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They're called "traditional" applicants for a reason. So no, you won't be discriminated against for applying straight from undergrad. Non-trads may have a slight advantage IF they've used their gap years well - i.e. research, volunteering, clinical experience, etc. If you have everything you need to apply, then go for it!

I wouldn't count those dentist shadowing hours though...
 
kittycat007 said:
Yeah I didn't put the dentist hours in either... I am just worried that 100 hours isn't enough shadowing. I am really excited to start a nutrition internship this summer to help reduce hunger in my community, and I rather do this than volunteering at another hospital this summer... Do I need more shadowing hours?
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I didn't do any shadowing, but volunteered as an EMT so I had plenty of patient contact, and I work with physicians at the NIH. Only one school brought up my lack of shadowing, and still accepted me.
100 shadowing hours should be enough. Do you feel like you've gotten a sense of what being a physician is like? The real point of shadowing is to make sure this is what you want to do, not to check boxes for med schools.
 
kittycat007 said:
Hi I am currently 21 years old and I am applying to medical school directly from my university. I am worried that I will be discriminated without taking a gap year, but I really do not want to take any gap years for personal reasons. To fulfill the whole gap year thing, I decided to graduate a semester early and take a "gap semester". How much do medical school discriminate against traditional applicants? Thanks

I have all the stuff that premeds typically need, plus a little bit more. However, I only have ~100 shadowing hours from Weill Cornell and maybe ~40 shadowing hours from a dentist. How many hours shadowing hours do we really need?

Thanks
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Your application is judged based on its merits. If you are less impressive than other people, then you are less likely to get in than them. We are looking for the best applicants that we can get, nobody cares if you took more or less time than others. That having been said, if someone has spent more time than you demonstrating their medical school readiness, they are more likely to be accepted. That isn't discrimination. That is you being an inferior applicant.

If you are asking the question, "is X number of hours enough?" you don't understand the purpose of shadowing. You also are unlikely to understand after more shadowing unless you do less box checking and more thinking.
 
kittycat007 said:
Yes of course, I learned both the bad and good side of being a physician. I also realized which specialty I do not want to go into, and I decided to drop dentistry completely because I dislike it a lot.

I don't have any other patient contact experience other than the shadowing I did, so that's why I am worried. No EMT, or NIH physician stuff
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Try to get some clinical exposure. Volunteer at a hospital or something.
 
kittycat007 said:
Yes of course, I learned both the bad and good side of being a physician. I also realized which specialty I do not want to go into, and I decided to drop dentistry completely because I dislike it a lot.

I don't have any other patient contact experience other than the shadowing I did, so that's why I am worried. No EMT, or NIH physician stuff
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Don't you have clinical volunteering? That would be part of the "stuff premeds need."
 
kittycat007 said:
Hi I am currently 21 years old and I am applying to medical school directly from my university. I am worried that I will be discriminated without taking a gap year, but I really do not want to take any gap years for personal reasons. To fulfill the whole gap year thing, I decided to graduate a semester early and take a "gap semester". How much do medical school discriminate against traditional applicants? Thanks

I have all the stuff that premeds typically need, plus a little bit more. However, I only have ~100 shadowing hours from Weill Cornell and maybe ~40 shadowing hours from a dentist. How many hours shadowing hours do we really need?

Thanks
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This is lol. It's a very Ivy-esque neuroticism - every advantage and loss must be calculated and dissected.

I hear all students except Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford students are "discriminated." But I'm not sure if it's for or against...
 
lol...100 hours of shadowing is plenty. And like mimelim said, it's not the number of hours per se, it's the quality of those hours and what you learned from the experience. The point is to have an experience that informs your decision to pursue medicine, not to accumulate X number of hours. Personally, I only had ~40 hours of shadowing. One of the posters above had none, but had other meaningful clinical experience. Don't worry about accumulating hours, just make sure the ones you have are meaningful.
 
caffeinemia said:
This is lol. It's a very Ivy-esque neuroticism - every advantage and loss must be calculated and dissected.

I hear all students except Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford students are "discriminated." But I'm not sure if it's for or against...
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Careful, you'll unintentionally draw out a certain poster who arrives in every "undergrad" thread to inform us all about how horribly unfair it is to attend a top 15 school...
 
