told us: One of his classmates had been a pharmacist (or a researcher in pharmacy? Not sure here.) before he became a med school student. I do not know how much knowledge about drugs a med school student is expected to learn, but he said this student’s knowledge about it is likely superior to not only a typical resident but also the attending. (Likely an easy honor for such a student if a rotation requires a lot of knowledge about drugs, considering the fact that this student knows more about this than those who are supposed to teach him. The point here is that it is not possible for any other student to become more knowledgeable than such a student in this particular area.)
One of Ds interviewers had worked as a psychiatric Nurse Practioner before going to medical school. That had to be helpful, if not in admissions, then in clinical rotations.
" Someone with a pharmacology background like that is going to have a leg-up."
"Nurse Practioner before going to medical school. That had to be helpful, if not in admissions, then in clinical rotations. "
D. pointed out when she was in medical school, that the only people who had an advantage in one class - Anatomy, were those with Masters in Anatomy. She never mentioned anybody else with any advantage.
Her personal advantages were Spanish (and another foreign language) and great ability to connect to people with very different backgrounds, including very old, prisoners, mentally ill, veterans. This was pointed out to her many times by superiors, peers and patients. These continue to be advantages thru her residency.
“Someone with a pharmacology background like that is going to have a leg-up."
“Nurse Practioner before going to medical school. That had to be helpful, if not in admissions, then in clinical rotations”
I’m not so sure what, if any, advantage that people with these backgrounds would have in in med school rotations as the opportunities to use their knowledge or the weight that an attending would give to a third or fourth year med student’s thoughts might be minimal. People with these backgrounds might offer interesting input outside the presence of patients, but I think that since attendings are the ones who are responsible for the patients, they’re probably going to order the drugs/procedures that they are used to ordering for any given illness. Students even with such backgrounds probably haven’t earned the trust of attendings to point where an attending would rely on what they have to say. Attending ego might also play a role as to the weight they would give, if any, to students with such backgrounds.
^^^ True. This may be school dependent, but rather than thinking that an attending would ask for their expertise, I was thinking it might help them perform better in certain classes or rotations. For example, in D’s school, each block M1s have to do interviews, history and physicals (what they do depends on the system they are studying) on standardized patients. They are observed and graded as part of their overall block grade. In addition, they shadow different units in the hospital and are expected to interact with patients. I would think an experienced nurse would feel very comfortable in these situations.
^^^ Medicine is a people business. IMO patients want to be schmoozed a little bit and believe that you, the health care provider cares. So I agree that if a student has a background such as a NP or a pharmacist and who are comfortable with patients and have developed a level of say verbal skills with patients that allows them to develop a rapport with people quickly would have an advantage over students who do not have this background.
I heard from somewhere that a resident at some NYC hospital committed suicide recently because of the pressure in residency. Does anyone here hear the same or I am mistaken?
If it really happens, does that residency program have a 36-hour policy? I do not know how DS feels about this. I in general have some reservation about these two careers: i-banking and medicine, because of their grueling hours. (Is there a “government employee” -type job for an MD?! I know someone who had been working for a single employer, the government, for life and could afford to retire at a not so old age with sufficient (granted, not very much) pensions to live on. I think his life is great – as compared to many of those forever stressed-out doctors in some specialties, who take calls in their life time. Hmm…it seems at one time when we called DS, his GF’s pager was beeping and had to go into hospital immediately – what a “romantic” evening?! The words that I often heard of was "she would be miserable for the next few weeks. Not sure whether her hospital has that 36-hour no-sleep grueling policy. It seems to be a no-pain-no-gain career!)
The suicide rate for physicians is higher than for the general population. (Most estimates put it at 2-3x higher than for people in the same age group.) Fully 9.5% of residents report seriously contemplating suicide in any given year.
The suicide you may be referring to happened last year–and it wasn’t just one resident. There were 2 separate suicides. One was a resident at NYU; the was at NY Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. Both jumped out of high rise windows.
."(Is there a “government employee” -type job for an MD?! "
Sure. Be a hospitalist. Set hours, known in advance, once your shift is over you’re done.
I’ve had hundreds if not thousands of nights interrupted by calls for my H. It’s just not notable for a physician. It’s just part of what you sign up for.
“If it really happens, does that residency program have a 36-hour policy?”
I thought - though I might be mistaken - that the hours for residents were regulated under federal law, so not at the individual residency program level.
@PG, I think some medicine related organization (AMA or some NIH-affiliated one) recently started an experimental program to try whether 36-hour-a-session residency programs are beneficial to both the patients and the doctors-in-training. The problem for regulating the hours is that the residents may need to hand off their patients to other residents more frequently; the logistics is more difficult and the handoff could result in miscommunications between one group of healthcare personnel and another group.
There are some hospitals which are selected used as the control group and another set of hospitals as the experimental group. The results of the experiments will be used to decide whether to lengthen the number of hours for residents (partially deregulate the current regulation. I think WOWMom mentioned this recently but it seems she did not provide the link to the source. But I think I later read something similar at somewhere else also.
Resident work hours are mandated by federal law; however there are currently 2 on-going studies (FIRST for surgical residents; iCOMPARE for medicine residents) on the effect of longer work shifts on residents and patient care. Both of the studies are sanctioned by ACGME and hospitals participating in the studies received waivers so they can assign residents to 30 hours workshifts.
FIRST will continue through 2016; iCOMPARE will continue through 2019