Anastasis said:
PSST!! Don't tell them that!! I want LESS competition!!
J/K
Actually now looking back on that, I dunno why I put it
I stand corrected by the great and mighty QofQuimica. That's means Queen of Chemistry right? (j/k don't hit me!)
Dude, you can't apply for the Baylor scholarships, as far as I know. That's a school where one day they just pleasantly surprise you.
on the Queen comment.
kypdurron, no, scholarships are not just based on MCAT and GPA, though those things do matter to some extent. There is actually quite a bit of subjectivity in deciding who gets a scholarship. If the school really wants you to come, and if they believe that offering you the money will make a difference and convince you to pick their school over another school, they are more likely to offer you one. So it's just a "simple" matter of getting them convinced that they really, really want YOU to come instead of 8 zillion other equally qualified people. You see the problem here.
cbennett, I didn't apply to any CA schools, so maybe someone else can comment on them. But I can tell you that most of the Ivy schools (with the notable exception of Penn) do not award merit scholarships. I do know that AECOM offers scholarships, and there are probably some other solid non-Ivy New England area schools that do as well. If you're willing to stay in the South, many of the Southern private schools award scholarships. I know that Emory, Duke, Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Baylor do, along with Miami as I described before. And like others have said, many of the top midwestern schools also award merit scholarships. I recommend if merit scholarships are important to you that you seriously consider applying to several private midwestern schools that offer them, like Wash U, U Mich, U Chicago (Pritzker), Case Western, Mayo, and U Pitt. Other people could probably list more that I've missed.
But again, and this bears repeating for all of you current applicants: do NOT count on funding your medical school tuition with a merit scholarship. When y'all start interviewing and meeting the people that you are competing with for those seats and scholarships, you will finally start to understand what I am saying. There are tons of d*** impressive applicants out there, and many more of them deserve scholarships than there are scholarships to go around. It's great if you get one, but if you think that med school admissions is a crapshoot, wait until you get into the scholarship awarding part of the process.