Emory pre-med

<p>wow, out of all the top schools, I applied ED to the ONE school that does screen med school applicants and actually went there...I wish I read this thread 3 years ago :(</p>

<p>The thing that stands out to me about Emory's data is the fact that far too many of its students are scoring below 30 on the MCAT. In fact, if my math is correct, around 1/2 of the reported students scored in the 20's.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.career.cornell.edu/downloads/AaChart2007ForWeb.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.career.cornell.edu/downloads/AaChart2007ForWeb.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Cornell is a school that reports its data in the same format as Emory. Notice the proportion of students scoring 35+ and below 30. HUGE difference from Emory.</p>

<p>The caveat is that Cornell only includes data for its seniors while Emory includes data for both seniors and alumni. You would expect the alumni to score slightly worse overall than the seniors but that alone cannot account forthe difference b/w Cornell and Emory's numbers.</p>

<p>Alright, so I've been in contact with the head pre-med advisor at Emory, and he gave me a lot more information. The premed committee at Emory is willing to support anybody to apply to med school, even the kids with less than a 3.0 GPA and 26 MCAT. (In fact, often over 100 students from this category apply each year, although very few are accepted.) In the advisor's words, he feels that it is not his place to decide who will or will not get accepted to med school, so even if he doesn't advise a student to apply, he will support that student if he or she wants to give it a shot anyway. These students significantly lower Emory's overall acceptance rate.
BUT, when considering only the students who are actually advised to apply because they are competitive applicants, Emory's rates are much higher. In 2007 it was 82%, and in 2006 it was 95%. According to Emory's head advisor, many of Emory's peer institutions only publish the latter number, and they either don't allow certain students to apply or they don't factor those "unadvised" students into the percentages.
I'm feeling MUCH better after talking with the pre-med advisor, and I hope that other future Emory students will find this reassuring as well!</p>

<p>
[quote]
many of Emory's peer institutions only publish the latter number

[/quote]
This is what we've been discussing. This isn't true.</p>

<p>can anyone who is a part/has been a part of emory's premed program in the past come up with a reason as to why the acceptance rates are so low...or is it just that people dont deal with the MCAT well?</p>

<p>Looking at thesecond page of PDF posted earlier, Emory reported 101 people applying to med schools with MCAT scores of 26 or less. Of those 101, only 23 were lucky enough to get acceptances. We can all agree that numbers like that bring overall stats down, yes?? Also, I'm sure we can all agree that nationwide, the acceptance rates for applicants with MCAT scores of 26 or lower are significantly below the overall acceptance rate, which is about 50%. It's not like somebody who gets a 25 on the MCAT is going to have an easy time getting into med school just because they go to a top 5 school.</p>

<p>Just based on the principles of statistics, I think it'd be impossible for any school to have an overall 80%+ acceptance rate if you had that many people applying with low numbers. There are two ways to explain the difference. </p>

<p>1) Other schools have that many low-stat people, but aren't reporting them.
2) Emory is the ONLY school that has so many people with low stats applying to med schools. If that's the case, I'll go ahead and say that there must be something in Atlanta's water that makes people delusional.</p>

<p>I am a proud Emory graduate, and I know for a fact that Emory students have every opportunity and resource needed to be successful applicants. But if anybody's considering going into over $100K of debt at ANY college for some perceived advantage in getting into med school, I'll be the first to say don't do it. The important thing is YOUR medical school acceptance rate, and the main determinant of that is YOU. There are plenty of sub-flagship state school graduates doing just fine in great medical schools, often with the added bonus of not having undergrad debt.</p>

<p>Apply to Emory because you want to live in Atlanta for four years. Because you're really interested in studying primates (Yerkes). Because you'd have a shot at Division 3 varsity. Or because you want a mid-sized school where most faces are familiar, but everybody doesn't know everybody else's business. Because you like the idea of an actual "school spirit" that walks around campus. Or because you really like Coke. Find things you love about all the schools you're applying to. Trust me, it'll all turn out fine.</p>

