UMKC 6-year BS/MD Program

Pre-Med & Medical School Multiple Degree Programs
4861

@Roentgen, thank you for posting the scholarship information and those COA charts. My son has been looking and applying for scholarships in general, regardless. For some reason, they didn’t add up the totals for non-residents in the link, like they did for resident and regional, but it looks like tuition total is $333,083 and total cost of attendance is $467,854 for non-resident students. Does the school purposefully select for affluent students to pay this type of tuition?

@blugrn6 and @Roentgen did you apply to any other combined degree BS/MD programs, besides UMKC?

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@NervousDad01, wow, out-of-state (non-resident) tuition seems to be getting more and more ridiculous every year. I know some of the people who are on the Council on Selection. I honestly don’t think they PURPOSEFULLY select for very affluent out-of-state students. They genuinely want people who will succeed in the school and give people a chance. Unfortunately, those are just the people who end up accepting the offer, which is completely out of the Council’s hands. Not everyone who is accepted to this program, accepts the offer, when they compare costs to other schools. Realize most families looking at those tuition figures, esp. for the first 2 years, are going to think those tuition figures are crazy, esp. with no real scholarship assistance. As mentioned, the university is in huge financial straits now, and is highly dependent on student tuition, one of them being revenue from the medical school.

If you’re not from Missouri, financially, you will not come out ahead by going to UMKC’s 6 year program. Even as an in-state resident, you will pay more in tuition as a 6 year student, than someone who goes to UMKC as a regular undergraduate and then goes to medical school (most of UMKC’s undergraduate premeds do not wish to go to UMKC’s med school if they have a choice for a variety of reasons – they tend to go to KU or Mizzou in the allopathic world).

So for me I applied to all the ones in which I was saving a lot on time (or at least I thought I was). So I applied to Howard’s 6 year program and NEOUCOM’s (NEOMED) 6 year program. I didn’t get interviews for either, as Howard tends to more recruit underrepresented minorities since it is an HBCU (they also take very few BS/MD students period) and NEOUCOM will recruit like 3 out-of-state students out of 100 BS/MD students. I didn’t think I was qualified academically for Penn State’s 6 year program with Jefferson Medical College (it was 6 years at the time, and just recently became 7 years), and I think Miami’s HPME (it was 6 years at the time, it’s now 7 years), required SAT Subject Exams, which after studying and prepping for SATs and AP exams, I just couldn’t fit in another standardized exam(s) to prep for. I did apply to IIT’s 6 year BS/MD Combined Honors Program in Engineering and Medicine with either Chicago Medical School or Rush Medical College, I really can’t remember which. I got a huge scholarship for their undergraduate program, but never heard back on my application to the BS/MD part. I think that would have been a better program for me honestly, just because if I had changed my mind about medicine, I would have still had a great degree in engineering with no time lost, but hindsight is always 20/20.

I didn’t apply to any 7 year or 8 year programs, as I didn’t feel I gained anything in terms of time (1 year was no big deal to me, and NW/Brown’s programs also required SAT subject exams, and were of course, highly competitive). I probably would change that if I could back and do it all over again, just so that I had more options, and didn’t feel compelled to pick a combined program. However, back then as a 17 year old applying, I didn’t even know how to evaluate medical schools which I think was kind of the problem with comparing. There’s much more information out there now.

4863

Will interview notifications come before new years?

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@Watang

I haven’t got anything either. The website says “late December” and December ends on Thursday. My assumption therefore is we should all have notices between Monday and Thursday!