WingedOx said:
Careful, you'll unintentionally draw out a certain poster who arrives in every "undergrad" thread to inform us all about how horribly unfair it is to attend a top 15 school...
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OMG. It's even moar unfair to be at the [top arbitrary number +1] because we're just as good, but the chip on our shoulder is exponentially bigger!

Whininess_about_unfairness = base_whininess*2^n . where n = ranking of your school.
 
gonnif said:
If I ever wrote a book about premeds I would call it "The Neurotics." Makes me want to put Valium Salt Lick in my office.
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Sounds like my premed band. I created it for activity *#16* on my AMCAS. Then I had to make it clinical, so we played in front of hospitals and confetti bombed sexual health awareness flyers after we finished.
 
WingedOx said:
Careful, you'll unintentionally draw out a certain poster who arrives in every "undergrad" thread to inform us all about how horribly unfair it is to attend a top 15 school...
Click to expand...

@efle

You might also unintentionally draw out a certain poster who will rely on ad hominem attacks or anecdotal evidence rather than addressing the data brought up by said poster.
 
kittycat007 said:
Hi I am currently 21 years old and I am applying to medical school directly from my university. I am worried that I will be discriminated without taking a gap year, but I really do not want to take any gap years for personal reasons. To fulfill the whole gap year thing, I decided to graduate a semester early and take a "gap semester". How much do medical school discriminate against traditional applicants? Thanks

I have all the stuff that premeds typically need, plus a little bit more. However, I only have ~100 shadowing hours from Weill Cornell and maybe ~40 shadowing hours from a dentist. How many hours shadowing hours do we really need?

Thanks
Click to expand...

As said above "traditional" grads don't get discriminated against. But people who accomplish more, during a gap year or otherwise, perhaps have an opportunity to give themselves an edge. But your post does raise one potential red flag -- you suggest you don't want to do a gap year vaguely "for personal reasons". The reading between the lines is that you are somehow in a rush. Rushing in this process is not a wise move. This is a lifelong career -- the light at the end of the tunnel is often a train and you really don't win anything by getting there first. This process often echoes the fable of the tortoise and the hare -- slow and steady tends to win this race.
 
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I echo the OP's sentiment. I hear from a lot of my interaction with med students at my Ugrad school and other places that most of them took at least one gap year. The few people I see who go traditional have killer stats and regular/good EC's, which is scaring me and making me apply even more broadly. Scared even to touch some of top 20s though I'd be considered a competitive applicant.
 
The-Shining-008.jpg


Don't bow out of one thread just to go startin ish in another! If you want to shut me up about this topic on these boards, legit address my points and data over in Does Uni Matter. I'd like to be convinced I'm wrong, it isn't a pleasant thought that many premeds' ability to shoot for selective schools/apply at all is largely impacted by where they choose for ugrad, but being called pretentious and whiny (while undoubtedly accurate) or told about your friends doesn't do much to change my view

To OP: iirc the percentage of incoming students with gap years is now well over half at the more selective med schools and about half for all schools. As people already said you aren't faulted for going direct from undergrad, rather taking the gap allows people to put more positives on their app.
 
I would not call a 1 year gap as "non-traditional". If you're early 20s and have been pursuing med school as an undergrad, you're rather standard. That said, they likely have more to show than someone who applies during undergrad.

That said, did I miss a part where you detailed clinical volunteering? Shadowing doesn't count. A nutrition internship probably won't count...
 
Frankly, I've always felt non-trads had an unfair advantage on the MCAT. SDN is full of stories about people who are 27+ who took the exam and got Harvard Medical School-quality scores on it. Why is this impressive? When they were a premed, the people who are currently traditional applicants were in the seventh grade. Recent research in neuroscience suggests that the brain does not finish development until age 25 or so, and decision-making skills are incomplete until then. Furthermore, many of these people have work experience in biology or engineering that make it so they barely even have to study for BS or PS on account of doing it every day for their job. It's like a college senior taking the SAT and bragging about doing well on it.
 
