UCLA - Geffen - full ride for about 10% of students and includes room and board
Penn - 30+ full tuition scholarships
WashU - undeclared number (they play politics with it - awarded a full scholarship very late in process to someone admitted to Harvard who we know). Reasonable financial aid compared to Ivies.
Duke - they dont publicize but have some merit scholarships
Chicago - not announced but several merit scholarships
Vanderbilt - 0.75 tuition for many admitted early
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Almost all schools give mostly need based aid.
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I do not think this is true, unless you're counting huge loans as "need based aid."
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I guess, I could have phrased it better - all schools, that give aid, give it mostly on the basis of need.
It is true that a vast majority of the medical students pay their own way through medical schools. However, a lot of elite private schools (Harvard, Yale, JHU, Mayo, Stanford etc.) do provide substantial aid exclusively on the basis of need. At the top privates, 60-70% of the class get some form of need based aid (grants private scholarships etc.). Quite a few state schools (UMich, UVA and two of our three state schools; NJMS and RWJ come to mind). are known to give full COA, full tuition and partial packages both as merit and need based aid.
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... highly-desired student, particularly if he/she is holding multiple acceptances. Merit for poaching.
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Schools like, Vandy and UChicago give merit packages right along with the acceptances. My son got his merit aid from Vandy just 15 days after his acceptance in Nov. I don’t Vandy knew that my son would be going to Yale, because he wasn’t even admitted to Yale at that time. Even his UMD aid notice came in the month of December.
I would add CCLCM (completely free), Emory and Columbia to @texaspg’s list of schools that provide merit scholarships.
... highly-desired student, particularly if he/she is holding multiple acceptances. Merit for poaching.
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Schools like, Vandy and UChicago give merit packages right along with the acceptances. My son got his merit aid from Vandy just 15 days after his acceptance in Nov. I don't Vandy knew that my son would be going to Yale, because he wasn't even admitted to Yale at that time. Even his UMD aid notice came in the month of December.
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I would add CCLCM (completely free), Emory and Columbia to @texaspg’s list of schools that provide merit scholarships.
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I would imagine that your son’s stats and resume were so strong that Vandy and UChi assumed that he’d get accepted by at least one other tippy top med. Likely their strategy was to award merit early in hopes that your son would accept and then withdraw his apps/interviews elsewhere.
There is a complicated yield strategy that med schools employ.
To further clarify…the well-funded SOMs that give merit, typically demand to see parents’ income, even if the student is a bit older and even if married. And even after determining high need (if parents are low/modest income) their need-based awards still are not huge. We’ve often seen need-based aid to be about 1/3 of cost, leaving the student and/or parents borrowing 2/3 of the cost…which is a LOT for these pricey private SOMs. Maybe their goal is to get costs somewhat down to that student’s instate public? I don’t know.
If someone is offered merit before December, it is most likely purely merit because they have not seen any financial paper work yet which is due mostly in February time frame for financial aid. Someone I know of got Geffen from UCLA in December and when I mentioned it on SDN, people thought I was making it up. I told them I was essentially passing on the info and didn’t care what they thought. However, the same kid got financial aid at Ivies which required unit loan and one of the ivies threw in more money (considered merit but not openly mentioned) to attract the kid to make it comparable to Geffen.
UCLA obviously recognized that they were accepting a student who would likely get other top offers and tried to “first strike” hoping he’d withdraw all other apps.
I see this all the time on SDN. A kid will get a desirable acceptance (maybe with merit), and think, “OK, I’m done,” and withdraw all open apps thinking, “let someone else have a chance,” or “now, I don’t have to travel anymore for interviews.”
Again, there are all kinds of strategies employed by med schools to get what they want. They don’t just wildly accept/reject/wait.
The smaller SOM in my state is “boy heavy” so they often interview many girls right away and try to lock some down by Oct/Nov with acceptances and sometimes merit. Often many of the boys don’t get interviewed until Nov or later.
