I have tried to read most of this thread as it kind of moved in and out of civil discussion. My position is really still not nailed down on this issue. I got a public high school education in Mississippi and Tennessee, colllege at UTK, and med school at Wake Forest. The med school is decent, but the rest is mediocre at best (unless we're talking football.) Now keep in mind, I'm white, not particularly smart, and from an underprivileged (read poor, no relatives with college education) background. I graduated HS from a public school in downtown Memphis (where a white male is definitely a minority.) I really think that some people are just going to get it done no matter what obstacles you throw in front of them. And let's face it... medical school is not that hard to get into. With my background, I took no MCAT prep course, had no connections, and still got accepted to 3 med schools out of the 4 to which I applied. It's hard for me to believe that if a motivated college student (URM or not) does some minimal amount of preparation for getting into medical school, that he can't manage to get accepted into some school. The people here who are upset with their lack of acceptance to a US med school should probably take a good hard look at how much they put into making their goals happen. Also, I believe there is room for a large amount of discrimination in the med school application process. I know that all of my interviewers were lily white. Also, every place I interviewed, I talked more about the 4 years I spent as a raft guide than I did about why I wanted to be a doctor. It's a mystery to me how people end up getting accepted to med school. I know people in my class who were on the wait list who had better scores and ultimately ended up being better med students than me, but almost didn't make it into med school.
At the same time, I don't think that the way we approach AA is appropriate right now. I might offend some folks, but I'm sorry. I know that when I graduated high school some of my URM classmates did not give one iota about their grades or performance b/c they knew that they could get a job based on their race (almost all URMs are black in Memphis.) Later, in college I saw the same thing. Not as bad, but some of my classmates knew that they didn't have to perform to the same level that I did. Many of these people were much smarter than me, but they were effectively being lulled into complacency by AA policies. I outperformed them simply because I knew that at some level, I had a different standard to meet than they did.
Also, I'm 1/4 Cherokee, but I never claimed any minority status b/c I'm 3/4 white and I don't plan on working on a reservation in South Dakota once I'm finished with training.
So, I see both sides, and I'm still not convinced that one is patently right. I truly believe that any moderately motivated individual can get into a US med school. I also think that the current AA policy (as I understand it) often does nothing to motivate otherwise bright individuals to reach their potential.
Maybe this is why you don't appear sincere. Just a guess.
