Expectations for older applicants (30's/40's)

[Gauss44]

What expectations do most MD admissions committees have for applicants in their upper 30's/lower 40's, that they do NOT have for applicants who are in their early 20's?

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[gracie369]

They should be the same. No reason they would be different.

 

[esob]

From what I've read both here and in books, there is some age bias at some schools. What does that mean exactly? Well my understanding is that all other things being equal between two candidates, the younger applicant will win out. Thing is, the probability of a younger applicant and an older applicant being on the same ground is not very likely, so I think you will really only see the age bias come in if you are at the very bottom of the applicant pool for that school or if you are applying for an extremely competitive school where everyone has 4.0's and 95th percentile MCAT's.

I do think some expectations of what you do with your time will be different. The 22 year old who had a part time job at a sushi bar is probably going to be expected to have more EC's than the business exec who worked 60 hrs a week running a company.

 

[bumblebee611]

What expectations do most MD admissions committees have for applicants in their upper 30's/lower 40's, that they do NOT have for applicants who are in their early 20's?

I thought about this question a lot while writing my secondaries and going to interviews over the past several months. Without revealing too much about myself, I found that much of my experience with the application process was different from what SDN would predict. And I think at least some of this difference arises from being a really, really old nontrad. I'm 43 and will turn 44 before I matriculate at a US MD school. At some point I concluded that I wasn't competing for a seat with folks just out of college or probably even well into their 20s because it wouldn't make sense for an adcom to evaluate us side by side and say, "which do I choose?" Instead, I suspect they take the real age outliers like me, put us in a pile, and compare us to each other--and then employ some sort of quota/limit where they are happy to have 1-2 of us but definitely no more. It would be unreasonable for an adcom to expect me to use my copious free time (sarcasm) to participate in the unicycle club, and it would also be unreasonable for an adcom to expect a 22 y.o. recent grad to have had the kinds of family caregiving experiences I have had and ding the young person for her relative immaturity.

 

[esob]

I wouldn't really think 44 was an age outlier. I was thinking 55+ would be where things might start getting questionable, but at 44 you can be practicing primary care at 51 and retiring at 71, so a 20 year career is nothing to sneeze at. Now, if you wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon and were starting at 44 then it might be a little different because of the long residency and fellowship. I guess it probably also really depends on what you've done in those years too. Previous experience can change a lot about how good people are at their current professions. A perfect example is that in the military, officers that were formerly enlisted were viewed significantly different from those who took direct commissions out of college. At the end of the day I do think it will still primarily boil down to numbers. If you have a near perfect GPA and stellar MCAT numbers, I don't think age will be a limiting factor. If it is, that's the probably not the school you want to attend anyway.

 

[atomi]

Someone 30+ will have to demonstrate that he/she can handle the rigor of medical school. It's a lot easier to do well in school when you don't have a family or other obligations one picks up as one ages.

What you've done between college and now is also important. Even if you got a 4.0 in college, that doesn't mean much if you've been delivering pizzas for the past 15 years.

You will also have to demonstrate that you have a sincere interest in medicine and aren't doing this to achieve/protect a certain income level. There seems to be a glut of lawyers trying to get into med school because legal compensation sucks these days, which is the reason they went into law, and now they are looking for a new field with high compensation.

Like it or not, some schools will discriminate based on age. The school I went to had an average age of 23 for entering students. There was only a single student above 30 in the freshman class. And it doesn't end there. I have heard multiple times of candidates getting dinged on the rank list because faculty do not want to train someone who is the same age or older than they are. A 50 year old intern reporting to a 27 year old resident and 30 year old attending creates an uncomfortable work environment for some.

If you are 40 and want to go to a DO school and do family med, ok, there are lots who do this.
If you are 40 and want to go to a top ranked private school and do a highly competitive specialty with small program sizes, you have an uphill battle.

 

[QofQuimica]

What expectations do most MD admissions committees have for applicants in their upper 30's/lower 40's, that they do NOT have for applicants who are in their early 20's?

A cut of their SS check?

All kidding aside, the expectations for older applicants are pretty similar to the expectations for younger ones: academic excellence, competitive MCAT scores, clinical experience, a commitment to entering the field, and some understanding of what doing so entails. Probably that last one is something that should be better thought out for older applicants. No one worries when a 20-year-old doesn't have their entire career plan figured out, but it's not cute to see a 40-year-old candidate wondering what they should be when they grow up.

