Berkeley grads who got accepted?

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raindodger

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Are there any Berkeley students who received acceptances to med school in recent years?

If so, can you share your experiences, with respect to gpas, applying, and etc, and or any hints for prospective applicants this season.

Thank you.

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I take it you went to Berkeley? I would be more than happy to share my experience of applying and getting in with you and I hope I can help. I graduated from UCB in 97 with a degree in Latin American Studies, worked, volunteered, took the last of my premed classes, and eventually took the MCATs and applied. I did well in school- but NOT spectacularly- I was not a 4.0 and my science GPA wasn't higher than a 3.5 or something like that. I did relatively well on the MCAT, though, 11, 11, 12, S. I applied to 23 schools, got 12 interviews, attended 9 of them, was waitlisted at 4 schools and accepted at 5 schools. The entire process was incredibly time consuming and draining- emotionally and financially. Applying to 23 schools means forking over a LOT of $$$, not to mention writing entirely too many essays that are not always "cut-and-paste-able".

I would suggest getting a hold of essays from this year's applications and starting drafts NOW rather than writing them all when the secondaries start arriving. They take a lot of time to write and the longer you take to send them back, the longer it takes to review your application, and the more possible it may be that your interview slot goes by the wayside. Besides, after writing 30 essays, I started to stop caring about typos and content. . . .

At any rate, things worked out well and I have to say that having been a good student from Berkeley strengthened my application. But keep in mind that the entire process is really random in many ways. For example, I got interviews at Wash U and Columbia, but got flat-out rejected at Tulane without an interview. It does, however, depend on what YOU do in addition to having been a good student. It seems like most of the interviews I had were entirely based on figuring out what made me tick as a person and why I had done the nonacademic things I had done.

In the end, I had a few choices, which was nice. UCI, UCSD, U Pitt, Tufts, and U Michigan- Ann Arbor. I decided on Michigan. Giving up the in-state tuition was hard to swallow, but I know I am making the right decision.

. . . I hope this helps- and good luck to you.
 
thanks for your advice.

i understand that coming from berkeley seems to come up in interviews, according to some people i know who've gone on interviews.

did you have those types of experiences?

also, when did you submit your amcas?

i also understand that with urms, the sooner one turns their amcas app in, the better it is.

 
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Hey there, glad I could help. I submitted my AMCAS mid june. I would recommend getting this application in ASAP since you only get the secondary after they receive the AMCAS. I have to plead ignorance and say that I don't know what urms is, but I can concur that the sooner you get in the AMCAS, the better. The secondaries take a lot of time and the sooner you can get them in, the soone your app is reviewed, the sooner you can get interviewed. . . .

With respect to interviewers asking about Berkeley. . . . I actually don't think it came up that much. I had one interview with a student who had gone to cal and we talked about cal quite a bit. We both sort of made fun of the neurotic premed environment, but he also asked me a question with respect to what attitude I had about grades. He later explained that the reason he asked how I dealt with grades is that as a med student, you essentially become a very small fish in a pool full of other once-big fishes. His perception was that many people had a hard time accepting the fact that they had to work that much harder just to be average- even if "average" was pretty damn good. He basically wanted to see if I was a student that would self-destruct if I wasn't in the top 0.01% of the class.

Other than that, though, Berkeley never really came up. I graduated in 97, like I said, and did a bunch of stuff in the interim so a lot of interviewers asked about that instead.

Are you applying this year?
 
yes, i sent my amcas app sometime mid june, i've started receiving supps and email notifications from a UC.

hopefully it'll be smooth sailing from here on..
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nah, i'm sure small obstacles will come up here and there, but that's life.
 
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