<p>IWBB - Your experience makes perfect sense if you attend a private school. My impression is that private schools tend to look at admissions little more holistically (just like undergrad where they look at conditions and environment of the student and expected performance) but public med schools do not go that deep in their analysis.</p>
<p>OTOH, they may have a leeway to debate such issues in an MD/PhD program since they don’t necessarily have as many to analyze once they have zeroed down to a smaller list unlike a pure MD program with thousands of applicants.</p>
<p>What about the dean of admissions for the med school and her discussion of choosing a wait list acceptance?</p>
<p>They may not “discuss” it like they did at the MD/PhD committee, but I still stand by my statement that everything that is on your app is part of the equation - some of it consciously and some of it not. And yes, I am including things like parental jobs, where you grew up/what high school you went to (all of which are proxies for your SES) getting factored in. To what extent? Probably very minimal, but the fact remains that if those things meant 0% to the schools, they wouldn’t ask about them, or if AMCAS was using something solely for verification purposes, they wouldn’t disseminate it to the schools, and currently your entire AMCAS other than what schools you applied to gets sent if I recall correctly.</p>
<p>I also wouldn’t necessarily disagree with the statement that public schools put less weight on those things, but I would disagree that they put no weight into them.</p>
<p>The idea that university prestige doesn’t matter for medical school is farcical and false. Moreover, it’s important to remember that there are literally over a hundred ways to do medical school admissions, and it matters more to some schools than others.</p>
<p>I will acknowledge that with Texas in particular, since they have their own application system TMDSAS (which I have never seen, since MSTP students only apply through AMCAS to Texas schools), things could very well be different, but I don’t think public vs. private has as sharp a delineation as you’re implying.</p>
<p>mainlinedcaff - Unless you can explain specific cases you are aware of, your snarky posts will be removed and you will lose your posting privileges.</p>
<p>IWBB - I have been led to believe the same happens at NJ public where they consider GPA+MCAT and add some more points mostly for additional criteria. There is exactly 1 point given for breathing the thin air at Harvard or Brown on a 100+ point scale according to one professor who was on the admissions panel (this person is at an Ivy now btw). I assume M2CK knows much more info about what happens in AL publics which is probably a reason she insists on prestige not having much weight.</p>
<p>OTOH, I am told 50% + of incoming class at Stanford is filled by Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and MIT grads. Almost 25% of admitted class each year is from Stanford. I have seen lists for Harvard and Yale show a large number of admits from other Ivies, Stanford and MIT and I understand most Ivies fill a large percentage of their classes with other Ivy graduates.</p>
<p>It looks like you already made the case for me in your own post. To further add to it, several admissions deans mention in their interview days (one in the midwest stands out in my own mind) how many HYP grads attend their schools as a matter of pride. I will not give out schools names if that’s what you’re looking for. Hard to see snark in my previous post but I suppose everyone has their own standard in that regard.</p>
<p>“The idea that university prestige doesn’t matter for medical school is farcical and false.”</p>
<p>This is quite snarky. I have a specific statement I made that says private schools seem to have more weight than publics.</p>
<p>"several admissions deans mention in their interview days (one in the midwest stands out in my own mind) how many HYP grads attend their schools as a matter of pride. I will not give out schools names if that’s what you’re looking for. "</p>
<p>If you don’t, then you will lose your posts since you are making a blatantly snarky remark about others’ posts being farcical and false.</p>
<p>Not sure what your particular qualifications are, but it’s kind of funny to see you go on about what you’re “told” about incoming classes and stanford, harvard, and yale, yet require that others post detailed specifics? Once again, not sure how deep you are in this field but medicine is a very small world and it’s professional courtesy not to publicly discuss matters that are brought up in private.</p>
<p>Kind of touchy of you to assume I was speaking about your post, when I was addressing the mentality that prestige has no effect whatsoever in admissions. A statement, I will add, is undoubtedly true. I’m involved in admissions at my own medical school and it is what it is. Keep making your threats and follow through if you have to, frankly the loss is to your community, not me. As a parting thought pending the inevitable banning, perhaps you need to do some character building. Such over-compensating ego outburts tend to imply a small self-esteem</p>
<p>I am glad to tell you I have no qualifications other than the right to decide whether we will accept your aggressive tone posts here or not. We have plenty who contribute who don’t talk down to us ignorants here and I am glad to say we can survive without your invaluable contributions if it came down to that.</p>
