Yes, you can plan realistically to apply for medical school now. The best thing you can do is get into a cheap, 4-year college so you accumulate as little debt as possible (apply for scholarships, grants, honors college, etc). Once you start college, create a plan to complete pre-requisites in a timely fashion and protect your GPA at all costs. Also get in touch with your premed advisor at college ASAP. But as a high school student, just set yourself up as best you can for college right now.
OP is right--acceptance rates for individual schools are 1-5%. 40% is the average acceptance rate for people who apply to tons of schools. Just like how your chance of winning the lottery is basically 0%, but if you put in a ton of tickets then your chances go up.
40% is the average out of ALL applicants. Some apply early decision (1 school) or <10 schools, and still get accepted. Some apply to 40+ schools and get rejected from all.
Now is the time for you to start planning. What you do and how well you do in the next 3 years will determine your chances of being in the 40% that get at least one acceptance. Good luck.
As others are saying, it's crazy hard, but it's far from impossible.
When you consider the large majority of schools accept 2-3x their final number of matriculants, that percentage (on average) creeps up a bit. The point is that the 1-5% per school statistic is an overly pessimistic snapshot of how difficult it is to get into medical school.
I'm an admissions dean, so I am somewhat familiar with how the game is played, but thank you for the analogy.
Was just clarifying to op, it was not my intention to explain to someone more qualified than me
But is 1-5% not right? Schools get on an average about 5k applications for about 100 seats = 2% (assume 200 acceptances = 4%).
There best way to improve your probability of admission is to get an astronomically high undergraduate total GPA and science GPA. First, make sure you attend a college that has a 75th percentile SAT/ACT score that's lower than yours. You want to be the smartest kid in the room. Second, do not take any advance placement tests for college credit. You want your freshman year of college to be a substantive reprise of high school. Third, don't major in engineering, physics or chemistry. These majors are GPA killers. Fourth, avoid party animals when you get to college for obvious reasons.
Focus on getting into college, and doing well there.
Is this good advice? You want someone to join a community college to be the smartest person in class and then compete with Ivies for med school?
Not quite- most programs do not advertise how many offers of admission they make but rather the number of matriculants they have. A school with 5000 applicants and 150 seats might appear to have a 3% acceptance rate but in actuality they might accept 450 students to seat a class of 150 which would be 9%. At my program each class has around 140 students and around 200-220 acceptances are granted each year. Regardless, the point is that competition is fierce. At some programs between 80-90% of applications must be rejected pre interview.
I would take this advice with a huge grain of salt - no you do not have to be the smartest person in the room - actually it’s better to get used to the fact that you aren’t early on so you don’t have a breakdown in med school when you realize you aren’t. Sat/act scores supposedly predict academic performance in college but the data on how predictive scores are is quite mixed.
Some medical schools, like GW for example, get 11,000 applications per year. They don't have the staff or inclination to parse through transcripts to see who took calculus based physics and who didn't. They have no way of comparing a transcript from Carleton with a transcript from Mankato other than taking them at face value. Furthermore, there is no study which shows, after controlling for SAT/ACT scores of undergraduate freshmen, that more rigorous schools produce higher MCAT scores.
Your response seems to imply I made arguments that I did not make - I would encourage you to look through it again. I agree committees are not going to parse transcripts which is why I wrote what I did above - don’t take classes because one thinks they look good. I am also not arguing that adcoms should compare GPAs of different schools. I also did not argue that someone should attend a school because they think it looks better. I agree that one needs to have good grades but being “the smartest one in the room” is a bit over the top. There are plenty of graduates with Latin honors in my class and even more who don’t have them. Again, grades and test scores open the door but they won’t get you to an acceptance.
I would not advise someone who aspires to become a physician to go to a community college if he or she can go to a four year college. Some medical schools disfavor prerequisite classes taken at community colleges. However, I would also not advise a medical school aspirant to major in chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon especially if that kid had an ACT/SAT score lower than the average score among Carnegie Mellon freshmen. There is simply nothing to be gained by bashing your head against a brick wall.