I thought about this question a lot while writing my secondaries and going to interviews over the past several months. Without revealing too much about myself, I found that much of my experience with the application process was different from what SDN would predict. And I think at least some of this difference arises from being a really, really old nontrad. I'm 43 and will turn 44 before I matriculate at a US MD school. At some point I concluded that I wasn't competing for a seat with folks just out of college or probably even well into their 20s because it wouldn't make sense for an adcom to evaluate us side by side and say, "which do I choose?" Instead, I suspect they take the real age outliers like me, put us in a pile, and compare us to each other--and then employ some sort of quota/limit where they are happy to have 1-2 of us but definitely no more. It would be unreasonable for an adcom to expect me to use my copious free time (sarcasm) to participate in the unicycle club, and it would also be unreasonable for an adcom to expect a 22 y.o. recent grad to have had the kinds of family caregiving experiences I have had and ding the young person for her relative immaturity.

There is not a quota for nontrads, and you are not only being judged against other nontrads. One of the main reasons why nontrads tend to do more poorly in the app process is because, as a group, nontrads have significantly poorer stats than trads do. (Look at the AAMC trends for MCAT scores and GPAs based on age.) They're also outliers. Given that there are relatively few 40-year-old applicants, and even fewer academically stellar 40-year-old applicants, clusters can form. Meaning, it is perfectly possible to have one class with multiple older nontrads in it, while the next has none, simply because of what the overall applicant (and matriculant) pools were like in an individual year.

 

[bumblebee611]

I wouldn't really think 44 was an age outlier. I was thinking 55+ would be where things might start getting questionable, but at 44 you can be practicing primary care at 51 and retiring at 71, so a 20 year career is nothing to sneeze at. Now, if you wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon and were starting at 44 then it might be a little different because of the long residency and fellowship. I guess it probably also really depends on what you've done in those years too. Previous experience can change a lot about how good people are at their current professions. A perfect example is that in the military, officers that were formerly enlisted were viewed significantly different from those who took direct commissions out of college. At the end of the day I do think it will still primarily boil down to numbers. If you have a near perfect GPA and stellar MCAT numbers, I don't think age will be a limiting factor. If it is, that's the probably not the school you want to attend anyway.

Oh, I fully intend to have a roughly 20+ year career after residency, and not to take on too long a course of training. But by an outlier I meant that if you look at those AAMC tables, there are very, very few people who actually matriculate at my age. When I searched for info on the experiences of others who had done it, I found virtually nothing. As @atomi says, there seem to be plenty of folks who go to osteopathic medical school after 40, but attending an MD school doesn't seem to happen so much. Again, plenty of folks in their late 30s, but it seems to me 44 is getting up there.

 

[bumblebee611]

A cut of their SS check?

All kidding aside, the expectations for older applicants are pretty similar to the expectations for younger ones: academic excellence, competitive MCAT scores, clinical experience, a commitment to entering the field, and some understanding of what doing so entails. Probably that last one is something that should be better thought out for older applicants. No one worries when a 20-year-old doesn't have their entire career plan figured out, but it's not cute to see a 40-year-old candidate wondering what they should be when they grow up.


There is not a quota for nontrads, and you are not only being judged against other nontrads. One of the main reasons why nontrads tend to do more poorly in the app process is because, as a group, nontrads have significantly poorer stats than trads do. (Look at the AAMC trends for MCAT scores and GPAs based on age.) They're also outliers. Given that there are relatively few 40-year-old applicants, and even fewer academically stellar 40-year-old applicants, clusters can form. Meaning, it is perfectly possible to have one class with multiple older nontrads in it, while the next has none, simply because of what the overall applicant (and matriculant) pools were like in an individual year.

@QofQuimica, I think we actually agree on a lot here ... at least I fully agree with what you've said in your first paragraph--I think adcoms expect more maturity (and perhaps some prior success) from older nontrads, and I also think that's totally reasonable.

As for the quota, I'm not so sure. To clarify, I'm not someone blaming my struggles on age discrimination--I was extremely pleased with how my cycle went, and in fact, it went far better than I would have expected, based on what I'd heard on SDN. And I have no doubt that it helped that I had a Lizzy M of 77 and had excelled in law school and had been fairly successful as a lawyer. But I remember reading on the USC-Keck board, for instance, that an adcom there had actually written an essay or given an interview in which she had stated that in fact, they did pool applicants who were similar in various respects and then have a single evaluator evaluate them against each other. Based on this and other references on pre-allo (by Lizzy M herself and others), it would seem to be not unreasonable that part of getting a diverse class is grouping "similar" folks and evaluating them against one another. And this seems like common sense to me--no one should expect a 21 year old to have had the life experiences I have had. Conversely, as I pointed out, I don't think I got dinged for not having eccentric hobbies because I don't/didn't need those to lend personality to my application.

I shouldn't have indicated that a hard ceiling exists--I'm sure if a school sees four fabulous oldies in a year and wants to admit them all, they will, and if they see no special old folks the following year, there will be zero in the class. But you can't seriously believe that they would FILL their class with qualified older folks. People would flip over wasting an education on someone who is only going to practice for 20 years as opposed to 35.

