.
Started by evenfeather
Get help with your application
Use all the free resources available to you from SDN: articles, guides, expert advising, forums discussions, and school research.
Helping those most vulnerable in society will always be seen positively regardless of your and their race, gender, sexual orientation, and/or socioeconomic status. Just my thoughts.
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
The SCOTUS decision gives some leeway for applicants when discussing contextually about their lived experiences in their journey and decision to be a healthcare professional. The issues brought up by recent DOJ suits against UCLA and Yale are more focused on screening and final decisions as far as I can glean.
Just make sure your essays reflect you and not "the vast majority of premeds."
Many states had already passed similar measures to not consider race/ethnicity in admissions decisions, including California who defeated a measure to rescind it. This really affects states where such a rule had not been made law.
Just make sure your essays reflect you and not "the vast majority of premeds."
Many states had already passed similar measures to not consider race/ethnicity in admissions decisions, including California who defeated a measure to rescind it. This really affects states where such a rule had not been made law.
What schools are forced to show (or not show) on their websites and what is in their hearts (and how they respond to like-minded people) are two different things. You'll be fine.
It would be very difficult for me to understand any legal justification that could wholly deny the existence of health disparities across groups carte-blanche (though many are trying). There is established, long-standing research that suggests certain genetic lineages are predisposed to certain kinds of conditions at higher rates than others. There is research that states certain groups receive different levels/quality of care than others. Social determinants of health include socioeconomic status, which implicate everyone irrespective of the typical hot-button categories used to stratify populations, like race.
That is not DEI... it is plainly a matter of public health and medicine. To deny that, as a medical educator, would appear to be simply factually incorrect aside from potentially discriminatory.
Surely there are people who have their own deviant, private beliefs, but I imagine that if you are a competitive applicant, it would be difficult to dismiss your application on the fact that you discussed SDOH alone, especially if you make it past the interview stage and to full committee, where one person cannot generally make a unilateral decision (at least not without considerable backlash).
Now, when I was applying, one of the responses I received was "the schools that care will continue to care about this kind of thing, and the schools that don't, won't."
That response drove me up the wall, because it was not really reassuring and provided no new information. But it was very true in my own experience. I do suspect that talking about my work with underserved populations was appreciated by some schools. Not all of them, and not always in a proportion that felt favorable to me as an applicant.
The good news is, you only need one, and there are many schools that you might intuit would be more amenable to that line of reasoning. Just look for the ones getting absolutely lambasted by the administration.
That is not DEI... it is plainly a matter of public health and medicine. To deny that, as a medical educator, would appear to be simply factually incorrect aside from potentially discriminatory.
Surely there are people who have their own deviant, private beliefs, but I imagine that if you are a competitive applicant, it would be difficult to dismiss your application on the fact that you discussed SDOH alone, especially if you make it past the interview stage and to full committee, where one person cannot generally make a unilateral decision (at least not without considerable backlash).
Now, when I was applying, one of the responses I received was "the schools that care will continue to care about this kind of thing, and the schools that don't, won't."
That response drove me up the wall, because it was not really reassuring and provided no new information. But it was very true in my own experience. I do suspect that talking about my work with underserved populations was appreciated by some schools. Not all of them, and not always in a proportion that felt favorable to me as an applicant.
The good news is, you only need one, and there are many schools that you might intuit would be more amenable to that line of reasoning. Just look for the ones getting absolutely lambasted by the administration.
Don't worry about this. MAGA people don't usually wind up being deans of medical schools. And if there is a school like that you'd be miserable attending one.
My alma mater was in a conservative area and the administrators were huge on DEI, social justice, etc
Edit: also if it helps, that school doesn't have DEI on its website or anything either, it's an internal thing. Don't be discouraged 🙂
My alma mater was in a conservative area and the administrators were huge on DEI, social justice, etc
Edit: also if it helps, that school doesn't have DEI on its website or anything either, it's an internal thing. Don't be discouraged 🙂
Last edited:
