<p>People like #60 need to remember that this program doesn’t actually obviate the sciences. You will still have to do them in medical school and use them throughout your medical career. If your interest is international public health and NOT physiology, or health policy and NOT science, or social determinants for health and NOT “the immediate biology” –</p>
<p>– then you do not belong in medical school. There are other schools for people with your interests.</p>
<p>Does anyone know of any programs like this one? Either the NYTimes article or one of the many blog posts that followed mentioned that there were a few more, although no names were named.
Besides post-bacs, are there any others that might have sophomore/junior admission as well?
(Because I know the applicant pool is likely to increase x100 after all the hype.)</p>
<p>While I normally bow to bdm’s experience, I would suggest an MD can be important for someone who wants to be heavily involved in International Health. It may not be academically necessary, but it can open a LOT of doors, which otherwise would be closed.</p>
<p>I am in the same position as a lot of you. I am a double major in English/History at the most selective school in Texas. I have a 3.82 at my university and I scored a 1520/1600 on my sats. I wanted to apply to this program, but I then I realized how ridiculously competitive it is. I have been looking into the program a lot, and apparently roughly 88-90 percent of the students accepted into this program come from the Ivys. One year they took 25 students, and 22 of them came from the Ivy League. The other three students came from Williams College. Another year they took 30 kids, and 27 of them were from the Ivy League. I read a post on Sdn from a UPenn kid who had a 3.9 gpa and a 1550 sat score, but he was rejected from the program, he wasn’t even interviewed. With the amount of hype this program has received from the NY Times, CC, and SDN, I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of applicants from for this program go from 300 to 600 this year. Think about it, everyone and their mothers will be applying, which means the competition will be fierce.</p>
<p>After finding out how hard it is to get into the program, I feel discouraged from applying to the program. Lol, whats the point? Rejection seems inevitable.</p>
<p>^^ exactly what I was thinking…I am not applying simply because my chances of getting in are almost non-existent…</p>
<p>^ The only reason I don’t want to apply is because if I apply, I will get my hopes up and my I will be disappointed when the decisions come around.</p>
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<h1>1- I said ONE of the most important factors not THE most important factor</h1>
<h1>2- Are you really going to tell me that the USMLE Step 1 is “minor” factor when a residency director looks at his/her applicants?</h1>
<p>This is a family friends response when i asked him what are the factors for selecting residents. he was a residency director for UCSF Medical Center around 15-20 years ago. </p>
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<p>enough said. Im sure bluedevilmike will agree with most of what i have said about the importance of Step 1 scores. </p>
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<p>I can understand your argument but lets digress for second. becoming psychiatrist is not the goal for most medical students. Comprehensive O-chem and Intro Physics is best because then you can be better equiped if you choose to go into research. In Research fields such as biochemistry, pathology, pharmacology its very beneficial to have a good background in O-chem. On the other if for the medical students that want to go into biomedical enginnering research a good physics background is essential. </p>
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For the third time in this thread bluedevilmike I agree with you</p>
<p>All this nonsense about organic chemistry, what is important is a strong knowledge of LATIN !!!</p>
<p>And BOTANY and ZOOLOGY !!!</p>
<p>I wish to stress that I have no objections to the HuMed program itself. It seems to me like a perfectly sensible way to capture some of the talented “latecomers” to the premed track. </p>
<p>I object only to the specific sentiments discussed by “Ms. Adler” in the NYT article itself.</p>
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<p>Try putting on your critical thinking glasses: the point of the Hume is that it produces practicing doctors, not researchers. Indeed, reading between the lines it appears that Mt. Sinai would prefer more of these students go into to primary care…</p>
<p>Agreed, bdm, but knowing the press and in particular, the NYT, who knows what the full quote/disussions was/is. It’s entirely possible that the snippet was taken out of context. I give Ms. Adler an (arrogant) pass.</p>
<p>So their summer versions of physics and organic aren’t like normal summer classes, they’re very basic? Maybe I misinterpreted shades_children wrong. Interesting.</p>
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<p>And what the NYTimes article actually said was:</p>
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<p>The HuMed program produces more students who take a scholarly year off as compared to traditional students. The only MD candidates who generally do more research in this school are the MD/PhDs students.</p>