<p>May be you should google more often since most schools publish their incoming students college affiliations as well as where their own students are admitted.</p>
<p>1 point out of 100 is still not zero, and given the competitiveness of the process, 1 point can be the difference. I have said many times before, I am not trying to overplay the importance or make it sound like a significant portion of the decision that requires choosing the more prestigious school over other much more significant factors, I just don’t understand how people (and I’m not including you) can come on here and say it is 0% of the equation when it is so clearly not 0.</p>
<p>It is clearly not zero which I agree with. But we have to remember 1 point can be made up by another 0.1 GPA bump or an extra point on MCAT or doing marginally better during the interview which does not take 4 years of struggle at highly competitive school. The idea was that one person giving fewer points during the interview would wipe out that 1 point advantage was what was pointed out to me.</p>
<p>Personally I think 5% weight can easily tip the scale if they have a preassigned rating starting at 0 for each school. I don’t know if any publics assign such a high weight.</p>
<p>I agree with what you’re saying and no where will I ever say that one should sacrifice their GPA or MCAT to go to a top school, but you can’t predict what you’ll end up with. Sure, if you’re deciding between a school where you’re below the 25th percentile for SAT and one where you’re above the 75th you might be able to predict to some extent how you might do at one vs. the other but of course we can’t throw out all the things that can indirectly influence your performance at school - things that have varying degrees of association with a school’s prestige. </p>
<p>For example, my GPA would have 100% been lower if I had gone to a school with strict GE requirements or some sort of core. Wouldn’t matter if the school was actually easier than Brown, I just wouldn’t have put in the work to get the grades like I did when I was choosing my courses.</p>
<p>How does a student like to be relative to their classmates? I came from a super duper private school where I wasn’t even in the top 20% of my class. When I did summer@brown in 2004 (which doesn’t have any academic minimums) all of a sudden I’m at the top of the class and by a large margin. It was weird, and if I hadn’t been super into the material, I probably would have slacked off a lot. I like being surrounded by people smarter than I am, but I don’t want to be forced to compete with them in a class room where we’re supposed to be learning, so I wanted schools that didn’t pride themselves on capping As.</p>
<p>I agree with you, all of these things (as well as other things not so directly tied to academics) are more important to a pre-med than the brand name of the school.</p>
<p>But I’ll never back down and say the brand name of the school is irrelevant or meaningless, I’m not in conflict with what you’re saying, I just disagree that it falls so nicely along private/public school lines, especially when cost is a confounding factor in that choice at both the UG and Med school level.</p>
<p>In my limited anecdotal experience, when DD was admitted to her respectably reputed med school, they admitted about 10% of the class early, in the fall. I looked at those kids on her Facebook group for the incoming class. The schools were obviously respected by the med school and would be mostly respected names on CC, but two kids came from a small private in that state which most people reading this would not recognize. So, the local reputation mattered as well as the national reputation.</p>
<p>IWBB - I believe in a lot of things you are saying in terms of choosing a college to attend. I would like to believe in my heart that someone attending a widely known school gets a 5-10% bump in med school admissions (why not - it will help my kids for sure). I would like to see some adcoms from some schools come out and say it!</p>
<p>somemom -
I was reading frugaldoctor’s post 37 and I was shocked to see Wofford, Princeton and UNC in the same sentence but I went to school in South Carolina and knew some Wofford students there in grad school.</p>
<p>Not knowing where frugaldoctor went to school, I would like to believe a school like UNC admitting someone from Wofford is common since they are in the region and tend to know the schools well even if we have not heard of them.</p>
I have absolutely no proof, but my guess is that private med school college give an extra point or two if that applicant also went to a private research university. Two points if that applicant is one of their own. Another point if that applicant is from the area.</p>
<p>When I see a lot of HYPSM’s types attending HYS-type SOMs, I don’t necessarily conclude that they were selected just because they went to HYPSM-type schools. I think that those who end up at HYS-type SOMs mostly all have crazy-high MCATs and stats. They were a unique group to begin with because they have amazing test-taking abilities. </p>
<p>Just look at the top quartile SATs/ACTs at those schools. The top quartile are all perfect/near perfect. </p>
<p>I think in many cases, if these med school applicants had their undergrads’ names whited out, they would still get picked. Who doesn’t want the MCAT 39, 4.0 cum/4.0 BCMP applicant with all the rest of the frills?</p>
If this is true, it is really high.
I guess this may have something to do with the fact that there are fewer tippy top PRIVATE colleges on the west coast than those on the east coast. (And also fewer med schools also.)</p>