<p>I am helping a friend with the med school app process. It would appear he applied to more schools than necessary as he has double digit interview offers. He is not complaining about this, but his pre-med advisor says, "take them all, you never know with med school admissions" and that seems crazy.</p>
<p>The time involved, the monetary cost, missing classes, the travel, it's all too much to do them all. Yet he wants to compare any grant offers.</p>
<p>How many is too many? I've always read that 10 or so is about right.</p>
<p>Is there a good way to learn which schools offer grant aid rather than just loans?</p>
<p>How do you decide which schools to cut? I suggested just going with cutting the schools which were the last ones added to the list since there must be some gut instinct involved.</p>
<p>Its not - IMO, take them all until you have an acceptance in hand.</p>
<p>The common wisdom for residency applications is that 10 interviews is enough to all but guarantee a match in most specialties, but residency applications are an entirely different beast to med school.</p>
<p>go to all of them until he gets an acceptance. that’s what im doing. schedule some of the interviews after oct 15 so that he can cancel if he wishes to</p>
<p>My nephew has only just completed his secondaries in the last week or so. He applied to 16 schools, got 16 secondaries. To date, no interview offers but no rejections, either. Should he be worried? Did he blow it by submitting secondaries so late?</p>
<p>BDM once said 10 (interviews) is about the right number. However, I believe DS started to decline some invites at about 8. His tolerance level for the grueling application process might be lower than most applicants though.</p>
<p>I do not have a proof for this, but my guess is that, if UG gives out grants, there is then some chance that its affiliated medical school may give out some grants. If not, then likely no.</p>
<p>Masslou–Your nephew didn’t necessarily blow it, but he isn’t helping himself. </p>
<p>Case in point: My D1 didn’t submit her secondaries until early to mid September last year (12 schools). She only got 2 interviews–one of which was to the state med school which has a late deadline (Nov. 1) and didn’t start interviewing regular decision candidates until November 5th.</p>
<p>D1 only got 1 instant rejection (in under 24 hours!), and got 3 more rejections before Dec 15th. The rest of the schools simply held onto her application until May (one held her app until July!) before ultimately rejecting her.</p>
<p>There is probably no good answer – it REALLY is based on the individual app. Sure, interviews raise the odds of acceptance to 40-50% in the aggregate. But interviews are based first and foremost on numbers; the three highest factors for interview selection or sgpa, cgpa, and mcat. (source, mcas article) After the interview, other factors take a higher priority (over raw numbers). if your friend’s kid is a lousy interviewer, s/he may need 10 interviews just to earn one acceptance. (OTOH, a great interviewer might earn 6+ acceptances.) Or, if the applicant experience/shadowing/whatever, the odds of acceptance drop.</p>
<p>One approach to determining how many intereviews is to look at the MSAR book (do I have the right initials?). As I recall, it shows for each program how many they interview, and how many offers they make. That will give you a feel for your odds of getting an acceptance. I also seem to recall the many schools give out acceptances on a rolling basis. So I’d recommend scheduling every possible interview, but then when (hopefully) you get a first acceptance, cancel any school you like less. If you don’t get any early acceptances, you’ll be happy to scheduled every possible interview.</p>
<p>What is the % of interviewed students who are actually accepted? </p>
<p>I guess if someone is hooked and has an unusually large number of invites, then declining would be considered. I know that in an earlier thread, some people said that if you’re a male URM with a high MCAT and a high GPA then you’re a shoo-in for top schools. So, in such a case, I could see declining a few low tier SOMs if your mailbox is crammed with invites from Top 20s. :)</p>
<p>his pre-med advisor says, “take them all, you never know with med school admissions” and that seems crazy.</p>
<p>The fact that his admissions advisor is giving that suggestion suggests that maybe there’s a concern of some type.</p>
<p>Is this student applying to UC SOMs? </p>
<p>Somemom…can you tell us more? Is this a hooked student? Is he applying to Calif SOMs? Does he have amazing stats?</p>
<p>Yeah. Yeah. I preach the same thing but…17 is too many. My kid would have had to start culling long before she hit 17 invites. (She did go to 12.) Not enough days, not enough money if there were enough days.</p>