4865

The wait is getting to me, every time I get a new email I have a mini heart attack :))

4866

@Watang @Elemelon @somuawan

Its going to be ok you guys. When I was applying UMKC said the invites will come out late december and I got my invite on January 8th…

@NervousDad01

I applied to a lot of them…like I said before the “scare factor” was really high for me. Idk what it was, for some reason I felt guilty that I would be a fool to not accept a guaranteed admission if had gotten one. I think my parents didn’t know anything about this stuff and their advice was…“what if you spent 4 years in undergrad and not get into medical school? You should definitely take this opportunity if you get it”. That just exacerbated the risk factor. For some reason I thought that I would be more of a failure and disappointment to my parents if I had not gone into a BA/MD program if I got accepted and gave it up and failed to get into medical school later.
And of course, being Asian my family always knew of like 7 other people in their friend group whose son/daughter when to UCLA, Berkley, and Michigan and than didn’t get into medical school and had to go to the caribbean for medical school, so they were like hey, I know UMKC has its flaws but its better than going to school overseas right? And at that time, seeing my parents invest so much time and money in my education and not being so mature, my young mind was like: well when you put it that way it seems idiotic to take a risk of going the traditional way if I know medicine is definitely what I want to do.
For me, since knew I wanted to do medicine because of my prior background working in the hospital, I wasn’t afraid of getting here and than finding out I hate this. That wasn’t a factor I had to incorporate into my decision.

But still, if I had to do it all over again, I would accept my full ride I got at UMich and taken my time to get into a top tier medical school. Two of my cousins and two of my really good friends from high school did that and they are now at top tier med schools and the resources that they have access to are just phenomenal. But hindsight is 20/20 as they say.

Anyways, I digress…

Ones I got accepted to:

  • SLU’s BA/MD program
  • UMKC
  • Union College BS/MBA/MD Program
  • IIT’s six year medicine program

Ones I applied but didn’t hear anything from:

  • UMiami
  • Brown PLME
  • Rice/Baylor
  • Toledo
  • Drexel
  • USC
  • UCSD
  • Northwestern
  • Jefferson’s 7 year medicine program

Again, I’m not saying UMKC is a terrible place. I think sometimes my tone conveys that it was a big mistake coming here. Would I do it again? Probably not…and here’s why:

  1. I love traveling and now I seriously regret not having the opportunity to do a study abroad and expanding my horizons…I am never in my life going to have that opportunity to just learn a foreign language in another country for a semester and just freely travel europe in my free time and work a job while I was there, etc. I think those are important life experiences to have
  2. I had to bust my butt to get subspeciality resources (research opportunities, mentoring, etc), I think it is just harder because of the nature of the medical center. Its not necessarily the medical school’s fault, they can’t control the residency programs. But at other medical schools there are lots of departments that are more well represented (for example UMKC doesn’t have its own ENT, Derm, Neurosurgery, or Radiation Oncology departments). If you want to do any of those, you are not going to have anyone that can give you advice. You’re gonna need to go to another medical school for help and they don’t like to help students that are “not their own”.

But again, these were not things I knew before I decided to come here. And I was too young to realize that so I can’t really blame the school for that problem. They are really upfront and clear about the curriculum, how there is not much time to take electives or explore outside of medical school, and how their strength is primary care physicians. They give you an introduction on interview day telling you that UMKC was created to churn out primary care doctors. That is their mission, that is their goal, and that is their greatest strength. And when I interviewed here I wanted to do primary care (medicine or pediatrics) and so I was sold! Now that I decided to not do primary care, I regret my decision. That’s not neccesarily the schools’s fault.

I will also say this: I post so that everyone has the information they need. I have no ulterior motive to post here. I’ve had an awesome time here. I was the lucky one who has breezed through my six years here. Yes, the school gives us frustrations here and there, but I’ve never had any academic problems, I chill and waste time just as much as I work, and I’ve made some awesome life long friends here that I have an unhealthy amount of attachment to.

I think in hindsight it is easy for me to say, I was missing x, y, and z so I didn’t like it here. But there are some good things that you get out of UMKC as well. You just have to weigh your options and decide what you like.

4867

Has anyone received the acceptance letter from UMKC general admission yet?