<p>(Sorry for writing a novel, but it's this or USMLEWorld.)</p>

<p>Of your hypotheses, I can tell you that among peer schools, (1) is just not true. I've seen the reports for Duke, Penn, and Stanford, and none of them omit low-number applicants. That is simply not standard practice. Even the schools which do omit low-numbers applicants generally state both percentages. Your hypothesis (2) is also stated in unnecessarily extreme terms. It's more correct to say that "Emory has a disproportionate number of low-MCAT applicants," not that it's the "only" school.</p>

<p>The rest of your post is, of course, right on the money.</p>

<p>You're right, I shouldn't have made such a sweeping statement. Attempt to add emphasis gone wrong, I guess.</p>

<p>Just out of curiosity, what year are you?</p>

<p>I have a question for bdm or any other posters. When considering prestigious schools that have a similary sized student body as that of Emory (around 6000 undergraduates), how many students per year apply to medical school?
I can't help but notice that a few posts back, bdm stated that 218 students from Duke were accepted into medical school in 2004. Assuming Duke's acceptance rate was around 88%, that means that about 250 Duke students applied to medical school that year. Over the last five years, Emory has had an average of 369 students per year apply to medical school. Emory and Duke have nearly identical undergraduate enrollment, so the only explanation for this disparity that I can come up with is that either (a) Emory students are generally more interested in medicine or (b) Duke has indeed filtered through applicants in some way and/or not fully reported its statistics.
Am I missing something here?</p>

<p>Duke had a 79% acceptance rate that year out of 276 applicants. (It was a bad year.) Duke (like every single private school's report that I've ever seen) is fully disclosing all statistics and does not have a screening program in place; however, we do have a top-notch advising system. In addition to fully supporting any candidate who opts to go forward, one of that office's roles is to estimate any given student's chances at receiving an admission. While the office is not involved in actively deterring applicants, it may be that our office is a little harsher in its honest assessment of a candidates' chances.</p>

<p>This is likely to explain a similar disparity between Duke and Stanford, for example. Stanford has extremely... uh, lax... advising that does not take proactive steps to ensure that it is in contact with its premeds. For that reason, you can see that Stanford has a lower admissions percentage, higher numbers, and similar admitted GPA/MCAT numbers. This is not a trivial concern. If this hypothesis is true, it means that a sizeable chunk of Stanford's student body is not getting good advising regarding the application process as a whole -- so much so that many of them waste thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours and years' worth of passed-up opportunities applying to medical school. In Stanford's case, this is likely trivial, as it really only affects 5-10% of their premeds. In Emory's case, where it might be affecting 30% of them, this phenomenon would be concerning if true.</p>

<p>If any given student opts to push through anyway, any responsible advising department will throw their full weight behind that application. Duke, like Emory and Stanford, does this, but it is hardly special for doing so. JHU is the only school in the country that I've ever heard of that does not do this, which is why it's so startling to hear about it.</p>

<hr>

<p>Basic game theory, by the way, has an entirely different answer to this question. But that's probably less interesting.</p>

<p>I'm still not exactly clear on what causes the disparity. Are you saying that Duke's advisors discourage unlikely candidates from applying (but are still willing to support them if they ignore the discouragement), and that this brutal honesty causes fewer students to apply? From my conversations with the advisors at Emory, it seems like they don't give such a brutally honest assessment, and therefore, even applicants with very little chance of acceptance go through with the application. I think that if Emory approached unlikely applicants in the same manner as Duke, thereby reducing the number of applicants by 75-100 per year, Emory's acceptance rate would be a lot closer to Duke's.<br>
On average, how many Duke students per year are accepted into medical school? At the root of all of these statistics, this is the only one I really care about. Emory seems to send around 200 each year.</p>

<p>That's my hypothesis, yes. Not sure offhand; 2004 is the only data I have stored on my hard drive. That's a bad way of looking at it, however, since it's possible that Duke just has fewer kids interested -- or more kids with other options (the game theory I alluded to earlier).</p>

