<p>they’re honestly not comprable. Step 1 is a knowledge test with a massive amount of knowledge and a bit of critical thinking. MCAT is a critical thinking test with a bit of knowledge. On an individual question basis, Step 1 is much more straight forward. Anxiety wise MCAT was child’s play but that’s also because you can only take it once if you pass and because you know the competition is much tougher.</p>
<p>Whether or not you get graded the 1st two years is irrelevant. If you learn the material well with no grades you’ll be just as set as someone with As. In fact many people on Super Duper Neurotic think you should choose pass/fail specifically so that you can spend the first 2 years only studying for boards and not worrying about class (I disagree).</p>
<p>Regarding holistic admissions: It seems to me that the adcoms are making decisions on individual candidates based on the type of assumptions (or statisitics) that, if they were used against a protected group would be considered discrimination.</p>
<p>Example: Women are more likely to go into primary care, so they’ll admit more women. </p>
<p>It used to be said by professional schools that women are just going to have kids and quit, so why admit women. </p>
<p>The point is that stereotypes and even statistics should not be used in admitting individuals. What an individual is going to do with his/her career can be quite different from what others in that demographic do. </p>
<p>I know many women doctors who are not in primary care. I know white male doctors who are in primary care. </p>
<p>If they want to encourage more doctors to go into primary care, rather than using group stereotypes, it would be better to have a military like system for primary care. That is, a medical student promises to practice in primary care for 4 years in exchange for no cost medical school. If the student reneges on that contract the entire amount becomes due and payable.</p>
<p>^^Tatin–those type contracts for primary care doctors already exist. They are available at every med school school in the US. It’s federal program called NHSC Scholarship Program. The scholarship pays for tuition and living expenses during medical school. In return the new doctor owes 4 years full time service (or the equivalent in part-time service) as a primary care doctor in a medically underserved area. </p>
<p>All 50 states also run their own individual loan repayment for service programs. State programs are modeled in the federal program. </p>
<p>For the record, there is no evidence that women are being prefertially admitted to medical school. If you look at the enrollment statistics, you’ll see that last year more MEN were enrolled in med schools than women. This is true both for the entering class of 2012, and also for overall enrollment over the 4 years of medical school. There are only 5 or 6 med schools in the country where female enrollment is higher than male enrollment. (And those are mostly at HBCU med schools). And many specialties are still overwhelming male.</p>
<p>Holistic admission doesn’t use statistics to make pre-judgments about any particular group of individuals. It simply contextualizes an individual’s achievements.</p>
<p>UTSW has an excellent Powerpoint it uses to explain holistic admissions to its staff.</p>
<p>Among a number of interesting points in the PP is the fact that adcoms–even without considering the use of holistic admission-- ranked 13 personal characters HIGHER in importance than knowledge of biology for success in medical school.</p>
<p>MCAT scores are predictive of whether a medical student will be able to pass the STEP exams only to certain point; the correlation flattens out at the upper end of scores (above a 27). IOW, there is little different in the pass rate of those with a MCAT score of 28 and MCAT score of 38.</p>
<p>Holistic admission has no affect on graduation rates, both 4 year and 5 year.</p>
<p>I was taking an example from the Quinnipiac adcom’s quote. </p>
<p>Women, first generation, second career, etc. are more likely to go into primary care. </p>
<p>What I’m saying is that if the schools want to graduate more primary care doctors, then use of the programs you mentioned is a better way to do it than to base admissions on stereotypes of which demographic is more likely to go into primary care. But ‘holistic’ admissions seems to be using those demographics and those assumptions rather than an individualized approach.</p>
<p>If you listen to the whole interview (or read the transcript), Quinnipiac is not selecting women preferentially for admission, but gender, previous careers and age of applicants, etc are used as one of many factors they consider in making an admission decision.</p>
<p>(In fact, immediately after talking about women in primary care, the Dean goes on to give an example of MALE applicant who is being considered because of his desire to work in primary care.)</p>
<p>The school has a matrix it uses to rank an applicant’s “fit” to their school’s mission. This matrix includes those factors mentioned above. However, many more factors are include on the matrix besides just those. This includes “why medicine?” and past activities. (Plus other things.)</p>
<p>Our state med school has a mission of primary care. It preferentially admits those interested in primary care, but it also looks at evidence to back up a students assertion of interest.</p>
<p>For example, when D1 was interviewing, she was asked about her potential specialty. She mentioned possibly emergency medicine, radiology and surgery, but admitted she really didn’t know yet because she hadn’t been exposed to all fields. The interviewer said to her "At least you’re honest. The [person] I interview right before you said he wanted to be a pediatrician, but the [individual] has never in his life worked with kids in his life. So how would he know?</p>
