<p>UVAJOE is bowing down to NORCALGUY,</p>
<p>Congrats man, those are stellar stats!</p>
<p>What is your undergrad school? And where are you applying to med school?</p>
<p>Thanks. I will be graduating as a bio major from Cornell next week.</p>
<p>I'll be applying to the usual places for someone w/ my stats: Cali, NY, Boston, Philly, Chicago...I would love to end up somewhere in California though: UCSF, Stanford, UCLA, UCSD are probably my top 4 choices. Don't really have a top choice for out of state but thinking Yale/Harvard/Columbia right now. Obviously, I'd have to be incredibly lucky just to get into any of the schools I've just listed.</p>
<p>If anybody would be accepted there it would be you.</p>
<p>Do i even stand a chance at Upenn/Duke or have my MCAT scores totally put those dreams to rest? How about UNC?</p>
<p>There's no one component that can automatically doom you from a school. There are only degrees of how spectacular the rest of your application has to be to compensate.</p>
<p>^^^I agree with BDM. Your 33 is okay for top schools although slightly below average (median is approx. 34-35). It will depend on the strength of the rest of your app.</p>
<p>My app is full of holes as well. Fairly subpar-average recs. Unbalanced MCAT subscores (15, 12, 10). In my opinion, weak clinical experience. A lot of EC's but not a lot of depth to most of them. It's very rare (even among the top applicants) that you will find someone with a perfect application. I certainly wouldn't fret just because one aspect of my application is weaker than other aspects.</p>
<p>The important thing is to apply to safer schools so that you can guarantee yourself an acceptance. I have a lot of match schools as well: Saint Louis, Drexel, NYU, Jefferson, Tufts, George Washington, Georgetown, the lower UC's, etc.</p>
<p>NCG is approaching the situation very wisely, especially given that Stanford and UCSF are notorious for being very odd and bizarre during the admissions process.</p>
<p>Just one more time to underscore how bizarre med school admissions are.</p>
<p>They often make absolutely no sense. I can tell all sorts of stories about friends or acquaintances and how messed up their admissions came to be. I'm sure that BDM can do the same. </p>
<p>I agree though that NCG is making some great decisions, but even out of his "match" schools, he'll get rejected from a couple.</p>
<p>The variance is definitely high, which is why I advocate what football coaches call a spread offense -- put enough receivers on the field and one of them is bound to be open. Stock gurus call it diversification: even when any single stock is very risky, you can protect against risk by buying lots and lots of them.</p>
<p>For example, usually there's around ten or so schools where you can feel pretty confident that an applicant belongs in that "tier" of selectivity. He'll probably get into one or more of them.</p>
<p>Which one(s)? Impossible to say. Some of them are going to yield protect him, some of them he's going to run into an insane interviewer, some days he'll run into the Dean on a bad day, and at some of them it'll happen that his application is reviewed at the same time as the latest Rhodes Scholar's.</p>
<p>So while any given application turns out very randomly, usually in the aggregate applications do have some sensibility to them. Usually.</p>
<p>Footnote: A Comment on Yield Protection
Schools, undergraduate programs included, have a habit of waitlisted or rejecting altogether candidates that they feel are overqualified for their programs. They don't like being rejected -- it boosts their admissions percentage, lowers their yield, and, to be honest, is also just annoying. So if they think you're very likely to go someplace else, schools get "jealous" and will preemptively reject you first. This phenomenon can explain much of the apparent randomness of medical school admissions.</p>
<p>As an anecdotal example, I applied to five of my state's public schools. We'll refer to them in their order that USN ranked their selectivity, #1-5, with 1 being the most selective. #5 rejected me flat-out. They did not want to interview me. #4 waited several months before extending me an invitation to interview. #3 put me on hold for months before inviting me to interview very, very late in the process -- at that point I would have been interviewing for a spot on the waitlist. #2 interviewed me and waitlisted me. #1 took me without any qualms.</p>
<p>If you were just to look at this superficially, you'd think that USN must have gotten their selectivity precisely backwards. After all, I was rejected by the least selective and admitted by the most selective, and the progression in between was almost exactly inverted relative to expectations.</p>
<p>In retrospect, it becomes clear that there was some yield protection happening. At the time, the process seemed frustratingly random.</p>
<p>Thank you Mike</p>
<p>"This phenomenon can explain much of the apparent randomness of medical school admissions."
Do you have any sources to corroborate that?</p>
<p>No, sorry, I know my language sounded like I was basing it on a statistical analysis. That was an accident.</p>
<p>No, no, this is purely anecdotal experience from watching dozens of my friends go through the process at twenty or so schools apiece. I found that yield protection usually explained quite a bit of the schools that had done bizarre things.</p>
<p>So maybe my sub par 33 will come in handy ;)</p>
<p>Certainly, if you're applying to Princeton, it's better to have a 1510 than a 1560, indicate the statistics.</p>
<p>Below 1510, Princeton wants to see you achieve as high as possible. Above 1560, and they don't care what you'll do, they'll take you anyway. But in between there, as you score better, they tend to worry about you going to Harvard -- so they'd prefer the 1510 they can get to the 1560 they can't.</p>
<p>BDM, if you don't mind, which med school are you in?</p>