<p>"For generations of pre-med students, three things have been as certain as death and taxes: organic chemistry, physics and the Medical College Admission Test, known by its dread-inducing acronym, the MCAT.</p>
<p>So it came as a total shock to Elizabeth Adler when she discovered, through a singer in her favorite a cappella group at Brown University, that one of the nations top medical schools admits a small number of students every year who have skipped all three requirements.</p>
<p>Until then, despite being the daughter of a physician, she said, I was kind of thinking medical school was not the right track for me.</p>
<p>Ms. Adler became one of the lucky few in one of the best kept secrets in the cutthroat world of medical school admissions, the Humanities and Medicine Program at the Mount Sinai medical school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.</p>
<p>Does anyone know how competitive this program is (cough: shades_children)? My sat scores are higher than the average, my gpa is higher than the average, I am a potential social sciences major, my high school gpa is decent, but my high school class rank sucks…I don’t know if I should apply, its a lot of work, and its rolling admissions (application opened on July 1st, and I will probably be done with my application by August 12, IF I start now) </p>
<p>Oh well I guess I will apply, the app fee is only 200 dollars total (transcripts + app fee), and even if I don’t get in (I really don’t expect to) at least I will have the experience of applying to medical schools BEFORE the junior year of college. It doesn’t hurt to try.</p>
<p>^^^ Never mind, 300 kids apply and only 34-35 get accepted. I have no chance. I wouldn’t be surprised if almost all of the accepted kids in that school come from schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford (the program description pretty much implied that all the accepted kids come from HYPS)</p>
<p>^I don’t think so, from what I’ve heard from two doctors who focused on humanities in UG. One thing bears true though: humanities students have a better chance of getting more competitive residencies, higher GPA’s, etc.</p>
<p>No they don’t need to cram math/science. Most med schools only require 4 basic science classes. The Mt. Sinai program requires that you have completed a year of bio/chem. So you only have to learn orgo/physics.</p>
<p>**** it, I am going to apply. I don’t want to wonder what if… the program places a lot of emphasis on the SATs (verbal scores are the most important followed by math, thank-god for my 750’s on verbal and math…)…Plan for the worst, hope for the best. =)</p>
<p>the school does have a phenomenal location, IN THE HEART OF THE BEST CITY IN THE WORLD!</p>
<p>Given how relatively unselective they are by GPA and SAT, they must put a huge emphasis on extracurriculars/interviews.</p>
<p>Although, it looks like their acceptance rate is pretty damn high. Over 10% even assuming 100% yield, and they probably don’t have that (although they probably have higher than anyoen else)</p>
<p>This program will not interest me at all. Personally i think its for strudents who are lazy, ones who do not want to work hard and take some physics and organic chem. as well as the ones who dont want to study for the MCAT.</p>
<p>On top of that their Step 1 scores are lower than average. and a majority of medical doctors will agree with me when I say that Step 1 is the most important test in a doctors life. </p>
<p>FYI- USMLE Step 1 is taken the end of the second year of medical school and it is one of the most important factors (not the only one) when applying to residency. </p>
<p>and yes I know that if someone gets a low step 1 score it can be over looked if a high step 2 score is achieved. but no medical student wants to take Step 2 early in their 4th year before the match. most medical students take Step 2 at the end of their 4th year after the match is done.</p>
<p>Is that a truely even exchange? No physics and o-chem in return for low Step 1 scores? </p>
<p>for me it is not a good one and as my name says i want to be an ENT Surgeon in the future which will require on average a very high Step 1 score of 242 which is in the 86th percentile</p>
<p>She is completely contradicting herself. She doesnt deserve to be a doctor if she cannot motivate herself to work hard in Physics and O-Chem. Not every doctor loved those subjects but they worked hard and performed well in them because that was what they needed to do in order to get accepted to medical school. This is a horrible program that allows these students to cut corners in order to become a doctor.</p>
<p>looking at the stats for the average accepted 3.74 GPA and 1444 SAT( M+ CR) its is evident that these students are ver capable of taking Physics and O-chem they are either scared to take them or too lazy to put work hard in them. I think the latter. </p>
<p>There are plenty of humanties majors just like them who take THE 5 premed classes and do just fine in them, get a good MCAT score, get accepted to medical school, and turn out to be great doctors. What makes these select few different from all the other successful humantiesmedical school matriculants? My guess is the lack motivation to take some challenging classes</p>
<p>"The study found that, by some measures, the humanities students made more sensitive doctors: they were more than twice as likely to train as psychiatrists (14 percent compared with 5.6 percent of their classmates) and somewhat more likely — though less so than Dr. Kase had expected — to go into primary care fields, like pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology (49 percent compared with 39 percent). Conversely, they avoid some fields, like surgical subspecialties and anesthesiology. "</p>
<p>Interesting. My former doctor had been a philosophy major. He was a marvelous doctor that my whole family used. What made him stand out was that he listened to us. Unfortunately for us, he moved on to join a medical school faculty of a school focusing on training family medicine physicians.</p>
<p>A med school applicant can certainly major in the humanities (religion, English, whatever) and still take the required core science/math courses. It would certainly be imprudent for a medical school aspirant to forego the science core in the hopes of gaining admission to a single program such as the one described.</p>
<p>The article did not indicate that applicants came from HYPS, but actually from elite LAC’s (Amherst, Williams and the like); this actually makes some sense as the top LAC’s in general stress a more rigorous and rounded undergraduate education than some comparably elite universities (where a significant priority in the latter group is their graduate and professional schools).</p>
<p>I saw the link to the article on Yahoo earlier, so I have a bit of an idea of the story. I’m not interested in going into a medical field by any means, but it does bother me that some people who are trying to become doctors don’t want to learn certain types of sciences. There’s nothing wrong with learning humanities, but using them as an excuse to dodge more “challenging” and salutary science courses–for a predominant science-based field–is bound to be problematic.</p>
<p>Got an email from D1 this morning…did you know about this program? Too bad I didn’t, it would have fit her well, she missed it by a year or two. Yes FutureENT, she is definitely one of those lazy, unmotivated students who would have jumped at the chance to get into a horrible program like this :rolleyes:.</p>