Wow, the whole system is messed. If you're scores are low, you're rejected, if you scores are high, you're rejected.
So sorry. If you are "young" (right out of school), you are competing against folks with 2-3 years of research/other experiences after Undergrad. The lesson is that the bar is getting higher each year. If you look at the average age of med students at top tier schools, it is 24-25. If you are a fresh 22 year old, it is hard to hold your own in the pile of super stars who are quite a bit older. Take a couple of years off, beef up your life experience, and folks will be falling all over themselves for you.
FWIW, I would add University of Michigan, University of Chicago, UCSF, they love folks like you if you have a strong research portfolio. Good Luck
Wow, I guess you have the life experience. Just bad luck. These top tiers schools usually have folks with significant research experience and research productivity (e.g. publications). Guess I would continue your work and volunteering, and try again next year. You did things right, but sometimes the chips don't fall they way the statistics project. Add a few more schools next time (Pittsburgh, Rochester,Emory), as see how it goes. I'm out of ideas, as I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this outcome. My sympathy is with you.
Okay, people need to understand this, because it seems pervasive... Yes, medical schools are more competitive than they ever have been. People are better prepared for the application season than they ever have been. But, to somehow say that a 4.0/40 got "unlucky" or that there were too many non-trads in the cycle so his ECs/academics didn't stack up well. There may be a certain amount of 'luck' when getting into one particular school, but in the aggregate, there really is very little 'luck' involved with this process. If you get rejected from multiple (many) places, there is something wrong with your application, pure and simple. And no, what is wrong is NOT that your "scores are too good" or "Your ECs at 22 can't possibly stack up against older applicants."
From a logic and reasoning standpoint, it is FAR more likely based on this the listed schools that you got LUCKY to interview at Harvard/Yale/Duke. The exact right person read your application, you had a single person that said, "I want to look at this guy deeper." Given the distribution of schools, I would hazard a guess that you peaked interest with whatever you did with your research. Then after you gave them more information, (secondaries/interviews), they said, nope, not worth it. You were rejected pre-secondary at a ton of schools. With your stats and really any random, some semblance of cohesion in your ECs, you should have gotten secondaries from every single one of those schools. It costs schools next to nothing to send a secondary. In general, the only people we DON'T send them to are people that we have zero chance of admitting. Having been on one of those admissions committees I can pretty much guarantee that. Yes, having a more 'well rounded' application list is a good idea, but after working with half a dozen people with scores like yours and "good ECs", it isn't that crazy of a list. I'll be honest, I don't think that having applied to more schools would have helped you. Maybe you would have gotten lucky and someone would have wanted a score booster in their class, but...
I'll be blunt. There is something fundamentally wrong with your application and we can't help you on here like this. There is something that is missing, maybe you've omitted it here, or worse, you simply don't know.
Institutional Actions
Criminal background check
Bad letters of recommendation (pretty unlikely to get rejected pre-secondary)
Pathologic personal statement (pretty unlikely to get rejected pre-secondary)
Vast over estimation of how "good" your ECs are and/or poor representation of these on paper (pretty unlikely to get rejected pre-secondary)
There are several other things that come to mind, but aren't really things I would post on an public forum.
I thougth I had good letters, as my letter writers knew me well and seemed eager to write me letters. Plus, one of my interviewers said I had "great recommendations"