I wonder how an applicant who wants to become a neurosurgeon can demonstrate to this ADCOM that he is a deserving candidate for admission! By cracking open a few skulls before applying? </p>
<p>Well, as TatinG said, it is what it is. Sooner or latter kids figure out this canned stuff and start gaming the system.</p>
<p>This reminds me off this one teacher at my kids elementary school, who was so impressed by a kid’s power point presentation for a project the previous year, she couldn’t stop gushing about it at a back-to-school event. She never wondered whether preparing fantastic power point presentations was a skill expected off of an 8 year old! To my skeptical mind, however, it was obvious that it was the kid’s parents that deserved all the accolades for that power point presentation :D</p>
<p>Re: elementary school teacher and “hands-on project-based” learning in elementary/secondary education:</p>
<p>When DS was in elementary school, most of the kids for his school were from the same neghborhood which is next to the school. So, many students even walk to the school.</p>
<p>At the end of the school year, students were expected to present what they learn about “neighborhood” for their social study class.</p>
<p>In the morning of the presentation day, you would see many sleepy parents walking to the school with their kids. Some of the models were apparently built by the parents, not by the second-year elementary school kids.</p>
<p>Also, DS’s fifth grade teacher did not know how to convert, say, 2/5, to 0.4. (Or, the other direction, 0.4 to 2/5.) she said since she did not know how to do it, the students did not have to learn this. She even did not bother to learn it.</p>
<p>In that case, kal, the correct answer is “I don’t know, but I always thought I might be interested in _________ because ________”</p>
<p>The point is the kid was trying to game system but got caught because he couldn’t demonstrate nor articulate why he wanted specifically to be pediatrician.</p>
<p>exactly, you don’t have to have direct 100% replicated experience to demonstrate interest in something, but for neurosurgery you could have easily had some combination of interactions with neurosurgeons/surgeons + dissections in school + studying the brain and/or cancer and easily make a compelling argument for why you are interested in neurosurgery.</p>
<p>There are so many opportunities to interact with children (teaching/tutoring, babysitting, camp counselor, numerous community service type things) that to claim interest in pediatrics without any of those on your record is just foolish.</p>
<p>Of course people “play the game.” This is not unique to medicine either. If you’re bad at playing the game though you’re going to get caught and that’s probably even worse than not playing at all.</p>
[ol]
[<em>]There are no “correct” answers for these kind of abstract questions. The correct answer is the one sitting on the other end of the desk, likes.
[</em>]The most one can deduce from the fact that this kid did not give your correct answer is that, he doesn’t know how to play dumb - not that he is not qualified to be a pediatrician.
[<em>]These kind of questions are similar to the “where do you see yourself in the next X number of years”.
[</em>]Every time somebody asks that question, I feel like - in your spot dumb**s, just so that I fire you for asking such stupid questions Good thing I haven’t been an interviewee in the last 15 years
[/ol]</p>
<p>About the guy who asked this question:
[ol]
[<em>]He asked that question, knowing fully well (may be I am giving too much credit to this guy), all kid has to do is to simply play dumb.
[</em>]He still goes ahead and asks that question.
[li]He then makes it a point to talk abut it, with the very next interviewee. Assuming that this guy is a doctor, he is the kind that does not give a second thought about talking one patients case with another.[/li][/ol]</p>
<p>I have a feeling that one these kind of questions from an interviewer like this, coupled with a potentially hot-headed answer, was what done in your daughter’s ex at your state school. The fact that, he WAS admitted to Pritzker makes me not lose faith in this system completely. </p>
<p>This is exactly what is wrong about this picture. The expectation that every applicant will have a fully planned out medical career all the way through a super specialty like neurosurgery, with evidence to support his suitability lined up, is preposterous. Kind of like that school teacher from my previous post, expecting that 8 year olds to have power point skills.</p>
<p>IWBB,</p>
<p>I am going put you on the spot again:) Did you have a super specialty (or in your case, a research topic) with evidence to support your interest, lined up when your going through the interviews? How did you feel when you came to know that one your interviewers felt that your Classics major was an indication of lack of commitment to research? I am guessing that you probably felt like, “How could this m<em>r</em>n jump to such far fetched conclusion, even though I also majored in Biology?”.</p>
<p>Not to answer for Brown but to give another perspective of being able to back-up a student’s claim of looking to primary care or any specialities from previous studies/ECs/majors…</p>
