Definition of URM in Academic Medicine

[Res-J]

What exactly is a URM in academia? On Stanford's MSTP Admissions website:

http://mstp.stanford.edu/admissions.html

they say, "Stanford MSTP is committed to expanding the participation of underrepresented minorities in our program, and to increasing the number of minorities in academic medicine."

I think this raises an interesting question as to whether all minorities (basically anybody that isn't white) will have some kind of advantage in MSTP admissions or not. What do you all think?

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[Neuronix]

URM is very specifically defined to mean a small amount of that ethnicity in the health care field. That status only applies to a couple groups, such as african-americans (black--not south african or non-black north african), hispanics (except Cubans), and american-indians. There's a few more minority groups I'm leaving off because I don't have time to look them up this morning.

URM DOES NOT INCLUDE asians of any kind, except for pacific islanders. Of course, it does not include caucasians.

I know for a fact through discussions with URMs and adcoms that URMs get a distinct advantage when applying. There's an even lower percentage of URMs in MSTP programs compared to MD programs, and they want to change that very badly. My personal theory on this is that many URMs get full-rides to med school (according to my URM friend at Baylor, any URM who is accepted gets a full ride there), so only hardcore ones go for MSTP.

There is also alot of research funding that is specifically for minority researchers. Only minorities or disabled students can apply for MD/PhD funding from the government outside of the MSTP. There's alot of HHMI money that is specifically for URMs.

So that's the scoop. I'm not saying that it's wrong. I'm just putting it all out there.

 

[Res-J]

But isn't there a difference in diversity when you're looking at the clinical versus academic research realms? I'm not sure if this is entirely true, but it seemed to me that there have been very few Asian professors in the biomedical field. Though just about every other post-doc/grad student/research assistant in the labs are Asian...

 

[Neuronix]

As far as I know--nope, it's the same definition for both. I've met many asian biomedical researchers, and also there's ALOT of asian graduate students and post-docs out there.

 

[phar]

Originally posted by Neuronix
As far as I know--nope, it's the same definition for both. I've met many asian biomedical researchers, and also there's ALOT of asian graduate students and post-docs out there.

Ya... the research field is rich in asian descendants. I guess they are the smartest social group on earth.