Doug Underhill said:
Frankly, I've always felt non-trads had an unfair advantage on the MCAT. SDN is full of stories about people who are 27+ who took the exam and got Harvard Medical School-quality scores on it. Why is this impressive? When they were a premed, the people who are currently traditional applicants were in the seventh grade. Recent research in neuroscience suggests that the brain does not finish development until age 25 or so, and decision-making skills are incomplete until then. Furthermore, many of these people have work experience in biology or engineering that make it so they barely even have to study for BS or PS on account of doing it every day for their job. It's like a college senior taking the SAT and bragging about doing well on it.
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You're suggesting that someone who does well on the MCAT because they have greater personal experience with the material, as well as being further along in brain development, has an unfair advantage? How is that unfair?
 
kittycat007 said:
OK I can see from the feedback that there is a lot of flexibility. It is just all of our premed advisers push us to take a gap year, and I am constantly wondering if there is something wrong with traditional applicants? Thanks again for the feedback

About the hours shadowed discussion, of course I am not simply doing it for hours. I just don't know what everyone else is doing at other schools, that's all. All the premeds at my university overdo everything.
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I don't know why they would push a gap year, unless you legitimately have something you want to do in your life. Medicine is a long journey, and once you start it you won't be able to take a year off and do...well, whatever the hell people do with a gap year. Anyways, it would be ridiculous to me for a student with average scores to take a gap year just to be "non-traditional" or more competitive (like above, I don't consider a 23 year old with one year of research after college "non traditional"). Bottom line, I can't imagine why someone would give a blanket recommendation for gap years, but I've heard tales of premed advisers recommending crazier things.
 
I think most people who have taken a gap year say that time was far less intense than med school and even than upperclassman undergrad

Advisers can be misinformed. This is mentioned all over these boards. Also their job is just to try and get you in somewhere, and spending an extra year building your resume does help with that
 
MrLogan13 said:
You're suggesting that someone who does well on the MCAT because they have greater personal experience with the material, as well as being further along in brain development, has an unfair advantage? How is that unfair?
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It's like putting a high school senior running back in the Pop Warner youth football league and being impressed that he's bowling over the 12-year olds. He has greater personal experience with the material of football and is further along in musculoskeletal development and maturity. For a more apt example, it's like a high school AP Calculus student taking an eighth-grade math placement exam.

Personally, I think it's unfair to compare the trads to the non-trads with regards to these scores. If med schools desire non-trad applicants for reasons of real-world experience or whatever, they should reserve a few slots in the class for them and compare non-trads directly to each other, while having traditional applicants compete only with each other for the rest of the traditional slots.
 
Doug Underhill said:
It's like putting a high school senior running back in the Pop Warner youth football league and being impressed that he's bowling over the 12-year olds. He has greater personal experience with the material of football and is further along in musculoskeletal development and maturity. For a more apt example, it's like a high school AP Calculus student taking an eighth-grade math placement exam.
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Think back to test topics last semester. Last year. 3 years ago? Do you even know what was on the test?

I think you're overestimating how easy it is for non-trads to pick up material they haven't seen in >5 years. There's no reason I would have looked at the purpose of a spleen, the difference between tRNA and mRNA, carbonyl reactions, or any of the minutiae presented during those 2 years worth of coursework. In undergrad, topics often build (my quantum class built on my modern physics, which built on/complemented some chemistry, etc). This helps reinforce topics and increases retention.

In the 5 years since I graduated, and 7 years since Bio/Chem/etc, I've been cramming everything else in: working on non-science ('business') skills, honing very specified knowledge required for graduate work (field: not at all related to medicine) and my job (field: not at all related to graduate work, or medicine), and I'm not using much (any) of my core undergraduate knowledge. This is all that the MCAT is testing. Use it or lose it... and most of us need to essentially start at the ground floor. Well... I did.

If you think someone should be discriminated against because they are older and experienced in ways ignored by the MCAT... that's ridiculous. If older students are doing well on the MCAT it's because they have to prove themselves ("Do you still know your stuff after X years"), the opportunity costs are higher to study/apply, and they may be more determined as career changers.
 
This is such a poor analogy that I can't even begin to figure out how to refute it.


Doug Underhill said:
It's like putting a high school senior running back in the Pop Warner youth football league and being impressed that he's bowling over the 12-year olds. He has greater personal experience with the material of football and is further along in musculoskeletal development and maturity. For a more apt example, it's like a high school AP Calculus student taking an eighth-grade math placement exam.

