2nd look weekends

[ChocolateKiss]

What usually happens at 2nd look weekends? Does the school usually provide airfare/hotel? What type of events are there?

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[riceman04]

What usually happens at 2nd look weekends? Does the school usually provide airfare/hotel? What type of events are there?

I heard baylor com provides airfare and hotel.

 

[SaturdayDwarf]

What usually happens at 2nd look weekends? Does the school usually provide airfare/hotel? What type of events are there?

For Medical Schools, Minorities Are the Star Recruits

By JULIET CHUNG



A <http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/a.gif> fter Stephen Haskins was accepted into the New York University School of Medicine last year, he revisited the campus at the school's invitation, along with 60 other black and Hispanic students.

During the spring "second look" weekend, they were welcomed by top
administrators and briefed on life at the school by minority students and
faculty members. They were also entertained at restaurants, nightclubs and a
Broadway show. The expenses, including round-trip transportation, were
picked up by the school.

"I felt like I'd just gotten hired at Goldman Sachs and they were competing
with Morgan Stanley," said Mr. Haskins, 22, a Yale graduate who had applied
to N.Y.U. only after he was sent an unsolicited application. "I couldn't
imagine someone saying no after the school treated you that well."

Indeed, swayed in large part by the recruiting weekend, Mr. Haskins withdrew
his applications to medical schools at the University of Michigan and the
University of Pittsburgh and decided to go to N.Y.U. He began classes in
August.

More medical schools are adopting such recruiting techniques in an effort to
increase the racial diversity of their classes.

"It's a little surprising, I think, because obviously they have huge
application pools, and it's always been a seller's market," said Richard J.
Stenzler, an educational consultant in Los Angeles who helps his clients put
together applications to graduate and professional schools.

The efforts are largely in response to the small number of underrepresented
minority candidates, which has remained relatively constant despite efforts
aimed at increasing it. In 1992, 4,034 underrepresented minorities -
African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, American Indians and Puerto Ricans -
applied to medical school, compared with 4,143 in 2003, according to the
Association of American Medical Colleges. While other professional schools
also reach out to minority students, their more impersonal admissions
processes and larger minority applicant pools mean their efforts tend to be
less involved, some college advisers say.

The result? Competitive minority applicants are often courted as they weigh
the merits of several admissions offers.

"It's like getting basketball players into your school," said Dr. James L.
Phillips, a senior associate dean and professor of pediatrics at Baylor
College of Medicine in Houston. "You want to show them the pluses of your
school and the pluses of your city. You want to show them there's support
for them at all levels of the school."

Washington University School of Medicine, in St. Louis, spends nearly
$20,000 to bring in minority students for a weekend. While the curriculum is
touched upon, the focus is to overcome the perception that St. Louis is a
"cow town," administrators say. Students are taken on tours of the
neighborhood, to the theater and perhaps to a Cardinals game. More than half
of those who attended last year enrolled at the school.

In addition to holding a revisit weekend, Baylor will help place a minority
student's spouse or partner with an employer or graduate school. If a sick
relative is the issue, the school will even try to get that relative to
Baylor for medical treatment. About 70 percent of those who attended the
second look weekend last spring committed to Baylor.

Medical schools justify their efforts on a number of grounds, saying that
diversity enriches the educational experience for all students and that such
efforts are necessary to attract such highly sought-after candidates.

"What's happening is that we're all competing for the best students, and so
we have to make these efforts to show the students that we want them," said Paul T. White, assistant dean for admissions and financial aid at Johns
Hopkins School of Medicine.

Perhaps the most common justification for such efforts, though, is in
creating a physician work force that will be diverse enough to serve the
nation's rapidly changing population. Admissions officers say that not only
are minority physicians more likely to work with minority populations, which
have disproportionately low access to health care, but that minority
patients are also more likely to seek out minority doctors.

But some educators question whether the energy might be better directed
elsewhere. Some college pre-med advisers, for example, privately wonder
whether the money might be better spent on financial aid packages.

Others point out that such tactics do little to increase the numbers of
underrepresented minorities entering medicine.

"The problem is that these programs are just shifting the zero-sum total,"
said Dr. Jordan J. Cohen, the president of the Association of American
Medical Colleges. "They're obviously important from the schools' point of
view, but they unfortunately don't serve to get at the problem in the
aggregate, which is to increase the number in the total pool."

They also raise the thorny issue of what special treatment, if any, can
appropriately be extended to only one group of students.

"A lot of students are looking at the revisit program and they're
questioning the equity of having the schools fund one group of students over
another," said Dr. Will R. Ross, associate dean for diversity programs at
Washington University School of Medicine.

Some minority students say they appreciate the extra efforts medical schools
make. Javier Valle, a first-year student at the University of Michigan
Medical School who graduated from Harvard last spring, said revisiting
medical schools would have been difficult without the financial support some
schools provided. The visits were essential to making an informed decision,
he added.

Mr. Haskins, the medical student who committed to N.Y.U. after attending its
second look weekend, said such efforts indicate the sincerity of a school's
commitment to diversity. "You have to appreciate something like that," he
said. "The key part is that all of it's very genuine."

"There may come a day when these programs aren't necessary," said Mr. White,
from John Hopkins. "But I think they are for the foreseeable future."