WARNING: INSANELY LONG POST!! Hey everyone! I have been rejected here twice in a row. While at first I was definitly frustrated, given that I have reasonably strong ties to the university and the medical school (for someone who did not graduate from the U for undergrad-- I'm IS though), I have accepted the fact that there are simply too many great candidates for the number of seats available. I really do believe that there were a huge number of applicants (myself included) that would make excellent physicians, but there were not enough seats to share with everyone. That being said, a friend and I were having a discussion after we both were rejected by the U, and we discussed the perceived struggle that the U has with sifting through the sea of premeds from Utah with seemingly very similar ethnic demographics (read: the white Mormon male). My friend expressed his frustration at the U for feeling discriminated against for fitting the previously-mentioned demographic. From what I have gathered by talking to other premeds from around Utah, I think that he isn't alone in feeling this way. This got me curious, so I looked at the available data from AAMC and UUSOM, and I found some interesting data:
The U received 3,871 applications total this year: 3,368 were OOS (~87%), 503 were IS (~13%). In total, 2,323 were male (~60%) and 1,548 were female (~40%). Nationally, the applicant pool is about 52.5% male on average. That being said, I estimated that the OOS applicant pool could be roughly 56% male (1,886 applicants-- a generous figure definitely on the higher end of what most med schools receive). In order to balance the male applicant pool to the previously-mentioned 60% (it's 60.4% to be precise), this would mean that roughly 87% of all IS applicants were male (437 applicants out of 503 total). Also, for what it's worth, AAMC reported that of all med school applicants with Utah residency (total: 583), nearly 82% (478) were white-- I didn't use that information further though. The 2016-2017 application cycle data shows that there were 125 matriculants, with 70% (88 students) coming from IS and 30% (37 students) coming from OOS. 56% of the class (70 students) were men, 44% (55 students) were women. Given the previous information, that means that women have a roughly 3.6% chance of acceptance if they apply, and men have right around a 3% chance of acceptance. Also, according to the U, "approximately 500 interviews are extended each year."
This is where my calculations become fuzzy, but this is based off of my two interview experiences only. My interview last year and this year both had 12 interviewees, and both had 10 male applicants and 2 female applicants (roughly 83% male). If you apply that ratio to the rest of the interview days (which is admittedly dicey and probably fairly inaccurate), 417 of the 500 interviewees would be male, while 83 were female. Given that 55 females were accepted, and assuming that my numbers are even close to a ballpark estimate, you have about a 66% chance of being accepted as a male (16.8%), nearly 4x more likely to be accepted based on the fact that you showed up for your interview. Also, assuming that the above 87% IS male applicant ratio is true, then that means that only 66 IS females applied. If the ratio of IS females accepted to OOS females accepted holds even at 70%/30%, then the U accepted 39 IS females-- meaning if you are an IS female in Utah, you have a ~59% chance of getting accepted. I have a feeling that this can't be accurate; let me know what you guys think about my calculations and/or let me know if I am full of complete crap.
That is only one parameter (gender) that I decided to explore before I got bored. But even so, it is interesting to think about. Honestly, to me, this little exercise just showed me, if anything, the difficult job that the admissions staff has to do in order to get through the surprisingly homogeneous in-state applicant pool. There were plenty of other interesting facts too (like the fact that BYU applicants constituted roughly 75% of all of the med school applicants from the state of Utah, and more than 95% of those applicants were white, meaning that, with some more fuzzy math, that possibly more than half of the IS applications came from white BYU undergrads-- assuming that a decent majority applied to the U and that a decent majority had IS status. You could also interpret this as saying that a HUGE portion of the IS applicant pool this year consisted of white Mormon males from BYU.). It's really disappointing to not be able to study at a good school like the U, but the more I looked into it, given the information available, the odds of getting in as a white male are slim-- and that is coming from a reapplicant who took the admission committee's "list of improvements I could make" very seriously and improved in every single parameter that they recommended I improve in. At this point, I am ready to move on. I apologize again for the length of this post. Best wishes to all who got sad news/are waiting for good news from the waitlist, and good luck to all incoming matriculants. You are a special breed of people, and don't EVER take for granted your acceptance to medical school-- there are many more who would be very very grateful to receive that call from Dr. Chan.
Congrats on getting off the WL!
