<p>Do many people take a year off after college to study for MCAT while doing research/clinical volunteering, etc? If so, will you be total of 2 years late compared to the "normal" applicants, since you have to wait another year for decisions to come out?</p>
<p>And how do medical schools view this? Negatively, positively, or don't care unless you do something useful?</p>
<p>Some people enroll in med school when they're in their thirties and 10 years removed from college.</p>
<p>As long as you do something productive with those years, you're good.</p>
<p>You wouldn't be 2 years behind. Instead of applying summer after junior year, you would do it the summer after senior year. Then you would take the gap year, and hopefully start med school the following summer.</p>
<p>Jakem is certainly describing the most common way to take a year off.</p>
<p>However, if you wanted to use that year to study for the MCATs, then you would have to delay by another year, for at least two years.</p>
<p>It depends on how you spend your time. If you actually spent your time without full-time commitment (either a student somewhere or a full-time job or some combination of the two), that would be a negative. More research would be a positive.</p>
<p>Could a person get into a GOOD medical school right after college? Is it hard or does one have to take a year off and do stuff to get in?</p>
<p>1.) I'm sure that every single medical school in the country has a signicant proportion of their students coming directly in from undergrad. Anecdotally, it seems that more selective programs tend to have higher, not lower, proportions of their undergrads coming straight through. This is NOT a bias against time off, it reflects the different applicant pools.</p>
<p>2.) MD/PhD programs depend heavily on research experience and therefore have much, much lower proportions of students coming straight through. Even there, many students still do.</p>
<p>3.) Obviously it's hard. It's always hard. Getting into any kind of medical school at all is hard. 75% of the kids who make it as far as taking the MCAT are never going to go to any medical school at all.</p>
<p>
Has any analysis been done to determine which 25% of those test-takers do go on to medical school? As in blank % of those with scores lower than blank do not apply. (Relationship between score and actual application to med school) . For example , if 60% of those with scores under 25 choose not to apply anywhere that really messes with the percentiles. Someone who scored in the top 2 deciles of test-takers could really be a lot more middle of the pack in the sense of med school applicants, right? And that's your "competition" - the M.D. applicants, not the test-takers. Hmmm. Well, that could be depressing. </p>
<p>Now to go look for applicant MCAT data (as opposed to MCAT test-taker data, as opposed to accepted student MCAT data, as opposed to matriculant MCAT data ). LOL</p>
<p>Gee. The more I think about this, the worse it gets. Let's take TopTen College of Medicine. Accepted students median MCAT 35, and USNWR average MCAT for enrolled students 35. Of their applicant pool , how many under 25's? I'm betting neglible. Then how many of those got in? 26-29? 30-32? 33-34? Has any school released this? Penn releases the %age acceptance by SAT score for UG. It could be helpful to know here also.</p>
<p>The following analysis is NOT correct, but it is what I use as a quick rule of thumb.</p>
<p>I tend to assume that the bottom 50% don't apply to medical school (~24 and below) and that the next 25% don't make it in (~24-30).</p>
<p>This is clearly, clearly, clearly not right, since the mean for admitted students is actually 30. I use this as an approximation which becomes more or less accurate above ~34 or so, since attrition above that point is pretty low.</p>
<p>What this essentially means is that the "remaining" percentiles get multiplied by four among medical students. So the 98th percentile (remaining 2) is really the 92nd (remaining 8); the 88th is really the 52nd, etc.</p>
<p>I would be very interested to see somebody do an analysis using ACTUAL data, not the fake data which I've inserted arbitrarily.</p>
<hr>
<p>As a start, means for applicants and matriculants can be found here:
<a href="http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2006/2006mcatgpa.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2006/2006mcatgpa.htm</a></p>
<p>A great deal of other charts are available here:
<a href="http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/%5B/url%5D">http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/</a></p>
<p>Data relating to all MCAT test-takers is here:
<a href="http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/examineedata/start.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/examineedata/start.htm</a></p>
<p>bdm, I am going to make a wag myself. Since you made one. ;) . I'm going to bet there is not a full two points difference between the median MCAT of HMS applicants, accepted, and enrollees. Maybe for a couple of others, too. If we knew for sure, maybe folks would accept the premise that the entire app has to "sing" for the top schools and not concentrate so much on the confounded numbers.</p>
<p>(Based my postulate on the idea that "every" 37 applies to HMS, but very few unhooked 32's bother. So if the median is 35 for both accepted and enrolled, then I'm guesing the median of all apps is a 33 or fractionally higher. Could be way off but...I'd like to see the data.;))</p>
<p>
[quote]
What this essentially means is that the "remaining" percentiles get multiplied by four among medical students. So the 98th percentile (remaining 2) is really the 92nd (remaining 8); the 88th is really the 52nd, etc.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>and yes, that is exactly what I meant by
[quote]
Someone who scored in the top 2 deciles of test-takers could really be a lot more middle of the pack in the sense of med school applicants, right?