Personally, I think it's unfair to compare the trads to the non-trads with regards to these scores. If med schools desire non-trad applicants for reasons of real-world experience or whatever, they should reserve a few slots in the class for them and compare non-trads directly to each other, while having traditional applicants compete only with each other for the rest of the traditional slots.
Click to expand...
 
kittycat007 said:
The reason why I don't want to do a gap year is that I am looking forward to medical school. I like being in school and I like the material that they are learning, so hey, why not get started? I think I will be happier as a medical school student rather than working at somewhere for 1 year. Who said that full time employment is any easier than medical school? Everybody struggles with life, and medical school students certainly do not have the worst type of struggle.

As for personal reasons, I think that if I enter medicine without a gap year, then I can spend 1 more year helping thousands of patients. Medicine is already long enough, and taking a gap year will make it even longer. I am NOT rushing on my application - I have everything that I am supposed to have. My clinical experience is both ER volunteering and shadowing for one summer.

I am just extremely concerned why our advisers are telling us to take gap years, over and over again. So I assumed that medical school discriminates against traditional applicants.
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Non-traditional applicants are becoming less and less non-traditional with each year. The average age of matriculation is something like 24-25 - if not older - at my institution. That said, that doesn't mean that you're going to be "discriminated" against.

Often, a gap year will give you time to 1) build your CV, 2) give you a break from school, and 3) mature a bit by being outside the classroom. #1 and #2 don't seem to be concerns for you. Based on the post I quoted, #3 might be worth your while. But at the end of the day, you should do what you think is best for your application. It's you - not your advisers - that are ultimately going to be applying.
 
Doug Underhill said:
It's like putting a high school senior running back in the Pop Warner youth football league and being impressed that he's bowling over the 12-year olds. He has greater personal experience with the material of football and is further along in musculoskeletal development and maturity. For a more apt example, it's like a high school AP Calculus student taking an eighth-grade math placement exam.
Personally, I think it's unfair to compare the trads to the non-trads with regards to these scores. If med schools desire non-trad applicants for reasons of real-world experience or whatever, they should reserve a few slots in the class for them and compare non-trads directly to each other, while having traditional applicants compete only with each other for the rest of the traditional slots.
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Goro said:
This is such a poor analogy that I can't even begin to figure out how to refute it.
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Do what I do and respond with "No Doug, no!"
 
Doug Underhill said:
Personally, I think it's unfair to compare the trads to the non-trads with regards to these scores. If med schools desire non-trad applicants for reasons of real-world experience or whatever, they should reserve a few slots in the class for them and compare non-trads directly to each other, while having traditional applicants compete only with each other for the rest of the traditional slots.
Click to expand...

I totes agree. Everyone should get a trophy too.
 
Doug Underhill said:
Frankly, I've always felt non-trads had an unfair advantage on the MCAT. SDN is full of stories about people who are 27+ who took the exam and got Harvard Medical School-quality scores on it. Why is this impressive? When they were a premed, the people who are currently traditional applicants were in the seventh grade. Recent research in neuroscience suggests that the brain does not finish development until age 25 or so, and decision-making skills are incomplete until then. Furthermore, many of these people have work experience in biology or engineering that make it so they barely even have to study for BS or PS on account of doing it every day for their job. It's like a college senior taking the SAT and bragging about doing well on it.
Click to expand...

So, if you're that convinced that waiting until 25 will get you into a better medical school than what you'd get into now, and if that's really all that important for you...why not wait until then yourself?
 
Doug Underhill said:
Frankly, I've always felt non-trads had an unfair advantage on the MCAT. SDN is full of stories about people who are 27+ who took the exam and got Harvard Medical School-quality scores on it. Why is this impressive? When they were a premed, the people who are currently traditional applicants were in the seventh grade. Recent research in neuroscience suggests that the brain does not finish development until age 25 or so, and decision-making skills are incomplete until then. Furthermore, many of these people have work experience in biology or engineering that make it so they barely even have to study for BS or PS on account of doing it every day for their job. It's like a college senior taking the SAT and bragging about doing well on it.
Click to expand...

Non trads fall into a wide range of people. I would consider myself as a non trad, working as an RN and finishing my bachelors in Biology. I have to juggle full time school, working all weekend, and studying for the MCAT. I am certainly at no advantage over your vanilla premed student. And the latter part of you argument is essentially saying non trads have more life experience than traditional applications. This is probably true, but isn't a reason to say they have an unfair advantage.
 
