<p>Bump**</p>
<p>Hi I am a physics concentrator at Harvard and I wanted to know if medical schools give some slack depending on what concentration you are. For physics, courses are far more rigorous resulting in lower GPAs so will medical schools take that into account?</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>And the answer to your question is —not much if anything at all.</p>
<p>Dragonoh, in my limited experience with med school admissions, the admission board really wanted a diverse body of students academically as well as racially. There is much more of a holistic approach to admission once you meet the minimum academic requirements. I was shocked at how low some MCAT scores were with some of my classmates. One had an MCAT score of 21 but he’s a Duke attending now. While other classmates majored in music or English. The point I am making is that it isn’t cut and dry. So many things go into account besides your major. What you lose by getting hammered in physics you make up for in MCAT score and the educational diversity factor.</p>
<p>They will give you some slack because you went to Harvard.</p>
<p>If you have 3.3 and 33 GPA instate publics will most likely take you.</p>
<p>As far as major is concerned, they would not care about the GPA and major relationship.</p>
<p>frugaldoctor,
your experience may be different these days vs. back when you went to Med. School. It looks like admission is getting more competitive rapidly. I have only experience with one Med. School though. Based on my observation, the student body is not much diverse at all and absolutely do not refelct the make of of general population, not even close. Specifically, i noticed the extremely low number of blakc students. The number is so low, that it practically could be dismissed as non-existant in regard to any kind of statistics. Just assessing the diversity by looking at the entire D’s class, there is NO diversity at Med. School.<br>
Anyway, what is a point here? One has to try to get as close to perfect 4.0 as possible, rigorous or not. Trying to figure out if it is OK to have much lower GPA will only make a negative impact on you. Thinking this way is basically counterproductive. Just stop and try harder if needed. No matter how rigorous your UG program, the Med. School academics will be much much harder…and thinking this way will help you, it should encourage you to put more efforts or figure out more efficient ways. Mindset is everything, having wrong mindset might easily derail a person. Also keep in mind that you are not alone having struggles on this very challenging road. Everybody does, no exceptions, they are different from person to person though. Having a support group, firends, family is very important…talking from experience</p>
<p>I think it also matters if it is an MD vs. DO program and the location. I am an MD but practice in a DO heavy environment with DO students and residents coming through our hospital. I ask all of them where they attended school and what they majored in. I have to admit that the DOs continue to have very diverse backgrounds. I don’t know on the MD side and definitely do not know about their grades. Also many come from lower tier schools for premed. I don’t doubt that the environment is much more competitive, but fortunately opportunities exist for nontraditional students.</p>
<p>“Nontraditional Med. Students” this days is probably more age/previous experiences related, than race. The race situation at Med. Schools is so skewed, that you can call the whole student body “untraditional” in comparison to a make up of population in general. I have no idea about back in your days. What I mean is a huge % of ORM, almost none of them black though. I believe that this is not only at Med. Schools, I know for the fact that very selective HS’s have the same situation.</p>
<p>^ ditto for the “hot” majors at top colleges (BME at JHU?) and top graduate schools.</p>
<p>I once read somewhere (CC?) a joke. A student at an Ivy college walked into a premed class at the beginning of a semester, but he then walked straight out of the class after he had seen the composition of the peer students of the class. Having been graduated from a very top high school in a major city, he is quite familiar with the situation of having to compete against these kinds of students and would rather not take the chance of being in such a class (or major) if he has a choice. (E.g., choose some some major like X Studies in the major’s name in social sciences instead of biochemistry major.)</p>
<p>My GrandD has just started at superselective HS (she had to compete with 30 others for her spot, it was 30,000 applications to 900 spots). Yes, 75% of HS are Asian. No, not at all studying all the time, most are very much involved in many unrelated activities and excell at them also. She is into so much and wants to continue. It is not so easy in major city either. They go places themselves, taking public transportation. But nothing would stop these type of kids, very self-driven.
Another joke in connection to that. D. was given (just joking around) the title of “Honorary Chinese” by her Asian friends. Why? They said becuase she is a good student who also plays an instrument.
Did not you notice that practically all of these top kids are palying instrument and I bet many are involved heavily in competitive sport (mine was and it was way way more time consuming than her music, it was 3 hrs every single day and we spent many weekends staying in hotels for out of town meets)</p>
<p>In my day, late 90s, non traditional students were the older students. These students were the ones who didn’t attend medical school right after college. I was a non traditional student because I worked for a few years as an engineer. The oldest student in my class had to be around 50 years old.</p>
<p>There were very few AA or Asian students in my class. The dean of student affairs told me that there were some strong racist tendencies that prevented the admission of AA and Asian students. The top student in the class ahead of me, who happened to be black, would have never been admitted if it wasn’t for the dean insisting on some changes to the admission policy. These are her words. The student was a 4.0 student out of college with high MCAT scores. Legacy points were huge at my school, but my schook didn’t admit AAs until the 1970s. In fact, she helped end the BS/MD program at my school after its catastrophic failure during my year. She saw that program as an additional obstacle for AA and non traditional students who were easily excluded from that program.</p>
<p>I didn’t realize how important the medical schools at traditionally black colleges were until I entered private practice. Those schools graduate a large number of physicians who probably would not have had the opportunity attend medical school. I wish we could be a race blind society but it continues to be an issue.</p>
<p>Personally, I considered non traditional students as students who didn’t have a science UG degree. They definitely had a tougher time adjusting. I have to admit that things are more competitive now than before. Nevertheless, GPA, and MCAT scores should only be a small part of the admission decision.</p>
<p>MiamiDAP, Regarding your mentioning of “Honorary” student, DS has a similar story. When DS was in high school, he was not in the IB program by choice. Since their school almost always combines the IB class and the AP class into the same IB/AP class (likely to save the cost), he took a lot of classes together with the IB students. His fellow students in the IB program jokingly said he is a de facto IB student, and they even allowed him to own their IB T-shirt (which is meant for IB students) and he proudly wore it to school (and there was another special personal reason for this.)</p>
<p>To be sure, IB students are busier during the summer break (maybe being a volunteer to fulfill some IB requirement?) and tend to have more writing assignments (likely that even a math or science IB class has some writing requirement.)</p>
<p>We jokingly said that even though he was not an iB student at the high school level, he was an “IB student” at a college which has some relatively more strict IB-like requirement. If he went to some public college, he would likely skip many core education classes using his AP credits and therefore would take fewer of these classes.</p>