<p>why do you want to go to harvard med? fame and prestige shouldnt be the reason your choosing medicine in the first place. if it is, sad to say, you wont even survive med school.</p>
<p>Palatable- I agree with everything you said in your post, except I would question this: </p>
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As far as the papers go, getting ANY publication is significant for a pre-med. Very few pre-meds get publications, so getting one puts you WAY ahead of others.
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<p>Getting a publication definitely would help, there is no way that they can hurt. However, I question the part about them "put[ing] you WAY ahead of the others." Getting published as an undergrad isn't usually about skill (a lot of people work hard for four years and don't get published), a lot depends on luck. Who you work with, whether the grad students agree to let you get published, the timing you join the lab, what kind of research it is/how quickly that type of research produces results, etc.</p>
<p>The only exception, from what I have read on these boards, is if you get published as the first or second author of a prestigious journal. That may help you quite significantly, but won't make up for bad grades/ MCAT.</p>
<p>I guess you could donate a lot of money to get into Harvard Medical School</p>
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oh dear, how sorely misguided you are. do you know anyone who has actually gotten into hms? It's hard, but there is by no means a requirement for your application to be spotless. I know 4 people who've gotten in in the last 2 years. One had a 4.0 and 35 MCAT, one had a 3.6/40+. Your numbers must be high, but saying 3.8+/37+ is pure BS.
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I never said getting below 3.8+/37+ won't get you in. What I meant was those numbers are good estimates to be competitive for HMS, assuming that rest of your application is as good.</p>
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There is no need to be a president/founder of anything either. As long as you do something you like and show your dedication to and impact on it, you will be fine. If I go out and halfheartedly start the Underwater Basketweaving Club, I don't think HMS is going to look at me any more favorably.
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I never said being a president/founder is a requirement. It's just something that can help increase your chances. I know many people who got into HMS without being a president or founder of anything.</p>
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As far as the papers go, getting ANY publication is significant for a pre-med. Very few pre-meds get publications, so getting one puts you WAY ahead of others. It doesn't matter if you are listed 2nd or 8th. If you had any semblance of research and publications, you'd know that 1st author and last author are the most important, and that everyone in between is pretty much the same. In fact, some PIs simply alphabetize the list.
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Calm down. I didn't say being an 8th author is useless. I'm also well-aware that less than 5% of undergrads get any publication. What I meant was being an 8th author is less valued than being higher up in the author list, especially for cases where there are 10+ authors for the pub. Still, any pub is valued highly, as you said.
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Don't go running your mouth about something you obviously have no idea about.
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Was that necessary?</p>
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I can see that you're stuck in your little high school world, where you believe that you'll be fine as long as you can put down "I was Secretary of Random Club," and the club really did nothing. In other words, you're a resume-builder. Med school admissions are a lot more rigorous than undergrad admissions and they're going to see right through the crap that you put down on your app.
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Sorry, but I'm not stuck in "your little high school world". I never said anywhere in my post that you'll get in if you merely have a great laundary list of so many different EC's. What's important is how much you put into each EC over the period of your undergrad career and whether you can talk passionately about them in your interview.</p>
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There is no formula to get into HMS. Of the 4 people I know who got in, each one had their own weakness/imperfection, but each one still got in. Don't feed people these kinds of lies if you yourself haven't even gone through the process yet.
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I didn't "feed" lies. I also didn't imply that there's a formula to get into HMS. And this is why I posted the link to MDapps, just to give the asker an idea of how so many different people of different scores and EC's get in.</p>
<p>Even if you have a 4.00 and a great mcat score, you are not guaranteed to get into top med schools. Med schools such as Harvard, Hopkins, and UCSF are especially unpredictable. It is sometimes hard to tell why they accepted one applicant over another. Now a school like Washu usually selects applicants with high GPA and high MCAt scores(washu has the highest scores among med schools) . But dont get your hopes high because med school admissions are not always fair.</p>
<p>palatable, I'm just curious, but were you a pre-existing user who made a new account just to post what you posted? Your account sign-up date is the same as the date when you posted the above, and your last log-in date is over a week (only a day after I responded to your post).</p>
<p>Come on people....I think most of you should tone down that arrogant and disdainful tone, always assuming that you have the holy answer...</p>
<p>The OP is asking what people think would help him/her get into Harvard Med School, NOT whether any medical school SHOULD do or whether wanting to go to a top medical school makes him/her a prestige whore..You always get into these perennially opinionated lectures...</p>
<p>Stop being so judgmental and if you do not want to answer THE QUESTION, just move on. You have become just as irritating with your irrelevant answers and comments...</p>
<p>wow alot of yall are really mean i mean he was just asking what he need to make it is really bad to want something nice for urself…anyways no matter what i think that u should just try ur best to get into any school im 13 and i would love to go to HMS but im still young so whatever i get i will take.</p>
