Thanks for all the advice in the past! I edited for anonymity at this point in the process. If you have similar stats and are looking at this thread for advice for yourself, feel free to pm me for more info.
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Going to get in here before the usual suspects to say that Brown does NOT favor it's own undergrads, so ignore that if someone tells you that's a reason to take them off the list.
While it's hard to argue what actually goes on in their adcom based on statistics alone, a huge part of their class are PLME students. Thus, it makes it incredibly hard to get in.
You do not understand how the PLME process works. Those students are admitted when they are high schoolers. They are not part of the admissions process after that. Brown uses the regular AMCAS admissions process for the remaining 65-70 seats in their class. Which, while small, is more seats than Mayo has, period. It's also more seats than any state school has for out of staters. By your logic no one should apply to Mayo and no out of stater should apply to ANY state school other than their own.
No medical school is easy to get into. Brown isn't an outlier.
No, you misunderstand my post. Because of PLME, Brown has fewer seats than your typical med school. (Sort of like Mayo, yes)
Applicants who apply to these schools should be extraordinary applicants. OP is a very good applicant, but his numbers are not extraordinary. It may just be a waste of money to apply. But again, I never opposed his applying to these schools, just putting this idea out there.
I guess their median MCAT decreases because I see a 35 median MCAT for Brown University in my 2011-2012 MSAR.Except Brown isn't a top tier medical school, which their stats immediately make clear. As is also clear if you know anything about the school and its research reputation. It's a good school, but it isn't comparable to the other ivies on the med school front. Median MCAT is only a 33. Median GPA is only a 3.7, per the MSAR. So the OP's GPA is right in line and MCAT is above average.
Solid applicants on this board are told all the time not to apply there, and it's ludicrous. It is in fact a perfect school for applicants whose numbers are good enough for the top but not extraordinary to apply to.
It's so obvious sometimes that advice is thrown around in WAMC when people literally have no idea about the schools they're talking about aside from what gets voiced in the echo chamber here.
Your goal here is to snag an interview invitation -- So your 'hook' needs to be prominent enough that the person reading your application will see it and (hopefully) notice and remember. So if your hook is such a tiny part of your application that it slips by unnoticed, then it hasn't done the job. But on the other hand, if it isn't rightfully or reasonably key to your personal statement, then it doesn't belong there either. You're really the best judge of how prominent to make it.
Thanks! I hope I'm not taking too much of your time, but is athlete too common of a hook? I was also a varsity swimmer throughout college. I wore a lot of "hats", and I'm having trouble picking one "hat" as my hook. As this isn't a college essay, I assume that being the athlete, and the musician, and the researcher, and the habitat volunteer isn't going to work as a hook since "well rounded" is something that everyone is trying to portray.