D2 pushed the button on her apps the day it opened. D1 just finished her first year of Med School, and loves it. She is doing a great internship this summer doing autopsies! My recent grad is taking her gap year and continuing her research at Vanderbilt, which is awesome because she gets paid, and can live at home and save money! She know neither her GPA or MCAT are stellar (good, but not great) but hoping for the best. If not, she’ll do a post bac or masters program to pad her resume and try again!
S1 also submitted to AMCAS on June 1…surprisingly already got “verified” as well on the next day…hoping for a good mcat score out later this month…grades have been excellent…and so he/we begin @-)
@SincererLove from my perspective this looks like a great schedule…this will be rigorous for an average entering student, but your daughter is clearly as prepped as she can be. The schedule (and AP background/scores) looks very similar to my BME premed as an incoming freshman. He got straight As that first semester which was a fabulous first step and set the tone for future studies. I wish your daughter well.
^^^
You need to make a new thread. This thread is not for incoming freshmen. This thread is for college students who are currently applying to med schools
^^^
You need to make a new thread. This thread is not for incoming freshmen. This thread is for college students who are currently applying to med schools
That said, if she’s an eng’g major, doesn’t she have to take the physics with calculus (calc based physics), and not just general physics?
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First D has been a good student who managed 5 or 6 AP classes and varsity swimming, among other ECs in high school. To date, she never stayed up to past 10:30 due to exams or homework.
She is going for premed or CS or Econ.
For her freshman classes
General physics 4 credits…took AP Physics C this year.
General Chem 4 credits…took AP last year and got a 5 on exam and 800 on subject test.
Multi-variable. 3 credits… Took BC last year, 5 on AP test. High school doesn’t offer multivariable, so she took LInear Algebra this year.
Intro to Engineering 3 credits…she is going to try CS, Biomedical Engineering and Chem Engineering
Econ writing seminar 3 credits…she got 5s on AP two tests in her freshman year of high school and 5 on AP Lang. She hopes this fulfills both writing and Econ requirements…and had sent an email to confirm with her advisors.
Total 17 hours. How does it sound? Is this too much? She hassles and already planned out her days of the week with classes. Her plan is to drop one class and add something else if she believes she can’t handle one class or another. Thoughts?
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One of state schools, Rutgers RWJ, requires another standardized test called CASPer! This test, supposedly, measures whether are not the applicant’s personal characteristics meet the core competency requirements of the school! Last year’s applicants had a choice to either take the test or write an essay for each competency. This year, it seems to be mandatory for the consideration for an interview. I am curious to see, what it does to the number and/or quality of applications at RWJ.
Tulane
NYMC
Central Michigan
U Vermont
U Illinois
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
East Tennessee State
Medical College of Wisconsin
Rosalind Franklin (optional)
West Virginia (optional)
IIRC, CASPer was mandatory at NYMC last year. It didn’t seem to cut down on the number of applications it received.
CASPer has been mandatory at Canadian medical schools for about 5 years now.
I just don’t understand some of these trends. Why would these schools want to add to an already complex and expensive process? Tests like CASPer are susceptible to coaching and lying. An unintended consequence of video secondaries may be that “looks” might end up creeping in as a subconscious bias in selecting interviewees. Besides, even the most social of kids can be awkward in front of a camera.
As @texaspg pointed out in the case of NYSM, the applicants are desperate enough to silently suffer through yet another step in the process. And the adcoms will continue to make the process even crazier.
I have no idea why requirements are being added–unless it’s another method being used to screen applicants so adcomms don’t have to read/evaluate as many applications.
ETA; The original rationale used by Canadian med schools (which were the first to implement the use of CASPer) was to reduce the use of “professional editors” for the PS and the required autobiographical essays. The use of a strictly timed, one-chance only unedited video recording is supposed to present a “more authentic” unrehearsed voice of the applicant. Unrehearsed since the applicant doesn’t see the questions ahead of time and the questions offered are different for every exam date/time.
I will point out, also, that once students are in med school they will have their OSCE/standardized patient encounters routinely video-recorded and scored. (I believe Step 2CS is also video recorded for later scoring by evaluators.)