<p>Give me one reason other than the prestige, rank, and fame of Harvard that makes you want to go to their medical school.</p>
<p>OP, just get college GPA=4.0, MCAT=41+, cure Africa from malaria and you all set for Hrvard, guarantee!</p>
<p>… on the other hand, not everybody, by far, wants to be at Harvard… or at JHU, Cornell, WUSL…so forth, even having what it takes …</p>
<p>i just want to go there that fact that it is the best i just want to be the best surgeon that i can be and i feel that that school gives alot of oppertunity. (i spelled that wrong) this is for mmmcdowe.</p>
<p>wow OP, your 13…your just starting high school (or jst finishing 8th grade lol), you should focus on getting into COLLEGE, not MED SCHOOL. Who knows if you will even want to be a doctor by the time your 17 or 18? A doctor’s life may not be what you think it is and your interests could change. I wanted to be an astronaut until I came to high school and took bio…lol. Keep your options open…</p>
<p>Man, I still want to be an astronaut.</p>
<p>hey Miami, just out of curiosity why does everyone not want to be at HMS, JHU etc…?</p>
<p>tompi90,
You need to ask my D. I have no idea. She never cared (UG or Med. School) to go to any Ivy or elite colleges. She has always had (and continues in college) GPA=4.0 and graduated #1 from HS that has always sent couple top students to Harvard and other Ivys.</p>
<p>jazzy- best what? You are implying that you think that HMS makes you the best practicing doctor, but there isn’t any evidence to support that the best practicing doctors are HMS docs. When you are thinking of Harvard as being the best, you are probably thinking of the research rankings, but you just said you want to be a practicing doctor. So, Harvard being the top research medical school doesn’t really mean its the best for you. Do you get what I am saying? There is no “best” medical school, there is just the one that best fits you and frankly you know nothing about HMS or any medical school at the moment, so how can you know that its your best fit. </p>
<p>As far as opportunity, that’s definitely true, but that opportunity has a lot more focus on academia and research (and to a lesser extent primary care I suppose, but you want to be a surgeon). Also, I am not entirely convinced that, other than the power of name, Harvard has any more opportunity than many of the other schools that I interviewed at.</p>
<p>Also, being the best surgeon you can be has very little to do with your medical school, because you don’t train to be a surgeon there. You train in your residency which is AFTER medical school. So unless you think Mass General or one of Harvard’s other affiliates is the best place to do your surgery residency (and then it would depend what kind of surgery), you probably won’t have that much of an advantage in getting into the residency you want from Harvard anyways. </p>
<p>I’m not trying to shatter your dreams of going to HMS, I wanted to go to Yale when I was your age all the way up to this year. Then I found a place that fit me better. All I want you to do is look beyond things like “It’s the best” and do a little reading about the program and the opportunities at HMS. I liked Yale because of their unique system when I was your age, not because it was Yale.</p>
<p>Tompi- just to answer your q a little more than I did in my post to jazzy, it all has to do with what you value as “best” for you. Is it ranking and prestige? Then I guess you should shoot for one of the famous schools. Is it location? Do you like urban or rural? East or West or somewhere in the middle? I know plenty of top applicants who would definitely get interviews at the top 10 but only applied to schools in the southeast, Texas, etc because, to them, location was the top priority (some had significant others and families, but some just really liked the are). What about financial packages? A lot of kids who get into the top 20 schools are offered big merit scholarship (sometimes even from the top 20 like Vandy and Pitt. I believe Columbia has a penchant for offering money if you happen to also get into Harvard and tell them. Big rivals, the deans of admissions.) in order to entice them to matriculate at a given school. I myself had a couple merit scholarships that I had to think long and hard about, because money is the route I went for undergrad and it worked wonders for me to be a bigger than average fish at my undergrad. However, in that case I also had a really good feeling about the school, the same feeling that I got at the school that I’m going to, so I chose to go with that over just going to a school that I wasn’t totally in love with for financial purposes (Since I am debt free from undergrad, I was able to do this. Had I not been, I very likely would have gone for the sake of not being buried in debt). Also, there is such a small difference between applicants in medical school that going to a lesser ranked school definitely didn’t promise that I would be the top of the pile like when undergrad where you have thousands of kids. “Fit”, as it were, was what I went with in choosing which school was “best” for me. Many people do it that way, and sometimes its not the highest ranked school on the interview list, as was my case.</p>
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<p>It just is not that important. When docs are relatively recently out of training, and do not have independent reputations, other doctors are curious as to where they trained, but they do not care where they went to medical school, except for opportunities for social conversation “Oh, you went to medical school at Columbia, how did you like New York?”</p>
<p>Training is where you learn enough medicine to enter your field, and most people train somewhere other than where they went to medical school.</p>
<p>If you want to train at the handful of top places in your specialty, it does help to come from an elite medical school. It helps even more if you are looking for a heavily oversubscribed specialty. </p>
<p>On the other hand, most doctors enter the large fields (that is why they are large), there are plenty of residencies all over the country, and it matters more to train where you want to live and get to know the local medical environment than it does to come from a name place.</p>
<p>So if you want to be on the faculty at JHU in neurosurgery, it definitely matters where you go to medical school. If you want to do private practice general internal medicine just about anywhere, it makes no difference at all where you go to medical school. There are way more general internists than there are neurosurgeons at Hopkins. Thus, for most docs, where you go to medical school does not matter.</p>
<p>I love it when people bash Harvard…and Hopkins…and Yale…I guess it always happens to institutions or to people that are on top…</p>