EDIT: Taking out Duke, adding SUNY Upstate and Rochester
Hmm I see your point. The truth is being in those areas is more than just preference, more of a family situation thing. So it's really not possible to be in Philly or Florida, etc.
Flip26, are you saying I just don't have enough safeties based on a numbers thing? As in, you think everybody should have x number of schools that can be considered safeties?
Catalystik, I will have held the job for more than a year, and my research thesis is over 2 quarters. My sheer number of volunteering hours will be 200 ish over 1.5 years, but both volunteering positions will be ongoing during application year. But again, I'm really not setting up my app to be a numbers+publications type. I'm not a science major and my hooks are not very conventional, so I'm really building it up to be a personal and unique app (yes I read the thread on being unique hahaha).
So I guess please ignore the top half of my list, I'm just concerned with the "safeties." of course I'm not opposed to having more, but I have the MSAR in front of me and I'm having trouble finding other safeties in those areas. I want to be in those places because this decision doesn't concern just me. I would rather become more competitive and reapply than make my fiance go to a crappy graduate program.
Out of curiosity, where do you guys get your golden rule of how many safeties is enough? Is it just a common SDN thing?
And yes I'm finalizing this list early in order to get a head start on secondaries.
Your CA residency is the problem.
I am a VA resident. I applied to 3 of my state schools (did not do the new VA Tech school), and going into the app cycle I felt confident that I would get acceptances to at least 2 of my 3 state schools. As it turns out, I was accepted at UVA and VCU, and passed on the interview at EVMS that was scheduled to take place after I got the UVA acceptance.
So as I had hoped, I did not need to have any other safeties. Even so, I applied to NYMC (accepted), but the rest of my apps were directed at reaches and so-called dream schools a bit beyond the reach of my
LizzyM 72 (3.9/33) which is the same as yours.
I was accepted at NYU and Einstein which were maybe slight reaches for me, got rejected at Wake Forest, but I did not even get interview invites at the very tier of schools you have targeted (MSSM, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, NU, Chicago, Yale, etc). I don't think you should count on getting covered up with interview invites, much less acceptances, at this top tier of schools.
You don't have the instate advantages I had. As a CA resident, you don't have any school you can really count on. Therefore, you need to cover yourself by adding some of the "safeties" that are, in some cases, off the beaten path and not located in the most desirable big cities in the country.
Tying your apps to the grad school goal of your GF is OK, I guess, but it really should not be the driving force in shaping your list - no matter what her grad program goals, med school admissions are much tougher and much harder to predict with any certainty. If anything, she should be making her list sync up with yours and not the other way around...