<p>Over the past few months, I’ve become convinced that young applicants harm themselves very seriously in the application process.</p>
<p>It’s hard to notice this process in medical school admissions, but it becomes much more obvious if you pay close attention to law school admissions. Law schools are extremely numbers-oriented, which makes it easy to detect very important soft factors. Race is one of them; it’s much harder for law schools to disguise the magnitude to which they practice affirmative action.</p>
<p>The other stunning example is the extent to which applying young and/or finishing college quickly harms candidates. It’s a big, big deal. Candidates who are well above the 75th percentiles at schools get rejected very quickly., something otherwise unheard of in law school admissions.</p>
<p>For premeds, SDN (another pre-med website) has long been bubbling with similar rumors. (“I have never heard of a student who finished college fast get into a top-ten school,” one poster commented.) Usually, of course, the sorts of students who finish quickly are the sorts of students who only apply to highly selective schools, as you see here in this thread.</p>
<p>The questions are multiplefold: maturity, why the rush?, and the shorter transcript time, and depth of coursework.</p>
<p>Of these, shorter transcript time is the easiest to explain and probably the least important. The reality is that if you are applying after your second year in college, everybody else has 50% more data – “track record” – than you do. They’re much more of a sure thing. (On top of that, they have usually taken more in-depth coursework, too, or at the very least signed up for it.)</p>
<p>The second most important factor is his youth, in and of itself. The average medical student is 25 at matriculation. Sure, most of the schools in question are younger than that (23.5?), but 20 is still a very large age gap. There are going to be a lot of questions about his maturity that he’s going to have to answer. There’s a limited amount of information that medical schools have about him, and if there’s any kind of maturity question – like his age – they’re going to err strongly on the side of caution. It’s not like Harvard can’t find another 37 to take his place.</p>
<p>The most important question, of course, will be: why the rush? Did he not enjoy undergrad? Couldn’t he find interesting things to do, interesting classes to take, interesting people to meet and spend time with? (Yes, I know there are cost concerns, but socially normal people find a way to make it work.) Many students who accelerate through will express an attitude of, “Why waste time?” Your undergraduate years are not a waste of time, and if a student openly considers them to be such, that’s a major warning flag. It tells you about his intellectual curiousity (low), his social bonding at that school (low), his involvement with the community (low), and his capacity to learn humbly and appreciate his place as a student (low). Of course, not all accelerated students feel this way! But enough do that this causes a problem.</p>
<p>This is why, over the past cycle, I’ve seen that our previous advice simply isn’t working out. We’ve always told students that it’s okay to rush through undergrad, so long as they take a year off afterwards and gain some experience. This made sense to us, but the problem is that it’s bad advice because it simply hasn’t been working. So don’t finish college early. And if you do, then at least don’t apply young. I’m sorry that this seems to be working out this way, but that is what I’ve been seeing in graduate school admissions in general, medical school included.</p>
<p>Moral of the story: Spend all four years in undergrad. Apply at a normal age. And, of course, the previous morals all remain: apply early. Apply broadly. Don’t withdraw from anywhere until you’ve actually gotten an admission. And balance your MCAT, if you can. This kid, I’m sure, is smart enough for medical school, but he’s botched his application process in several very obvious ways. And very avoidable ways, too.</p>
<p>Thanks for the “horror story,” curm. I think exploring this is one of the best things we can do for our premeds here. I’ve linked to it from the Horror Story thread.</p>