<p>For those of you that are minorities, did you find that you had the same treatment/opportunities when applying to med school compared to those that are not?</p>
<p>I would hope that minority applicants are treated with the same level of respect as non-minority. I have definitely never seen or heard anything contrary. As far as opportunities, I guess I don’t really understand what you mean by opportunities while applying. You have the opportunity to fill out AMCAS and some secondaries, but that’s it :D. </p>
<p>Under-represented minorities do typically have lower GPAs and MCAT scores on average in terms of applicants and matriculants. There is also some efforts made to ensure that a substantial number of a given class are URM, though few schools openly admit this. I did have a few adcom members here and there admit that they do try to recruit URM candidates with acceptable statistics. Harvard proudly boasts that it reserves half of its class for minority (not necessarily URM) students.</p>
<p>By opportunities, I meant as in being called for interviews and whatnot.
So being a minority, would it negatively affect us because some schools will only accept a certain maximum number of URM?</p>
<p>I have never heard of a school capping the number of URM’s. If anything, all med schools can’t get enough of them. </p>
<p>As a minority, you get SPECIAL treatment. It’s called affirmative action.</p>
<p>Some schools, like WashU Med, used to pay for plane and hotel for Second Look for URM’s. That practice was put to an end after numerous complaints from the non-URM acceptees who were attending Second Look.</p>
<p>I believe Case Western still does something similar (maybe its just a special day of second look or something…).</p>
<p>Trust me, even if there were caps on URMs (which I never said, I said there were reserved spots at Harvard for minorities, not a cap), it would difficult for most schools to reach. URM applicants are URM for a reason. They traditionally have a lower proportion of applicants than other racial groups. How much it will help will vary from school to school and also depend on your involvement with your racial group (or so it is said). It will not hurt you, however.</p>
<p>Riceboy, I am almost certain racial caps are illegal. (Isn’t it a quota of some sort? That was proved unconstitutional.)</p>
<p>On the other hand, don’t play the race/minority card. Be as competitive as you can be, and stop paying attention to race.</p>
<p>Edit: *not illegal in private institutions.
You don’t need to worry about minorities taking up too many places.</p>
<p>Bakke outlawed the use of quotas. Presumably other cases from the civil rights era – I assume they were follow-on cases to West Coast Hotel and the like – outlawed caps.</p>
<p>*Grutter *and Gratz combined to outlaw explicit point systems while permitting holistic review, on the grounds that point systems were effectively quotas. With all due respect to the Court, I find this reasoning absurdly backwards: point systems are explicitly not quotas, since if you do not have enough URMs who meet your point thresholds after the boost, you accept that result. </p>
<p>On the other hand, it is generally understood that holistic review functions on an implicit, quota-like system. This led Justice Souter to write in frustration that “Equal protection cannot become an exercise in which the winners are the ones who hide the ball.” Justice Ginsburg: “If honesty is the best policy, surely Michigan’s accurately described, fully disclosed College affirmative action program is preferable to achieving similar numbers through winks, nods, and disguises.”</p>
<p>My “Power and Politics” class continues to confuse me for these same reasons. The court’s thinking sometimes seems backwards, sometimes forwards, and other times, undeniably side-ways. </p>
<p>Those cases were just covered in my class. Honestly BDM, PoliSci/Constitutional Law, are by far the hardest, most challenging classes I’ve ever taken in my life. Much harder than Real Analysis, or any math/science. </p>
<p>There is just so much to it: Who Governs? To What Ends? My prof. keeps asking us this question, and the answer is always different. WAH!?</p>