<p>Son received his undergrad degrees from 2 schools (1st school does not allow double majors) so, a degree in economics, another BS in biochemistry, another BS in microbiology, a minor in genetics and another in Helenic studies. He spent 4 high school summers doing cancer research at Duke and UNC, spent his college summers doing research at Harvard and Yale, one in public health and another in healthcare economics. His 200+ page senior thesis was in healthcare economics. His advisor/preceptor for said senior thesis was recently awarded the Nobel prize for economics.</p>
<p>His ECs were a 4 yr high school EC (normally irrelevant for med school but since it was 4 more years in college made sense) + 4 yrs in college tutoring same “type” of kiddos they could see he was committed. Balancing this as a D1 college athlete the adcoms knew he choose carefully where he spent his “free” time…time off the field.</p>
<p>He didn’t tell the adcomms what he wanted , he showed them through years and years of his studies, research and activities. There was no question of his committment.</p>
<p>It was just a question of fit. And that is where the holistic comes in. Some schools just were not him and he is was just not them. After getting over the GPA and MCAT hurdle it was much more his personality and the type of leader he already was and where he could contribute the most.</p>
<p>Since we are a low EFC family there was no MCAT prep courses. And he didn’t always do what his pre-med advisor suggested. They didn’t see things the same. For many different reasons. But son did get the interviews and acceptances he wanted. Surprisingly his top choices matched to him. Just came down to a question of money.</p>
<p>I think and I think son would agree that the system did work. Maybe even better than undergrad however, that worked out well for him as well, again more holistic reviews.</p>
<p>Yes, other than one summer doing data analysis in a skin cancer epi lab, all of my advanced coursework, research experience, and honors thesis was in the area I listed as my #1 field which lined up perfectly with my desired specialty if asked. I also said my dream job was to be a department chair or dean and I backed that up with administrative/leadership experiences in my fraternity (an elected or appointed position every semester including President) and greek life as a whole at Brown (was Vice President of the entire greek community).</p>
<p>With regard to the Classics comment. I did think the guy was an idiot because I took 20 science classes (22 if you count cognitive studies as science and my policy class was on health care in america) compared to 9 classics classes one of which even focused on death/dying. This + research + MCAT teaching seems to me that it’s pretty clear what I’ve demonstrated. The people who actually read my application in full and interviewed me didn’t agree with this guy so it’s pretty clear that it would have taken a similar idiot to agree. I would hardly call what he did “holistic review” of my application.</p>
I know you won’t. I don’t either. However, it could have been lethal to your chances, if wiser heads didn’t prevail. To me the conclusion reached about the other kid’s interest being a pediatrician sounded just as rash as the one this guy reached about your interest in research, unless we start splitting hair.</p>
<p>except I don’t think they are at all similar. If I had applied as a classics major with only the bare minimum pre-med requirements and no research then I think it would be fair to question me just as I think it’s totally fair to question a person saying they are into pediatrics with NO experiences with children. I had a bachelor of science with honors and research experience - both of which count as experience in the field I am expressing interest. If the kid had worked as a camp counselor and the person still questioned him then I don’t think that’s necessarily fair.</p>
<p>I’m quite impressed with your dedication. My son is going to be starting at WUSTL this fall. He is going to be majoring in Classics and plans on going to medicine as well. It’s a pity that some idiot out there actually thought that your major indicated a lack of commitment to research.</p>
<p>I am still catching up on this thread, but I call, “no way” on this premise. Kal, how do you know this? Yes, you all get two years of science and two years of short (2-12 weeks exposure) to many specialities, but that is it. After you choose your residency that is what you learn and the EM doctor does not learn most of what the Ortho learns or Ob/Gyn learns.</p>
<p>If you tore your ACl, did surgery and therapy, you should have an intrinsically better understanding of the ramifications, including the part that doctors don’t think about, real life, than any other doctor other than an ortho or maybe PM&R.</p>
<p>Same with other experiences- diabetic? family with cardiac or cancer diseases & serious interventions, those experiences coupled with your med school will put your knowledge beyond many other doctors. It is likely the same with cultural things. Not that all First Nations or all Hispanics or all any race or religion are the same, but if you are Navajo and grew up in AZ and work in AZ on the res, yeah, you probably have a pretty broad and deep understanding of the unmentioned factors that affect the care & especially chronic disease management success.</p>
<p>Not to put words in his mouth but Kal is the blacksheep in his family of doctors and his son will be righting the family tree to the rightful place. :D</p>
<p>texaspg, That is funny.
How would you describe DS and my family in the same way? Although he was born in US, he really did not learn English from us. I still remember that after half a year in a 2-day-per-week preschool, his teacher said she believed he finally had understood what she was saying.</p>
</p>