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This is precisely what I meant.</p>
<p>Brown, I was mentioning the 72k bio majors to show the 23k offered by Ldog was too low.</p>
<p>How that morphs into a dig at your top 20 MD/PHD program is beyond me. Calling someone you don’t know ignorant or a liar is equally beyond me especially when you don’t know the what point I was trying to make.</p>
<p>Raycmr,</p>
<p>You wrote that most schools have a 20% acceptance rate because only 16k people from 80k bio and Chem majors get in. I really don’t see how I missed your point. Those 80k kids are not the denominator and to use them as such is wrong.</p>
<p>You wrote in another thread that you thought orgo was a nationally standardized curriculum so I retract any notion that you were trying to deceive any one. It is clear just that you have some misconceptions about how this process works, and I apologize for suggesting you were being deceitful.</p>
<p>I brought up myself because I am trying to show that your friend is one meaningless data point just as I am.</p>
<p>I was a first responder on 9/11 and believed things were on the level for the upper ivies which offer tuition of 10 percent of parents’ gross up to 150k or 180k. I believe it because they receive federal tax dollars. However, for the unhooked the rate of acceptance is half the published rate. After reading all the posts of the accepted for 2010 , I saw the vast discrepancies of the skill sets of those selected and know these will be the power elites in this country in the future.</p>
<p>The combines and Rutgers Presidential scholarship full merit award do things on the level like Caltech does in California does for the engineers. I also personally met a grad at Yale who received a bio BS and MS had to go to 24 Med school interviews before a lower Ivy med school spot opened up. I also know two Princeton grads who had to go overseas for med school and believed the harsh grade deflation policies and lack of their own medical school impacted them.</p>
<p>I don’t consider these anecdotal stories since I have seen their faces. If your stress level is low and your debt tolerance is fine God bless you. My D’s combined offers her very low stress. She will grad debt free and remains on the Presidents list at school so it was a perfect fit for her. She has worked for years with autistic children and wants to be a pediatric neurologist to help these children who have no voice in society. She comes from a family of public service.</p>
<p>With the new health care act if enforced doctors can no longer have private cash patients and fees will be uniform thru out each states’ exchanges. So debt load becomes more important than ever. Unsubsidized loans accrue interest from day one so 150k note can take decades to pay off like a home mortgage. Albert Einstein only half jokingly said compound interest was the greatest force in the universe.</p>
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<p>This is a topic the comes up frequently. At SDN, LizzyM commented on this in one thread. She declined to list schools that were known for grade deflation by the community of adcoms, but she did mention Harvey Mudd as an example of one such school and Princeton as an example of a school that did not deflate.</p>
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Where did you get this from? It sounds apocryphal.</p>
<p>The NY Times wrote an article entitled" A plus students chafe at grade deflation" in Jan 2010 about Princeton grade deflation. </p>
<p>Now the Secretary of HHS has the authority not Congress to flesh out the new Health care law. She already has power of what medical procedures doctors will be allowed to perform in the United States. One of her decisions will be how to Raise the availabe number of doctors quickly.The country is desperately short the number of doctors required for the 40 million new patients and it was floated as one way to immediately increase the doctor supply. We have to sit back and see what is written by the Secretary.</p>
<p>Somehow the thread has gone off into the weeds. :o</p>
<p>OP: I’m not a physician, but two siblings went to accelerated(both were six year, I think) programs years ago. Both knew in hs that they wanted to be physicians, so it worked out very well. Both got the residencies they wanted, and have enjoyed their very different careers. So if your applicant knows(as best as one can) that medical school is it-go for it! My siblings used the couple of extra years to get degrees in fields utterly unrelated to medicine(one got a master’s in journalism, don’t ask). So here’s a vote in favor of accelerated programs.</p>
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I also personally know a grad from Yale (with BS, but not with MS also in 4 UG years) who, after everything said and done (that is, I do not know how many interview invites she got and how many interviews she went to), got into a SUNY med school and maybe another one (She attended the former in the end.) And I think she should be proud of her achievement as every med school in US is good.</p>