4868

@sss0296 I heard back from the general admissions on September 28. I heard we find out soon after Christmas so hopefully tomorrow!! @Watang @Elemelon @somuawan

4869

I got my acceptance to for general admission in September

4870

@NervousDad01, I really have to highlight and emphasize what @Blugrn6 said. There’s such a huge “scare factor” and I would also add there’s a huge “guilt factor” as well. It’s ok if your son has these feelings, these are normal, but these feelings aren’t good to make matriculation decisions from. That’s a lot for any high school senior (your son) to take in and process, and it’s hard at that age to try to be objective. None of my family was in medicine so getting objective advice was difficult, although they gave me more emotional support than I could ever dream of having. I still remember my mom’s tears of joy when I got the UMKC BA/MD acceptance (it used to be by snail mail back then, when everyone did the light weight envelope/heavy weight envelope thing to see if it was a rejection or acceptance, respectively), so you can imagine the internal guilt at that age I would have felt by saying no, but looking back I also know that if I had explained why I chose not to go, she would have supported me 100% and I would have been close to home (which all mothers want, lol).

For me it was all internally driven. My parents were 100% supportive of either path I chose, but I think deep down I felt just so guilty that I would be throwing away an opportunity I felt was given to me by God (assuming you believe in God, whatever your religion may be). As @blugrn6 mentioned, You hear stories (almost never ever the entire full story, of course, or critical details that are made up by those telling it – everyone telling the story says they had such great GPAs/MCATs) about those people who didn’t make it into med school or ended up going to the Caribbean (PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS EVER - not with the way the match is going now), usually not knowing the entire story.

The problem as you apply to this program (or really any Bachelor/MD program) is this (at least as an out-of-stater): You first apply, just to see if you’ll get an interview, if you don’t get an interview, no biggie, not much emotional investment on your part, so you move on, if you do get an interview offer, then you prepare for the interview, then wait nervously for interview day, then interview etc. and so it snowballs in terms of your level of emotional investment to where by the time you are waiting for an acceptance on April 1 (that’s the national date by which all colleges, BS/MD programs or otherwise, must give you a decision), you almost feel compelled to take the BS/MD offer if you’re accepted after all the emotional investment in preparing, filling out applications, getting letters, flying out to interview, etc.

Also another problem is 9 times out of 10, your typical high school student (even the smart ones), tend to greatly OVERESTIMATE the traditional medical school admissions process and think they have to be tip-top perfect in every aspect, like this ridiculous quote from a 6 year student: http://info.umkc.edu/unews/umkc-medical-school/

That’s absolutely not even true, and it would make most med school admissions people wonder if you can’t handle what it takes to get into med school, what makes you think that it will get easier once you’re there, when you have to then build up your CV and academic record to shoot for a residency in a particular specialty?

I was someone who had thoroughly researched what the premed pathway entailed when I was in high school before I even knew BS/MD programs existed, as well as what the first 2 years of med school entailed (as I was told that’s the hardest part of med school – not really true). Probably not as well for the clinical side of med school and clinical medicine as I didn’t get to have the access to exposure that @Blugrn6 did. In my case, I put the cart before the horse in many respects. Part of what makes this process very difficult for high school students is that they DON’T KNOW how to evaluate medical schools properly for their own future career goals, when they’re just now trying to get a good handle on how to even evaluate undergraduate universities properly. Universities, and by extension medical schools, capitalize on this. It’s much easier to understand the evaluation of med schools on the other end when you’ve gone thru the residency and/or fellowship process.

4871

@NervousDad01,

BS/MD programs are very much counting on this to happen. They want to nab and lock in the highest achieving students early in terms of academics (even though they don’t have an undergraduate GPA), standardized test scores (even though it’s the SAT/ACT and not the MCAT like they want), EC accomplishments, etc. that they can get, when in all honesty, they usually would not be able to get that caliber of student thru the normal admissions process. There are definite exceptions of course - Northwestern, Baylor, Miami, etc. but those schools don’t take as many BS/MDers to begin with, for good reason).

Trust me, UMKC’s med school school knows this. There’s a reason the school has continued to remain as a 6 year program, when all other Bachelor/MD programs in the United States (BU, Northwestern, Miami, Penn/State Jefferson, NEOMED, are no longer 6 year programs). It’s a great admissions grab by the university for potential applicants. Just FYI, on @blugrn6’s list above — USC (back in 2011) and UCSD (just this fall in 2015) have both discontinued their Bachelor/MD programs. Why? Because these schools now have no problem in recruiting and getting even better and stellar applicants thru the regular process.

