<p>I have become very interested in a career in medicine in the last few weeks. Looking at one pre-med thread, I saw bluedevilmike mention that if an applicant to med school has a 3.65 GPA and all other things are equal, they have a "50/50" shot. Does this mean only a 50% chance to attend ANY medical school? I thought that people with 3.5 GPA/30 MCAT could get in somewhere as long as they interviewed well.</p>
<p>(Just realized I should have titled the post Is it really this competitive, not hard, because how hard something is can't be quantified.)</p>
<p>“Does this mean only a 50% chance to attend ANY medical school?”
-Some old statistics is that 43% of applicants get accepted to at least one Med. School. Out of this number, vast majority will have stats higher and many significantly higher than 3.65/30. IMO, 3.65/30 has mentioned as absolute min.
However, you do not need to be scared. Just set very achievable goal of having A in every single class in UG and you will be all set. There is no need to remind that MCAT is NOT SAT/ACT, you have to prepare for it,…but this is well known fact.</p>
<p>A white applicant with GPA 3.4 -3.59 and MCAT 30-32 had a 55% chance of being accepted 2009-2011.</p>
<p>Recently, a med school admissions person came to speak to the pre-meds at my kid’s school. There are a good number of URMs, so med schools that want more URMs will “recruit” at their school.</p>
<p>The problem is that when the guy was speaking is that he didn’t want to be insensitive and mention that his SOM would be more lenient with GPA for URMs, so he just spoke generically implying that a 3.2 GPA could be enough. I understand why he didn’t want to say, "Well, if you’re a URM then we will consider a 3.2, but if you’re a ORM or White, then you need a 3.6+. However, some kids in the audience weren’t so savvy and left the room thinking that a more modest GPA would be fine.</p>
<p>Med. Schools recruiting is a huge news to me. Never heard of that. Why? Each Med. School has close to 5000 applicants for about 170 spots. Why organization like this would spend any resources “recruting”?
It is very well known fact that GPA standards (maybe MCAT also) are lower for URMs and higher for ORM. And what group prevail in Med. School? ORM beyond any imaginations/expectations, sometime having over 50% representation in Med. School class. Again, nobody could deny you, if you have all A’s and high MCAT and other stuff. Work hard and you will be there, ORM or whatever, nobody will stop you.</p>
<p>^^ You notice the AAMC has report grids separated by ethnicity. There’s one set of stats for white, another for Asian, another for African AMerican/black, another for Hispanic/Latino/Chicano (and within that group it depends on your country of origin Mexican-Americans are considered more ‘disadvantaged’ than Cuban-Americans and so have more acceptances with lower metrics), and still another for Native Americans/Native Hawaiians.</p>
<p>@OP-- that 55% chance? It includes all kinds of ‘special cases’: Olympic and D1 athletes, alumni’s kids, rural kids, kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, BA/MD students (who often just hit the minimum it takes to stay for the MD portion of their program). All these students get boosts at admission time.</p>
<p>Recruiting is probably not the right word for what mom2 describes. “Outreach” is probably a better one–making ALL students from all walks of life aware of what’s possible. There are plenty of bright kids (esp first gen college kids) who are honestly not aware of what the process is to go to med school.</p>
<p>Med schools would like to boost enrollment of student from certain minority groups. Patients often better relate to a doctor who looks like they do/understands their culture/speaks their language natively. In locales with high ethnic/racial majorities, it’s part of the med school’s mission to persuade the best students from that group to consider enrolling in med/PA school.</p>
<p>D1’s med school does a huge amount of community outreach: sending med students out into the elementary and middle schools all over the state to teach sex ed and talk about being a doctor; inviting high school jr-sr advanced bio students from all over the state to participate in cadaver lab; opening certain facilities to the paramedics/EMTs for further training; sending out admissions reps to talk to college students all over the state.</p>
<p>Over 90% of our state is federally designated as “medically underserved.” We need more doctors, but we especially need more doctors who are from these underserved areas/communities who will go back there to practice.</p>
<p>The reason that he didn’t say the quoted text in your post, is because it’s NOT TRUE. The FACT is that non-URMs are the majority of selected applicants at ALL levels of GPA and MCAT scores. </p>
<p>FACT: over half of Hispanics in medical schools in the US, had GPAs over 3.6
FACT: the number of URMs in US medicals schools is very small (hence the word “underrepresented”). If you exclude the numbers from Puerto Rico, (I have no idea why they include them in the first place) AND exclude the TB institutions, then the number is TINY, and there has not been much (if any) improvement in recent years! Why perpetuate these myths? Why must URMs be the constant scapegoat? You should probably be more concerned with the children of doctors, or of rich donors being admitted with low scores.</p>
<p>Pluma- I think it would be fair to say that a well-qualified URM would have an advantage over a well-qualified non-URM, if they have the same numbers. It may mean they both get into med school, but have a very different looking list of interviews. A URM may see interview invites from a more prestigious list of schools than the non-URM. Of course this assumes they are both well-prepared for med school.</p>