<p>Regarding the number of interviews one should go to in order to be safe to say he would likley get into at least one med school, I think the rule of thumb (which I learned from BDM at one time) is 10. I did hear in the past that some applicant had gone to over 24 (he must be rich as it would cost a fortune to do so), but I think it is rare. So I think Raycmr’s Yale grad example is an outlier – even though it could happen. Most Yale premeds without a major problem (maybe >80% of all premeds who actually apply from there?) would get into one with much fewer intervews.)</p>
<p>Re: accelerated/combined vs traditional routes, I have an observation about this after seeing so many academically high achieving high schoolers could not get into mid/high level combined one. Many high achieving high school students could not get into the combined one just because they do not have anyone to guide them how to “DO PREMED” at the high school level. At the college level, these high achieving students could more likely rely on themselves as they are older. Also, academic achievement alone is more a distiguisher for the traditional route. (College GPA and MCAT are an order of magnitude harder to do well than high school level AP course/test scores and SAT/ACT scores.) Of course, this is just my personal opinion. (I personally tend to disagree with the idea of going the accelerated/combined route (such a program, esp. at “more visible” colleges, is a dying species I think) for MOST, but not all, high school students though. Maybe it is because DS did not go that route…LOL.)</p>
<p>The student from Yale was one of our tour guides at the school when we spent a full day there. He/she was very bright and a hard charger. The guide explained that his/her grades were just about perfect ( I didn’t have the chutzpah to ask MCAT numbers) but upper Ivy med schools were signicantly harder than UG to get into due to internationals and other goals of the Med schools. There was also emphasis on going to another Ivy Med school as a cross pollination factor.</p>
<p>The guide indicated the $2,400 in med school apps were not the kicker but the airfares, hotel and taxis bills plus the repeated missed days of class and the intense stress level. I could get much more specific about the difficult type of two bio degrees the guide completed, but I don’t want the guide identified.</p>
<p>The more I see of these people, I think they are not outliers or and are not points on the graph outside the mean. I think things getting less and less on the level for little people all the time.</p>
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<p>This could be true when the mission of such a med school is heavily oriented to one or a few specific areas (e.g., favor those applicants more into a science researcher, or social activists, etc.) Because of these specific missions, they could even more heavily emphasize qualifications besides stats. Some med schools flat-out disclaim they are mostly interested in grooming future leaders in the medicine (here in US as well as in other country which badly needs medical services – thus their interests in recruiting some “true” internationals who may go back to their home country and will potentially have a high impact in medicine there, not here, in their life time. They have little interests in recruiting internationals who are mostly interested in becoming a mere practicing doctor in US. (e.g., They definitely do not like those who were grown up in US and went to schools in US mostly and only had a stint on an international missionary as a part of their applications because they had a better connection over there.)</p>
<p>Raycmr,</p>
<p>I read your post #30 and read one of your previous about the same student:
My wild guess is he likely had applied to mostly very top med schools. If he happened to come from a “difficult” state like California or those with very few hard-to-get-in in-state med schools, it could happen. (Actually, DS knew a similar case as well.)</p>
<p>If I remember correctly, BRM (a long-time CC contributor some time ago, who many of us have benefited from) once said many students from ivy colleges tend to apply to top medical schools mostly because of both their own inflated ego and the peer pressure. This results in top med schools being highly populated by those students – applicants as well as matriculants. (Many equally good students in academics who did not attend an ivy college may still stay in-state for their med school education.) Another side-effect is that those students put themselves in a situation that many of them could not get a seat at any (or at least most) of these very top med schools because of the simple arithmetic: The class at med school is just too small to take most of them. They crowd (the majority of) themselves out – their high stats from a brand name college is not as rare and valuable when we are talking about the admission to such a small set of top med schools.</p>
<p>Make the tuitions for med schools very cheap and also make all doctors just government employees. Most of these “admission-craze” problems will go away. (Am I dreaming?)</p>
<p>I think things are getting less and less on the level for the little people all the time!</p>