As far as primary care, this must be a relatively recent change that @blugrn6 mentioned, but in my time, UMKC didn’t really go thru it’s true history on interview day. Maybe they’re being much more upfront and honest with applicants regarding its strength being in primary care and not so much in specialist care, which are good examples that @blugrn6 mentioned: ENT, Dermatology, Neurosurgery, Integrated Plastics, or Radiation Oncology, but even in relatively non-competitive fields (currently) like Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. When you’re fully dependent on resources outside of your own medical school availibilities, in this case UMKC, you will not be treated as “one of their own” since you are not their student paying them tuition. That makes it harder to match when competing with people from schools that do have those opportunities available, who have faculty willing to mentor and call residencies for them. This is something that is impossible to intuitively know as a high schooler. One thing I can say for sure, is that UMKC Med has clearly put a lot of money and effort towards at least the admissions side – with its campus visit days, webinars on the website, and Skype appointments: http://med.umkc.edu/bamd/visits/.

4872

@Watang, @Elemelon, @Somuawan, @sss0296, @mscrystal, I think most likely UMKC Med will try to notify Early Notification applicants sometime this week before New Year’s Day. My guess is that UMKC Med had quite a few initial applications to sift through and personal statements/essays to read and they wanted people to just have a nice and relaxing Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Happy Holidays this year with their family, while UMKC is making their list, checking it twice, trying to find out whose naughty and nice…(ok, bad, lame joke, but couldn’t help myself). I’d tell you guys to just calm down and take it easy (easier said than done), but clearly that isn’t going to happen, so go run on a treadmill and at least get a good benefit from an increased heart rate. =))

4873

@Roentgen , Thanks for providing the important information. My son is high school senior and wanted to join medicine either through bs/md or 4+4 programs in ohio. I understand that in medical there won’t be any scholarship. In order to save money for his medical college tuition we are looking for the scholarship when he is in undergrad college. He has ACT34 and GPA w4.34/uw3.94. He is not eligible for need based financial aid. He may get some scholarship for college.Are there any specific sites which lists the outside scholarships just based on his GPA and ACT score.

Could you please let me know little bit more how this one helped you so that we can go for it.

http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Scholarships-College-Fourth-Insiders/dp/0805099476/

4874

@Roentgen Okay I’ll admit that joke was pretty funny!
Gosh you’re so knowledgeable on this stuff!

4875

@Roentgen
I’m digging the humor.
I would say I’m not stressed, but I would say I flip out every time my phone buzzes.

4876

Hi @Pras2016!!! Yes, so for medical school in general, there generally aren’t real huge scholarships available, but there are exceptions, the ones I know: University of Chicago - Pritzker, UT-Southwestern, Wash U, Vanderbilt (thru Canby Robinson Scholars), I think Case Western, some other public medical schools, as well as some newly opened medical schools starting a charter class (might be hit or miss depending on whether it’s worth it for that particular school for you to go to though)

Often these are merit-based scholarships, mainly based on MCAT and undergraduate GPA. It’s a good way for medical schools to grab very stellar students in terms of stats, who normally would go to better schools, than the one offering (which can be pretty good schools in and of themselves). You won’t really know about these till you undergo the regular AMCAS traditional application process. Many of the medical schools that offer the MD/PhD program, offer something called MSTP, where effectively your entire education is paid for, although you will be in school for 4 years longer than your MD only counterparts, but it can help with certain specialties.

As you know, which I’m sure your son applied to – there are BS/MD programs with NEOMED: http://www.neomed.edu/admissions/medicine/bsmd; Case Western: http://admission.case.edu/apply/ppsp.aspx; University of Toledo: http://www.utoledo.edu/offices/studentservices/preprofessional/Baccalaureate_MD_Program.html (although for this program starting in Fall 2015 - there is no longer a “guaranteed” acceptance, so not sure how well that plays into whether you should apply. OSU used to have one but no longer: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/multiple-degree-programs/989584-no-medical-admissions-pathway-bs-md-at-osu-this-year.html.

