<p>Hello. First of all I want to give a disclaimer that:
1. I'm still a high school student and therefore am very ignorant on the things that may seem very obvious to most of you.
2. I'm not one of those people who shoot for brand name schools just for their prestige and degrees.
3. I'm just curious. Just curious.</p>
<p>How hard exactly is Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Dartmouth, and all of those high tier medical schools?
I understand that getting into any U.S. Medical school (excluding the Caribbean) is an accomplishment, and that most medical schools have an acceptance rate of 1~3 percent, but what kind of stats would make me competitive for the best medical schools?</p>
<p>Would I literally need a 4.0 college GPA, 36+ MCAT, published research, hundreds of volunteer hours, significant and long-term leadership positions, 2 to 3 fantastic recommendation letters, beautiful personal statement, etc. etc. etc.?</p>
<p>Would anything less than that even be considered? It would also be very helpful if you could post the stats you applied with and the school you got into.</p>
<p>Very difficult. Acceptance rates are under 10%. For some of those schools, it’s under 5%.</p>
<p>Depending on how you calculate acceptance rates, I think your assumed 1-3% acceptance rate is way off. If you only consider global acceptance rates among those who apply, in any given year ~40% of applicants get accepted somewhere. School specific acceptance rates range from 2% to ~35%, depending on the school. (BTW, those under 5% acceptance rates are not always at the schools you might expect: Morehouse has 1.6% acceptance rate–which is lowest in the country; Georgetown a 2.8%; George Washington 3.3%; Wake Forest a 3.8%</p>
<p>Yes and no. You don’t need to be the perfect applicant, but you do need to have a strong application. All of those things go into creating a strong application–MCAT, GPA, LORs, leadership, volunteering, research. You need to be exceptional but not perfect. Additionally, medical schools will be interested in your “soft” factors–your communication skills, your interpersonal skills, the quality of your ECs, the diversity you bring to school, your passion /reasons for medicine, interests outside of medicine, and how well your CV/interests/experiences match the mission of the school. Because there are so many strong candidates applying to the med schools, these soft factors are very important. A couple of adcomms over at SDN have mentioned that they could literally fill all their seats at the med school 3 times over and still not run out of fully qualified candidates.</p>
<p>I know that you’re just asking, but consider this. Most people who want to become doctors do not do the MD/PhD route. If you want the MD/PhD route, then you have to go to a top med school. For everyone else, any US MD school is more than fine.</p>
<p>We only have very good MD schools in the US…no “so so” ones.</p>
<p>Lets just say, they are very hard–even those that have very solid reputations like George Washington and U of Washington have acceptance rates below 5 percent. My oldest daughter went to GW Med, not quite 4.0, maybe 3.8, MCAT of 38, several research gigs after undergraduate school UCSF and Wisconsin. URM (native) double science major, lettered 3 years in college in cross-country, and also has worked summers on Indian reservations. I think she got into 6 of the 8 schools she made application, including UW, U of Minn and MI…</p>
<p>Based on your other threads you’re a CA resident. This means you have a tougher road to med school than most. CA is a net exporter of med school applicants. The pre meds graduating each year from UCLA alone could fill every single public and private med school seat in CA and still have applicants leftover.</p>
<p>Only 15% of CA applicants matriculate in-state.</p>
<p>There is no guarantee that 4.0/36+ will get you into Harvard. And publications…well, many Med. School students have hard time publishing despite the fact that they run the team full of MDs, go to annual conference with the poster presentation, get great reviews that somehow is published …nothing will guarantee the publication of their manuscripts. In regard to "LORs, leadership, volunteering, research. ", every application is full of these and many are long term commitments, so you will not be any stand out here, unless you save humanity from ebola or something of this nature, but then you do not need to attend a Med. School, right? Joking or not, shooting for Harvard is OK as a dream, but frankly as you said, even Medical School in Ireland is fine and many take this route. So, shoot for the stars but make sure to stand firmly on the ground.
As far as getting into top 20, it is very possible, very realistic. </p>