<p>Plumazel…you’re missing the point and ignoring the facts.</p>
<p>Nobody is scapegoating URMs. My point was that when speaking to a group of pre-meds…mostly non-URMS and a number of URMs, it is misleading to throw out suggestions that a student will be considered with a 3.3 GPA without including the “fine print” that the info doesn’t really apply to non-URMs (without some unusual circumstances.)</p>
<p>You can’t ignore the data… and you can’t ignore that med schools have “filters” that immediately weed out non-URMs with stats that are below certain req’ts. And there are filters that allow lower stats URMs applications to move on to the next level. </p>
<p>I remember Kristin saying that a sub 10 on a MCAT section was an immediate rejection from G’town. Would there be that auto-rejection if the applicant were a URM? Probably not. </p>
<p>No one is saying that all/most URMs in med schools have sub-par stats. I know that’s not true. My older son’s research partner is now at Emory SOM…she’s a URM with high stats. </p>
<p>the number of URMs in US medicals schools is very small</p>
<p>As you have indicated… The problem is that there aren’t enough URM applicants for all the SOMs to have an adequate number, so they’re more likely to accept a few with lower stats.</p>
<p>“Because almost none of them will be URM’s”- Almost none of are URMs, so?? Where is an issue? URM or not, we do not care, right? Qualified applicants get it and it is not true by any means that qualified URMs would not apply, why they would not? That goes well over my head.</p>
<p>I think it is true that quality URM’s (not all kinds of URMs though – some are more URM than others) are indeed rare and therefore there are fewer URM med school students.</p>
<p>As an example, the link posted by WOWMOM in post #2 above shows that:</p>
<p>Acceptance rate
Black applicants 27-29 30-32 33-35 36-38 39-45 </p>
<p>It is almost as though, as long as MCAT is >=27, MCAT is not a distingushing factor here. For applicants of white and ORM, they may need both GPA and MCAT, but it appears for this particular ethnic group, they need either GPA or MCAT-- and it appears med school adcoms search high and low for any merit they may have, e.g., successfully overcome the disadvantage environment in which they have been growing up.</p>
<p>You may argue that all tests (including MCAT and the tests in college) are biased against certain ethnetic groups though. (More likely, I think the system is against the students who grew up from a family and/or a community that does not have the means to supprt them when they were growing up. It is indeed very challenging for anybody to distinguish themselves if they were growing up in that kind of environment, no matter what ethnic group they belong to.)</p>
<p>My school definitely pays attention to diversity. I’ve spoken with our diversity coordinator before (we were seated next to each other at a banquet) and he mentioned that the whole purpose of his position was to ensure that students with diverse backgrounds were aware of the possibilities at medical school, much like mom2 mentioned. I hosted a few applicants this season–2 of them African American males–who mentioned, without prompting, that they had been recruited by various schools who either called them, visited their campus, or otherwise asked them to apply there. One is from Nigeria and a D1 athlete–so perhaps that played a role. They did not specify which schools. They each held multiple acceptances when I hosted them (one in December, the other in January) so I imagine their statistics were competitive. </p>
<p>For what it’s worth, there are 6 SE Asian kids, 3 Indian kids, 5 African Americans, and 2 American Indians in my class. The others (myself included) are Caucasian. In terms of race and ethnicity, my class is among the most diverse my school has seen. And across all races and ethnicities in my class (Caucasian included), there are a few people who I wonder how on earth they got here!</p>
<p>Regardless of what’s fair or not, I do remember how frustrating it was as an applicant to see that there were such differences in acceptance rates. But hey, it worked out in the end.</p>
<p>“Because almost none of them will be URM’s”- Almost none of are URMs, so?? Where is an issue? URM or not, we do not care, right? Qualified applicants get it and it is not true by any means that qualified URMs would not apply, why they would not? That goes well over my head.</p>
<p>Miami…not sure what you’re saying.</p>
<p>SOMs do care if not enough qualified URMs apply. They do care if not enough will be enrolled. That’s why SOM will recruit where they think they can get a number of good applicants.</p>
<p>D1’s school also pays a great of attention to diversity and has had a recruiting program in place for more than a decade. It’s paid off too. The SOM has a 45% minority enrollment, most of whom are Hispanic/Mexican American.</p>
<p>The Hispanic enrollment percentages almost matches (but still lags behind) the state’s Hispanic population percentage. Which was their goal.</p>
Just 9 ORMs? I believe at DS’s school, there are even that many internationals! – to be sure, most of these internationals are Canadians. Not all internationals are created equal.</p>
<p>At several med schools for which DS had a second look last year, likely 35% to 40% of all students are SE Asian or South Asian Indian. This may have something to do with the fact that most med schools DS interviewed at are more research oriented (my guess here) because I do not believe that all med schools are like this.</p>