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<p>There is also no particular push for HuMeds to go into any particular area or specialty. The NYT article notes that they’re more likely to go into psych or peds or OB/Gyn, but it’s not as if we don’t have HuMeds that go into surgery or anesthesia. What does it mean? Who knows. I’m sure if we broke down classes by gender or MPH degree holding or number of gym visits per week, we could also come up with some mildly interesting statistics about specialty choice.</p>
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<p>What exactly do you mean by a “normal summer class”? The HuMed summer program covers some basic orgo and physics, and it’s nowhere near the amount of material one would get while taking Orgo I and Physics I over the summer at a 4-year university. They also do some shadowing in the hospital.</p>
<p>I’m not directing this at anyone in particular, but it’s been on my mind ever since this article came out.</p>
<p>As I see it, there are two types of objections to the HuMed program.</p>
<p>1) “But pre-meds have always taken orgo and physics, so all pre-meds should continue to take those classes!” This is the argument that we’ve always done it a certain way, so we should continue in that same manner. I wouldn’t necessarily object to this in the absence of evidence regarding the performance of HuMeds as medical students, but it’s pretty clear that HuMeds do just as well in medical school as traditional applicants. This, then, is a moot argument.</p>
<p>2) “But I suffered through those classes, so no one else should get a free pass!” This is essentially a pro-hazing kind of argument. It’s the same attitude that people use to harass the ones underneath them in the medical hierarchy. It’s not a kind of attitude that I think should be tolerated. We should be eager to make training more efficient and effective for the people who are junior to us, not happy to make their lives just as miserable as ours were.</p>
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What I meant by a “normal summer class” is precisely what you went on to mention, the standard month-long summer courses offered by universities. When I first read that the HuMed students took those courses over the summer, I figured it’d just be undergrad summer classes, so I didn’t see how they were ‘skipping’ anything.</p>
<p>But if they do just as well as the regularly admitted students even after taking basic versions of these courses, that undermines the reasoning I’ve sometimes heard, that physics and organic are needed to provide students with a very small sample of the workload in medical school. ‘You can’t handle med school if you can’t handle organic.’ Of course, you could argue that the students admitted in this program have demonstrated high academic ability already anyway, and your average college student needs to see if they can handle the rigors of hard science classes on a small scale before jumping into the big leagues.</p>
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<p>I could just as easily say, “You can’t handle medical school if you can’t handle an English class, where you’re reading one classic novel a week and turning in three papers during the semester.” Being good at reading and digesting quickly is probably more useful than knowing orgo well since there’s a ton of reading and studying in medical school and not so much orgo.</p>
<p>I don’t actually agree with the reasoning I quoted, it’s just the justification I’ve heard med school faculty give for the requirement of those classes. And medical schools require English, don’t they? I thought English, Calculus, and Statistics were all required in some form, although the depth of each varied by school.</p>
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<p>The most important remainds the “good olde boy club”. </p>
<p>I get kids residency’s and fellowships every year by picking up the phone and we give similar. Over half the spots are filled that way. I trust friends opinions much better than numbers, etc. About 1/2 the remaining spots are filled with kids from our school which we know. The final 1/4 are filled by scores, etc and those kids are usually not quarantined the whole five years - only two</p>
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<p>That was my first impression as well Steeler. I guess the website for the HuMed program doesn’t go into too much detail about the 8-week program.</p>
<p>I’m thinking about applying to this program. </p>
<p>It fits especially since I’m a public health studies major at a relatively ‘prestigous’ school, with a 1550/1600 SAT and a 4.0 HS GPA. I’m just worried that if I don’t get in, it’ll mess up my pre-reqs that I’ll be required to do during the traditional route to med school.</p>
<p>Personally, the program stinks of a way to admit a select group of students who are well connected but aren’t academically up to getting into medical school. Programs like this are popping up all over the country now, as medical school gets more competitive. As a college student, I was shocked when I learned my college accepts high school students directly into medical school. They don’t have to take the MCATs (although they need to take Organic Chemistry) and only need to keep a 3.5 GPA to get, even though you need a 3.75 to get into that medical school! As a college student considering applying to medical school, I feel slighted that candidates are getting in on nebulous criteria unrelated to medicine (high school performance, English composition, artistic ability). The only way a school would allow such a program is to provide a way for scions/legacies to get in easy.</p>