<p>Do older people (30-50) who've had other career experience have an advantage over youngsters (19-23)?</p>
<p>Why do people always assume that the older a person gets, the more mature they become? I heard a med student saying that the most immature guy in his class was in his thirties.</p>
<p>You thinking about waiting 10 years before you apply to medical school now?</p>
<p>On a serious note, I'm not sure it's possible to know this. The average matriculant is around 24-26 years old, I believe, so that speaks for a significant proportion of students not going straight through high school and college into medical school. One might assume that older applicants have weaker stats than those of students fresh out of college, but there are potentially many barriers that prevent older people from applying in the first place. In the end, I doubt you'd be able to tease all these factors out to determine if age alone helps admission.</p>
<p>From what I've seen and heard, I think older students get a little bit of a pass on the "standard" things pre-meds tend to focus on: grades, MCAT, research, EC's, in part because adcoms understand that they "real life" going on around them when they went back to school. The expectations are there, those things are good, but adcoms "understand" if they're not (the quotes are intentional). But at the same time there are other hurdles, much harder to define. They face a lot more scrutiny about why they want to be a physician, how they feel about starting later than most, having a shorter career, the effect on their family, etc. They have to prove the "want to" in greater depth. </p>
<p>It should go without saying that this is not a viable option if you're already pre-med.</p>
<p>also, this table is of note about ages...</p>
<p>Non-trads may get a pass on the absolute number of "pre-med" courses and volume of usual EC's, but most successful non-trads have excellent MCAT's and GPA's. Additional scrutiny, in a negative sense, is uncommon, but much curiosity is voiced at interviews regarding abandonment of an otherwise successful career.</p>
<p>Successful non-trads usually present a record of real world success in a medical or non-medical field.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Why do people always assume that the older a person gets, the more mature they become?
[/quote]
Perhaps because they no longer have to constantly display all of their insecurities on internet forums.</p>