"THERE ARE SO MANY STEPS in applying to medical school, and the AMCAS application is one of the first and most significant.
In addition to the personal statement and writing about extracurricular activities, AMCAS, or the American Medical College Application Service, asks various biographical and demographic questions. One specific question to applicants is if they consider themselves disadvantaged. A lot of applicants struggle with this question and whether or not they should identify as such.
What does it mean to be ‘disadvantaged’ when applying to medical school and how should this difficult question be approached?
https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/medical-school-admissions-doctor/articles/what-it-means-to-be-a-disadvantaged-medical-school-applicant
In addition to the allowing the applicant to self-identify as disadvantaged, AMCAS also automatically generates a SES disadvantaged identifier for every applicant. The EO identifier.
The EO identifier categories a student from EO-1 through EO-5 (EO-1 is the most disadvantaged category; EO-5 the least) based upon the biographic data an applicant has supplied to AMCAS. The identifier uses parental education and occupation information, as well as an applicant’s personal work history, and the zip code of an applicant’s primary childhood home (identifies an area as medically underserved based upon federal guidelines) to generate the EO-identifier.
Students who do not choose to self-identify as disadvantaged will still be identified as SES disadvantaged by AMCAS.
Parental financial situation, parental and background information, k-12 education , coming from a an area deemed disadvantage ,
I live in an area that gets one autoadmit Med studebt each year, and extreme consideration for others. Acute shortage of doctors here. Poor education system overall so the Top20 school in this state as well as state flagship, do give applicants from here a boost