[/quote]
Changes the perspective a bit, huh? And , to harken back to UG language, when you remove the "hooked" students, your formula may not be that far off for the "unhooked".</p>
<p>Now, to do **some **math. We know that in 2005 66,435 MCAT exams were taken, and that the mean was 24.7.</p>
<p>We know that 39,000 of them applied to medical school, and that 17,300 were ultimately admitted.</p>
<p>We know that the mean for those who applied was ultimately 27.6.</p>
<p>A weighted average reveals that the mean for those who didn't apply was a 20.5. If we assume that the mean is roughly equal to the median, then that means that half of the 27,435 who don't apply (13,700) have scores below 20.</p>
<p>Since we know that 25% have scores 20 or lower (16,600), then that tells us that 17% of those with a 20 or lower apply (2800).</p>
<p>75% of people (50,000) have scores 21 or higher; 36,000 (72%) of these people apply.</p>
<p>Even if you assume that a negligible number of sub-20's get into medical school, then people applying with a 21+ have a 48% chance of getting into medical school, a pretty marginal improvement over the national average of 44%.</p>
<hr>
<p>For what it's worth, we do know that a 30 is the 80th percentile among test-takers, but is **below the mean<a href="slightly">/B</a> for eventual medical students.</p>
<p>Thanks guys, now I have a headache from reading this thread. Is there a doctor in the house?</p>
<p>I think pre-meds not taking MCAT till after graduation are few and far between. The reasons most pre-meds take a year off intentionally could be:</p>
<p>(1) Taking a break between undergrad and med school.
(2) It takes a lot of time to apply and travel to interviews during senior year. It can impact your grades, in case you have no acceptance and need to re-apply next year.
(3) Build up the ECs during the gap year.</p>
<p>As for the MCAT numbers, no matter how you cut it, there are only about 17,000 spots each year for entering med students. So you will need to be among the top 17,000 applicants in general. Looking back to high school PSAT for some rough correlation, there are about 16,000 NMFs and 34,000 NMF commended. So if 1/3 of the top 50,000 PSAT scorers are pre-meds, one could make these assumptions (and yes, they are only assumptions):</p>
<p>If you are at least a NMF commended students, keep doing what you are doing, get a good GPA, do well on your MCAT like you did with the PSAT, you will be a competitive applicant.</p>
<p>If you are not even close to be a NMF commended students, work even harder, get a good GPA, and improve on taking standardized test and do better on MCAT than that high school test, and you can also become a competitive applicant.</p>
<p>For ECs, make sure after you do your ECs, you had learned a lot more about what it takes to be a doctor.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I think pre-meds not taking MCAT till after graduation are few and far between.
[/quote]
Many, many of my friends do this.</p>
<p>True. I also forgot that many pre-meds don't even apply to med schools.</p>
<p>It is mentioned that the "gap" year (I assume after undergrad) could be used to enrich our resume, but it seems unrealistic because how could you improve your resume if you already sent your application to med schools?
They wouldn't know what you are doing senior year, wouldn't they?</p>
<p>If you apply on a normal schedule, you'll be applying right after your junior year. This means that 3 years' worth of EC's goes on your app. If you take a year off, you'll be applying after your senior year. This means you can include 4 years' worth of EC's on your app. Plus, many secondaries ask what you WILL be doing during your year off (even though by that time you will have turned in your primary) so basically you are including FIVE years' worth of EC's on your transcript instead of just 3.</p>
<p>I'm taking a fifth year at Stanford to increase my science GPA by taking more biosci graduate classes (and because GATES pays for it). I'm also thinking about applying to the UK Fulbright program, too. There are so much more things to do before getting into medical school.</p>