I noticed that non-trads becoming the new norm is more common up North than it is in the South.
 
Doug Underhill said:
It's like putting a high school senior running back in the Pop Warner youth football league and being impressed that he's bowling over the 12-year olds. He has greater personal experience with the material of football and is further along in musculoskeletal development and maturity. For a more apt example, it's like a high school AP Calculus student taking an eighth-grade math placement exam.

Personally, I think it's unfair to compare the trads to the non-trads with regards to these scores. If med schools desire non-trad applicants for reasons of real-world experience or whatever, they should reserve a few slots in the class for them and compare non-trads directly to each other, while having traditional applicants compete only with each other for the rest of the traditional slots.
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why? what right do traditional applicants have to medical school seats? i don't even disagree that non-trads enjoy certain academic advantages, but i'm failing to see what's unfair here
 
answer to OP is "no", but those who don't know the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb might not be so lucky
 
Holmwood said:
Any theories on why that may be? I'm curious.
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Probably relative competitiveness of getting into med school. In case of Texas, for example, there are probably not even enough non-trads to fill all the med school seats, and they can't draw students from OOS.

Another speculation is for some reason people who run med schools in the South have a different view on admissions process than those from North programs. To my surprise, I spoke to a number of faculty at med school of my university as well as the dean of admissions and they didn't seem to be any more enthusiastic about non-trads than they are about trad students. In fact some of them flat out said, that they themselves would avoid gap years if at all possible.
 
Traditional or non-traditional, a competitive applicant is a competitive applicant. Schools will take candidates that they feel meet their mission and will succeed.
 
Doug Underhill said:
It's like putting a high school senior running back in the Pop Warner youth football league and being impressed that he's bowling over the 12-year olds. He has greater personal experience with the material of football and is further along in musculoskeletal development and maturity. For a more apt example, it's like a high school AP Calculus student taking an eighth-grade math placement exam.

Personally, I think it's unfair to compare the trads to the non-trads with regards to these scores. If med schools desire non-trad applicants for reasons of real-world experience or whatever, they should reserve a few slots in the class for them and compare non-trads directly to each other, while having traditional applicants compete only with each other for the rest of the traditional slots.
Click to expand...

This post is SOOOOOO bad, I'm going to ignore the fact that everyone else has piled on and pile on some more.

I'm about 3 months away from being an attending. How do you think I'd do if I took Orgo today? Step 1?

C'mon now.
 
The funny part of the @Doug Underhill derail is that Doug is a nontrad himself. He is a doctoral candidate, based on his other posts. I doubt he truly subscribes to the Pop Warner mis-analogy.

He's a good-natured guy and he wants to help. He just seems to have a brain circuit that activates every now and then and causes him to talk out of his ***. No Doug, no!
 
What breakintheroof said is true, I was basing it on my own experiences. It just felt really odd competing with the traditional applicants on the test.

gonnif's third point is very apt. As a patient, I would probably prefer that the selection process be the way that it is.
 
Doug Underhill said:
It's like putting a high school senior running back in the Pop Warner youth football league and being impressed that he's bowling over the 12-year olds. He has greater personal experience with the material of football and is further along in musculoskeletal development and maturity. For a more apt example, it's like a high school AP Calculus student taking an eighth-grade math placement exam.

Personally, I think it's unfair to compare the trads to the non-trads with regards to these scores. If med schools desire non-trad applicants for reasons of real-world experience or whatever, they should reserve a few slots in the class for them and compare non-trads directly to each other, while having traditional applicants compete only with each other for the rest of the traditional slots.
Click to expand...

Um, the more you type the less sense you make. Med schools want to take the best candidates and train them. To the extent you are arguing that it's unfair because nontrads will generally be the better candidates, I think you undermine the premise.
 
To an extent they are discriminated against, in that it's easier to be impressive when you have had more time to have life experiences/accomplish significant EC. Although I'd argue it's more like non-trads being discriminated favorably rather than trad applicants being hurt directly. If you have a good app, you have a good app, regardless of whether you're a trad or non-trad so don't worry about it.

If you have a good app I'd still recommend taking a gap year (or just deferring) since once you get on the medicine train it's hard to get off. Now is the time to backpack around Europe, work a farm, train for that marathon etc. If you would prefer to just go straight through that's a perfectly reasonable alternative.
 
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