<p>But I want to make clear that this is not a trivial concern. If there are 100 Emory kids applying every year to "bring down their statistics," those are 100 kids who are putting their lives on hold and spending thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in an endeavor that isn't going to help them. They deserve to know what their odds are going into the process. At 30% of their pool, that's a sizeable chunk.</p>

<p>Beyond that, too, you have to wonder what it says about the rest of their advising office. If 30% of their kids stand basically no chance at medical school -- the process really is not that random -- then are the other 70% getting their essays read, doing mock interviews, being helped to select schools?</p>

<hr>

<p>This is all a small point. The big point above is exactly what MN said: for most students, you're either going to get in or you're not. There are very few students for whom the choice of an undergraduate school is going to determine whether you go to medical school. Very, very few. He's right on the money and that is the most important takeaway point. But I think it's a little irresponsible to blow off 30% of Emory's premeds. That's a ton of kids who are sacrificing an awful lot when they really need somebody to advise them properly.</p>

<p>So it seems like we've established that the explanation for Emory's lower statistics is not that too few students get accepted, but that too many apply. Yes?
I'm not trying to defend Emory's system, by the way, as I agree that for those 100 or so kids who really don't have a chance, it ends up being a waste of time and money. From what I've gathered, Emory's advising system offers plenty of resources (mock interviews, help selecting schools, etc.), but it is up to each individual student to utilize those resources.<br>
One other question: Emory chooses to compile and send individual recommendation letters rather than writing a committee letter. Does this hurt an applicant's chance of acceptance?
It's nice to hear that the undergraduate school doesn't actually make much of a difference. Let's say that three equally hard-working and motivated students attend no-name-state-school, Emory, and Harvard, respectively. The MCAT score is the same for each, and the only difference in GPA is due to the rigor of the undergrad school. Do they all have an equal chance of med school acceptance?</p>

<p>Yes, committee letters are very important. You can infer this from the fact that if your school offers it, you are prohibited from applying without one -- medical schools will simply not accept any excuse other than, "They don't do it." (This is what allows Hopkins to screen its applicants, by the way.) You can infer from that that medical schools very, very much value that particular letter.</p>

<p>I wouldn't put the chances all exactly equal, but I'd suspect they're all pretty close. Harvard was probably not a good choice, actually, as they have pretty terrible advising as well. If you used an example like Penn or Davidson, I'd say it might matter a little more. But in any case that effect is definitely secondary.</p>

<p>So will medical schools look unfavorably upon students from schools that don't write committee letters (like Emory)? Will this hurt my chances of being accepted?</p>

<p>"Unfavorably" is too strong a word. "With uncertainty" is the phrase I would use.</p>

<p>bluedevilmike - why do you say Harvard advising is so terrible? Are there pitfalls that I should be watching out for? Have you heard stories? Is there anything I can do to negate whatever downsides you may have heard?</p>

<p>For one thing, each residential college has one advisor, who is usually a medical student or sometimes a resident. That's a major negative, since it means they're not full time and they're inexperienced and they don't have the ability to provide context. If memory serves, they don't write a committee letter. I was almost offered a post as one, actually. (And no, I'm not a medical student at Harvard.)</p>

<p>Can you explain why they look upon applicants from such schools "with uncertainty?" Does it lower an applicant's chances?</p>

<p>It's a very important piece of information that some applicants are simply missing. It'd be like if some applicants weren't permitted* to write personal statements while others were. Of course the ones that don't are more obviously "sure things" -- you just have more information on them.</p>

<p>It's important because it allows you to place the other pieces of the application in context -- it's an objective voice that tells you, "Look, he got a C+ in organic, but that professor is notoriously tough even by our standards." Or somebody who can explain exactly how special it is that you're taking as many courses as you are, or what your school's policy is regarding this silly class that, actually, you had to take. It can compare you to other applicants directly, since the office does their own set of interviews and essay-reading, and help admissions offices decide whether you're worth one of their scarce interview spots. Without that, they know less about you.</p>

<p>(Notice that I say not permitted -- an applicant who actually failed to turn in a personal statement would be automatically rejected on grounds of laziness. That doesn't happen in this scenario, since it's not their choice.)</p>