I applied during this application cycle, and although I got into a couple medical schools, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois, and had interviews at Duke, Case Western, and Northwestern, I was pretty disappointed that I did not get into a top 25 medical school. Here is basically my profile. I graduated from Northwestern in 3 years with a 3.7 GPA and a degree in economics, took the MCAT this past summer after I graduated, and got a 37. I thought my stats, along with my extracurriculars which I thought covered the bases (1 summer of research at Feinberg, shadowing 3 doctors, 1 year of volunteering at a free health clinic in Chicago) would be able to get me into a top med school which obviously did not happen. As I look back to what went wrong, I know it wasn't my interviews or essays as all my answers were thoughtful and were presented in a confident, self assured manner. I think the problem was the substance of my overall application, in the sense that I didn't spend a summer abroad in a poor country or didn't have a publication due to the fact that my research experience was only a summer. In a sense, there was no fascinating or unique circumstance that I could share because of my vanilla E.C.'s and the fact that I come from a pretty privileged background, as both of my parents are physicians. But honestly, is it really my fault that I have lived a pretty good life? I guess I could have taken a year off to further strengthen my application, but I know that most of my friends who go abroad in public health programs end up partying instead of really "making a difference", and I could not see myself doing that. Furthermore, I find research really boring and could not force myself to do that for a year. To close, I think I realize that in order to get into these top schools, it was more a matter of me not doing the aforementioned activities instead of just bad luck. What do you guys think?
Just from this, I can pinpoint a number of issues:
1) you followed the ABC's of med school application, and you did the bare minimum for all of them. Adcoms aren't stupid and realize you did the bare minimum. In general, a passionate applicant is better than one that just checked items off a checklist.
2) if you're talking about the USNews rankings, you're talking about RESEARCH rankings. To go to a top 25 school means to go to a school that is best known for its research dollars. That means that not only do they expect a good deal of research in your application, but they also expect it to be significant (meaning that it was an important part of your education) and they expect you to at least want to do some kind of research in the future. That's the only reason to go to a top 25 school, really- the resources. If you're not going to use those resources, and you don't fit their mission (which generally includes something about training scientists as well as physicians), then you're not going to get in.
PS- research is really a catch-all term. I don't mean just lab research. Clinical research, or global health research, or public health/community based stuff also counts. The point is, you have to be a curious, open-minded scientist.
3) Again, the fact that you rushed through college by graduating in 3 years indicates that a) you're probably very young, and that generally works to your disadvantage in admissions (medicine is a grown-up job), and b) you kinda missed the point of college in the first place. Unless you had economic reasons or very good other reasons to graduate so soon, it can indicate that you didn't really care enough to take classes that were more advanced than your major required, or stuff that was a little outside the box, that may have not been your cup of tea but could have enriched your learning. Again, this points to lack of curiosity, a sort of apathy toward education. It can sound as if you were like "ok, my parents are doctors, I want to be a doctor, so I'm going to get this college thing done as quickly as I can, get a 3.7, then I guess I should do research/volunteering/shadowing, and take the MCAT, and ok, I'm done".
The thing is, medicine is all about lifelong learning. You have to LOVE what you do, and you have to be incredibly curious and inquisitive, and you have to be willing to try and learn things you might not think are super interesting, and you meet patients from all walks of life. You need to be passionate about what you do in order to do this well, I think. Either way, count your blessings for having gotten into a couple of great places, and good luck with your education.