I just noticed on my prior post on scholarships, it says, “I used scholarship websites like Fastweb and ****, etc.” I have no idea why it bleeped it out, as I swear it wasn’t a curse word. lol. That was supposed to say S C H O L A R S H I P S . c o m. So one of the scholarship search engines I mentioned was Fastweb.com. I really liked that one. It has you fill out a brief profile which asks for your GPA and ACT/SAT score so that any scholarships that filter by that can appear in your box. It also gives like a calendar so all the deadlines appear. It keeps you organized.

So the reason I loved that particular book is the background of Marianne Ragins and it was a well-written book that really kept me organized and gave great essay tips. She really knows the entire scholarship game from personal experience. You can Google her and see that she won a ton of scholarship money like $400,000 and she does speaking events. She had done well academically also. Part of applying for scholarships is staying organized, meeting deadlines, writing and revising essays (many of which you’ll re-use and end up tweaking here and there). She really does a good job at going thru and explaining the entire process. My only regret was not getting the book earlier in high school.

4877

hey roentgen, i had a quick question. does umkc ba/md give importance to weighted gpa also and to what degree.
also if you are an out of stater which i am, and you have a 3.62 unweighted gpa but a 4.5 weighted, does this look good.(i have a 33 on the act though)

And my final question is can incredible medical ec’s like shadowing at mayo clinic and shadowing in India cover for my low gpa?

4878

@sandtime4, you may have said this before, but what is your class rank? So in the past, UMKC asked for both a weighted GPA and an unweighted GPA (both are usually on your transcript). This is because different schools have different systems. For example, some schools give a 6.0 for an AP or Honors class for an “A” grade. That’s why the unweighted GPA is needed to put everything on the same scale.

Now when I had the application, they used to make you write down the classes that fulfill the “Required High School Coursework” requirements – see page 6: https://www.umkc.edu/admissions/docs/2009MedApplication.pdf, so they could easily see the difficulty of your curriculum that you took that was available to you at your school, so it helps put your GPA into context – i.e. someone with a 4.0 who took all “regular”/on-track courses, when there was a much more strenuous curriculum available at his/her school. My guess is now they look at your transcript directly for that information.

@Watang was saying recently that at a UMKC BA/MD workshop thru the school that they no longer look at class rank and senior grades (the latter has always been the case as senior grades don’t make it onto you transcript by the time you submit it in the fall): http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/18801204/#Comment_18801204. So I don’t know if they go more by just the actual weighted/unweighted GPA or not. Kind of hard to believe that they wouldn’t look at all at your class rank.

I think your specific GPA numbers by themselves are fine, so that alone probably will not hold you back (the class rank helps better put your GPA in context which I don’t what that is). Your ACT score is excellent. The ECs you listed are excellent. It really is a holistic review process, if that makes sense. Much different than other more competitive places, that tend to emphasize class rank and standardized test scores a lot more than UMKC does.

The only real issue is the fact that you’re an out-of-stater, so the total number of spots is a lot less than that specifically allocated for regional and in-state. Even back when it was in-state vs. out-of-state only you can see on that old application link above that in-staters tended to be in the top 10% while out-of-staters tended to be in the top 5% (See page 5 of that link).

4879

thanks. um… i dont know about my specific rank, but im in the top 10% in my graduating class. also how heavily is medical experience looked at. i mean like, is a shadowing experience more valuable than just volunteering at your local hospital?

4880

also roetgen, sorry to bother you again. But other than UMKC, i only want to apply to BS/DO programs and not BS/MD programs. I was wondering whether you can tell me any info on these bs/do programs like how much easier is it compared to BS/MD. It will help me a lot if you can tell me anything you know about these programs, since there is not much info on these compared to the info on BS/MD programs. and how my chances would stack up in these tpes of programs(BS/DO)