Computational School List

[VanillaThunder]

Hi all,
Long time lurker here. I finally got my MCAT score back this week and am looking to preemptively make my school list so I'm not rushed come June. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I don't really have an advisor during this process. A little about me:

MCAT: 520
GPA: 3.99 (4.0 science)
Major: Bioinformatics
White Male
Research:
- 400 hours (Summer REU) in a high level cancer lab developing microbiome analysis pipeline.
- 100 hours on a thesis type project
- 2000 hours (at application) as a Lab tech in an addiction genetics lab. I do all our genomic analyses, develop some web applications for behavioral assay analyses, and am currently leading out my own project.
- Currently a middle author on a paper under review with hopefuly 1-2 more of those by application submission.
Shadowing:
- 20 hrs sports med/family practice
- 20 hrs general pediatrics
- Hopefully will have about 60 more from an assortment of specialties by application time.
Clinical volunteering:
- 0 hrs
TA:
- 1 year OChem
- 1 semester human physiology
Extracurriculars:
- I played my freshman year on a top 10 D1 basketball team before transferring and finishing playing at a small state school.
- Basketball coach at a school where 65% of student population is below poverty line.
- VP of school premed club
- Multiple awards involving academics and basketball

I love doing computational work and want to develop those further during my PhD; however, I'm looking to move away from genomics and more to an engineering/data science/medical informatics theme. I'm planning on applying to about 15-20 schools and I'm having a hard time not making my school list too top heavy.

So far my list of schools I'm interested in consists of:
- Stanford
- Duke
- Vanderbilt
- Emory/Gt
- Pitt/CMU
- Baylor
- Harvard/MIT
- Northwestern
- UCSD
- UCI
- University of Florida
- UNC
- Indiana/Purdue
- Iowa
- Michigan

Any feed back on other schools I should consider adding or schools I should drop based on my stats and interests would be greatly appreciated. I'm not sure how competitive I am for the top tier programs and i don't really want to waste any of my applications so any kind of feedback is greatly welcomed!
Thank you!

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[931kra]

Your stats are amazing (congrats!) but I think the heavy focus on research with little to no commitment to clinical responsibilities will be very difficult for you to overcome when you apply, regardless of the schools you have on your list. I suggest aiming to start both clinical and non-clinical volunteering as soon as you can. MD-PhD programs are looking *more* at your research experiences (at least compared to regular MD programs), but you still need a threshold amount of clinical activity so that adcoms are convinced you really want the MD AND the PhD, and not just a PhD.

If you get some kind of "substantial" volunteering experience before you apply, I think any school is within your reach given your strong numbers and varied research background!

Others may have more specific advice, but these are just my thoughts. Good luck!

 

[VanillaThunder]

Your stats are amazing (congrats!) but I think the heavy focus on research with little to no commitment to clinical responsibilities will be very difficult for you to overcome when you apply, regardless of the schools you have on your list. I suggest aiming to start both clinical and non-clinical volunteering as soon as you can. MD-PhD programs are looking *more* at your research experiences (at least compared to regular MD programs), but you still need a threshold amount of clinical activity so that adcoms are convinced you really want the MD AND the PhD, and not just a PhD.

If you get some kind of "substantial" volunteering experience before you apply, I think any school is within your reach given your strong numbers and varied research background!

Others may have more specific advice, but these are just my thoughts. Good luck!

Thank you for the input! The lack of clinical experience is my biggest concern as well. The basketball coaching thing is a volunteer position and TAing have been volunteer positions. Does that help on the non-clinical volunteering side?

 

[931kra]

Thank you for the input! The lack of clinical experience is my biggest concern as well. The basketball coaching thing is a volunteer position and TAing have been volunteer positions. Does that help on the non-clinical volunteering side?

I think the basketball coaching definitely could--sorry I missed that! I would classify the TAing as Teaching/Mentoring on your apps since you'll want a breadth of different experiences. But even with the basketball coaching activity, you'll still definitely need some clinical experience beforehand. I bet that would also help you write your essays in a more convincing way too, since you'll have recent clinical experiences to draw from!

 

[VanillaThunder]

I think the basketball coaching definitely could--sorry I missed that! I would classify the TAing as Teaching/Mentoring on your apps since you'll want a breadth of different experiences. But even with the basketball coaching activity, you'll still definitely need some clinical experience beforehand. I bet that would also help you write your essays in a more convincing way too, since you'll have recent clinical experiences to draw from!

No worries I didn't specify that it was a volunteer position! What would you say the clinical hours threshold is? Our season ended last night so I'll have a lot more time to try and at least get in an adequate number of hours by the time I submit.

 

[mtoboggan]

No worries I didn't specify that it was a volunteer position! What would you say the clinical hours threshold is? Our season ended last night so I'll have a lot more time to try and at least get in an adequate number of hours by the time I submit.

Generally,~50 hours of shadowing is more than enough. Any more tends to be overkill for its purpose, which is to introduce you to the responsibilities of a physician. You mentioned getting 60 additional hours of shadowing, which is time that I think could be better spent getting clinical volunteering hours in as you currently have none. In addition to knowing what a physician does, you want to demonstrate an ability to be around and serve patients in some capacity (other than just following a physician around).

All that being said, it is more about what you can get out of your clinical experiences than the time spent doing them. I think you have a very strong application right now with the exception of clinical involvement. I guarantee you will be asked "Why do you want to be an MD/PhD?" on the interview trail. You want to be able to convince your interviewers that you want to be a physician-scientist and not just a scientist. I think your goal right now should be to accumulate enough clinical experiences to be able to articulate that clearly and not necessarily try to reach some arbitrary number of hours.

 

[inode]

Would highly recommend adding UCLA and UCSF and UPenn to your list (not sure why they aren't already on your list?). You are competitive enough for the top 10's so you should include more top 10's. You have a much better chance of getting into a top 10 if you actually apply to multiple top 10's.

 

[ex-mdphd]

Would echo UPenn. Not sure what kind of computational work you want to do, but it's quite strong here (especially comp neuro).