<p>I agree with what the general consensus has been so far:</p>
<p>There is no such thing as too many until there is an acceptance in hand.</p>
<p>HOWEVER</p>
<p>If you feel that having too many interviews will hurt your performance at the schools you have more interest in (e.g. the stress of missing school makes it hard for you to prepare/stay focused while at your Harvard interview) then you might want to drop a couple.</p>
<p>The kid is a URM with an average typical strong CC type applicant profile, you know decent scores, decent ECs, solid UG prep, likely strong LORs, very similar to my DD and some of the other kids here whose journeys I have followed. Actually this student is back east not in CA. He has his state schools plus assorted Ivy type invites and other top schools across the country (he is originally from CA)</p>
<p>How would he go about determining which schools offer URM grants? I think the mission now has to be follow the money, assuming the schools feel good and have a certain ‘fit’. I just cannot imagine my DD having been willing to do more than 10 interviews, but we were in the extreme, she got her #1 choice and withdrew from the rest. Even two interviews a month were annoying to her in their interruption.</p>
<p>Fingers are crossed that some of the interviews already completed will decide in a few days! But you wonder, too, when you think about the stories we have all heard where adcoms know the applicant’s interview schedule. Will this kid be denied at places that know the other interviewing schools and which want to maximize yield?</p>
Some just dares to “gamble.” I believe DS started to reject an interview without an acceptance in hand. From my point of view, it was stupid for him to do so. But with some luck, it turns out OK in the end.</p>
<p>At the beginning of the application cycle, he was even toying with the idea of applying to TMDSAS schools only because he thought “his yield” (not school’s yield) would be higher, and not dealing with AMCAS at all. Hearing this, I warned him that the outcome of medical school application could be very unpredictable, and he finally changed his mind. But I guess for many schools that he applied to (except for some of them he really cared about), I think he likely applied half-heartedly.</p>
<p>
DS knows an URM applicant (I do not know his stats) who was accepted to many schools (but not too many because he did not applied to too many to begin with – likely because he does not want to waste money carelessly.), including one top 10. In the end, he decided to go to some other school (like top 30-40-ish but in a nice medium-sized city), which happens to give him most money. He was from a middle class (not one of those “URMs” who went to a high power prep school or those newly immigrated from overseas whose parents are already high achievers) and DS had rarely met anybody who is so level-headed about finance at such a young age. The growing-up environment matters.</p>
<p>It depends on personal situation a lot. Which ones to choose and even if money is consideration. It might be for one who paid tops for UG, it might not be for another who had it for free because of UG Merit awards. Some people prefer to be very close to home, others want to be as far as possible. Some pay attention to ranking, others are looking for type of medical students at different schools. Again, some would dream to be in beautiful Chicago (just as an example), others do not care for it at all, still third cannot imagine living without a car. And there is a small group who had a spot at one Med. School befor applying, so they could afford to apply to very few. There is also Second Look event which is crucial to some, who actually change thier mind based on information obtained in non-stressful situation.
There are so many very personal considerations, I do not understand how others could advise on this and how anybody would actually listen to others who have completely different set of personal considerations. I would strongly advise looking at your own criteria and decide based on your own preferences.</p>
<p>Leaving out those who don’t have the stats to be serious applicants…how many interviews would a good applicant who has a sensible app list likely get (no special hook, not a URM)? </p>
<p>For instance…students with MCAT 30+, 3.7+, good ECs. good LORs, etc with a well-thought out app list of say 10-15 schools. What would be the likely number of interviews? 4? 6?</p>
<p>D. was NOT interviewed at 2 out of 8. 2 out of 6 put her on waitlist. She had 4 acceptances and had very hard time deciding between 2. However, she disregarded everybody’s advises and used her own criteria, so that she pretty much knew that she would attend at any of 8 schools that she has applied.</p>