 

[Goro]

None.

Your academics will prove you can keep up intellectually with 20-somethings.

What expectations do most MD admissions committees have for applicants in their upper 30's/lower 40's, that they do NOT have for applicants who are in their early 20's?

Teaching moment! It's not a zero sum game. We don't interview two people for one seat. Both quality candidates would be accepted. And older candidates bring positive things to the table, like life experience, wisdom, and maturity.

What does that mean exactly? Well my understanding is that all other things being equal between two candidates, the younger applicant will win out.


Believe me people, I have interviewed people like this!!

No one worries when a 20-year-old doesn't have their entire career plan figured out, but it's not cute to see a 40-year-old candidate wondering what they should be when they grow up.

 

[ROSC]

This can be inversely related. 21-22 year old trad applicants who have done nothing. This may not look great for them, but I feel as an older applicant (as you put it) if you haven't done anything worth writing home about; that could be just as bad if not worse. If you haven't committed yourself to something in the last 20 years, then how in the h*** are you going to convince the committee that you're committed to medicine.

Just my .02

Not inferring to anyone involved in this thread, just a hypothetical scenario that non-trads can face.

 

[DrMikeP]

Being a 40 something non-traditional applicant I spoke with a number of MD and DO program adcom members before starting the process (3 each). Of course they can't age discriminate, but quite a few MD programs made comments about how they've rarely ever seen a competitive candidate over 45 and there wasn't much interest expressed once they learned my age. One adcom basically told me that he didn't like candidates with past major careers because they in his opinion made poor med students. The DO programs were excited to speak with me and encouraged me to complete my recs and apply.

They will definitely want to know why now? Every II asked me that and grilled me on how I would handle the stress of med school. I must have demonstrated something right, as I got in. Best of Luck!

 

[atomi]

One adcom basically told me that he didn't like candidates with past major careers because they in his opinion made poor med students.

They are also less likely to tolerate the anathema of team based learning and other progressive educational snake oil plaguing these schools recently compared to 21 year olds who have never worked in the private sector and thus lack the perspective to see through its bullchit.

 

[esob]

Being a 40 something non-traditional applicant ....

Every II asked me that and grilled me on how I would handle the stress of med school. I must have demonstrated something right, as I got in.

If its less than 90 hrs per week and I have less than a dozen people to manage it will be like a vacation

 

[DrMikeP]

If its less than 90 hrs per week and I have less than a dozen people to manage it will be like a vacation

That was sort of my response, but then I added the expected self care, seek help, etc stuff that is expected. I also added that I was raised that 80hrs a week was normal and don't really know much different... LOL

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[tnedoots]

I'm in my late 30's at a US MD school.
Here's my take on it:
-Figure out how to explain your story. What motivated a switch to want to be a doctor? (Make it real and honest. Don't say "I've always wanted to be a doctor" if it's not true.)
-Figure out how to tell them you can work well with people 10-15+ years your junior. (have some experiences to demonstrate this)
-If you've been out of school for a few years, it may be beneficial to take at least one or two semesters with a full load of science courses to show that you can still handle a full academic load. They need to know you can handle the academic stresses of med school. Remove any doubt from their minds.
-Use your age to your advantage. You'll have to answer a lot of questions in secondary apps about what diversity you bring. Your age is diversity not a handicap.

 

[QofQuimica]

They are also less likely to tolerate the anathema of team based learning and other progressive educational snake oil plaguing these schools recently compared to 21 year olds who have never worked in the private sector and thus lack the perspective to see through its bullchit.

Or possibly the exact opposite, because they've had experience successfully dealing with BS teams/meetings/boss whims in the corporate world without letting it get under their skin. It all depends on how you sell your prior experiences.

Regarding grouping similar applicants and only evaluating them against one another: it just doesn't work. Part of the problem with doing this even if the adcom wants to do so is that simply accepting an applicant isn't enough. The applicants still have to choose to matriculate at your institution. While all well-established med schools have historical data regarding their matriculation to acceptance ratios, and can manipulate them somewhat by doing things like offering scholarships to the most desirable applicants, there is no guarantee that the applicants you most want will matriculate with you even if you give them a full ride and a red carpet. Most of these rock star applicants get accepted to multiple schools and have many options regarding where they wish to go, and for nontrads in particular, personal factors (extended family proximity, spouse job prospects, owning a house, etc) tend to play a major role in their choice of where to matriculate. So even if we accepted twenty rock star nontrads into our incoming class, if only one or two choose to matriculate at our school, or if none do, then it perhaps looks to the outsider like we don't "want" older applicants because our current incoming class happens not to have very many. However, that was by *applicant* choice, not by ours.

The select few of you who are rock star applicants holding multiple acceptances will see how the tables begin to turn over the next few months, as the med schools begin competing for you instead of the other way around.