I’m just wondering how to best utilize my undergraduate years to best boost my chances at some of the top medical schools - primarily yale medical school.
Any pointers or warnings would be helpful, thanks!
note: I will not be attending an Ivy-League or highly ranked school for my undergrad. That said, it’s still a top-70 school according to usnews though I’m aware that’s only one rankings list of the hundreds out there.
What will Yale Medicine offer you that the other 130 medical schools in the US will not? If you answer is “prestige”, you will never be admitted.
Yale School of Medicine Statistics
100 in each class/4,400 applications
Average GPA=3.8
MCAT average =12 (top 3% of all students who take MCAT)
You need to do the same things to impress Yale as you’d do to impress any US med school: excellent GPA, excellent MCAT score, altruistic community service, significant clinical volunteering, sufficient physician shadowing to demonstrate you understand the sacrifices that a medical career entails, demonstrated leadership, excellent interpersonal & oral communication skills, excellent writing skills, research experience where you have responsibility for the success/failure of the project, impeccable letters of recommendation, academic & non-academic awards & honors, bringing some sort of diversity and uniqueness to your future med school class.
Demonstrating that you are compassionate, altruistic and are willing to sacrifice yourself for the greater good humanity. (That sounds corny, but it’s true.)
Have a strong work ethic.
Be unimpeachably honest and ethical.
Be an interesting, well-rounded person with hobbies/activities/achievements that have nothing to do with medicine or science.
Besides that you need to fit the specific mission of the med school(s) you apply to.
tl;dr: You need to have a full & well-rounded portfolio plus that intangible “something extra” that catches the eye of the adcomm.
There is no magic formula to getting an acceptance to “top” med school. (You do know the ranking system used by US News is extremely flawed and largely based on NIH/NSF research funding amounts, right? Stuff that has zero to do with the quality of a medical education or the quality of the doctors a program turns out.)
You can’t assume that 4.0 GPA + 42 MCAT + first author Cell + Rhodes Scholar + Roosevelt Fellow = Yale acceptance. Or any acceptance to a US med school, for that matter.
It just doesn’t work like that.