Hi, I’m a sophomore from Virginia. I just need some help moving forward about what steps I should take to make it to Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (yea you guessed it). JHS is my favorite university of all time! I love it and I dream of going there. I will provide some stats for whoever needs it:
Currently have A+ and A in all of my classes. (first quarter)
AP classes:
Haven’t taken any freshman year due to complications moving from one state to another.
Currently taking AP Biology, got 100 A+ (rounded down from 112%) first quarter and currently have 115.8% in class (teacher gives 40 p curve on tests)
Will take 4 AP classes junior year (Ap Chem, Ap Seminar, Ap US History, Ap Stats) too much?
Will take 4 AP classes senior year.
Total Aps: 9 (good enough??)
Planning on taking IVY summer school programs, already submitted essays. (will this help?)
0 volunteer hours rn, but hope to start volunteering soon at hospital and begin shadowing doctors.
Extracurricular activities:
Currently in school Wind Ensemble/Advanced Band & Orchestra, played trumpet for 8 years.
Taking private piano lessons for 7 years.
President of school Medical Club, 1.5 years.
Founder of the NEHS (National English Honors Society) at our school
Should I start a Science Competition team?
Member of the Science National Honors Society, tutor students who have difficulty
Play basketball & baseball
Taking Spanish for 2 years, started learning French too.
I would appreciate if you guys could shine some light on my path, and maybe direct me in some decision making. I guess you could think of this as an early (cHaNcE mE) post, but whatever.
You have a lot of things wrong. JHU med school is GRADUATE school, so pretty much nothing you do now will affect that. You do undergrad (pre-med) first.
You do not have to go to a very highly respected institution for undergrad, although it significantly helps.
To get into a prestigious undergrad school there’s some things you need to work on:
PSAT is very low for these schools, you’ll have to work a lot to improve that. It’s harder than you think, especially with a lower starting score. Since you’re white and don’t get any URM boost, you’ll need at least a 1500+ to be competitive.
As for coursework, it looks like your school heavily inflates grades, which is pretty bad and looked down upon by most schools. (40 point curve on AP Bio tests? Most schools give 0 point curves and students get 4.0 GPAs regardless). You’ll need a lot of rigor + take courses at your local university to show that you can succeed outside of inflated courses. You don’t need a perfect 4.0 to get in; a 3.7 from a hard school looks 1000x better than a 4.0 from an inflated school.
4 AP classes for next year looks fine. That’s a pretty normal rigor so don’t worry about it being too much unless you’re struggling in the classes you’re in now.
Total 9 APs is fine. It really depends on how many your school offers. I would take college courses if I were you.
Most Ivy League summer programs are entirely worthless, and just money-makers. Most prestigious summer programs are free. These ivy programs will not help you AT ALL!
Your extracurricular activities are a little weak. Try adding more science and math stuff; but don’t do anything that you’re not genuinely passionate about.
Top medical school admits have an average of about a 3.9 undergraduate GPA and 96th percentile MCATs. Most went to top undergraduate schools.
To just get into med school, you need about 80th percentile on the MCAT, and a high GPA. The GPA is adjusted somewhat, but not much for school, so getting into a top undergraduate school may hurt you.
I would just focus on learning and getting top grades and test scores in high school and undergraduate. That will help you maximize you potential. It may lead you to a top medical school, and average medical, or something else.
As a sophomore you have a good opportunity to bump your ECs over this summer / next year. Your goal to get in is to rack up awards and good activities. It also helped me to look at some of the results pages for JHU that are on this website to see what level I needed to be around to get in, although the people who reply do skew way towards the top.
If the summer programs you’re talking about are precolleges they’re nice but not really great or prestigious so don’t rely on them too much. Doing science competitions is a great idea, it’s probably how I got in! Team competitions like science olympiad, science bowl are great, try to get some regional awards in these at least. If you have a particular interest and dedication for a specific science subject, there are “olympiads” for them which are basically solo tests that you take and qualify for different awards / rounds, big examples are USA math olympiad / AIME, USA biology olympiad, USA chem olympiad, there’s also weird stuff like linguistics olympiad, and they should be easy to sign up for but require a LOT of preparation to do well in (you can PM me for advice if you’re interested in doing them).
If you are able to get summer research that can be a huge plus too, either by getting in touch with a professor through family or teacher connections, or emailing local professors asking to intern / assist in their lab (you’ll have to email a lot), or applying to a research program that sets you up with a professor.
Check if there are any local educational programs that you can apply to that will help teach you more about STEM topics
Hey yea np, I’m a HS senior who got accepted to JHU undergrad this year, but I’m going to be a biology major and not sure if I will be premed or not. So although I’m not a current student I know about the admissions process / high school planning. Yes you can message me on discord I’m @platypusomelette#4057
