One thing is for certain.
Legendary applicants receive the Geffen Scholarship. There are Geffen Scholars who have served in combat, saved lives, published groundbreaking research, and overcome immense adversity. There are some people in that cohort who look more like honest-to-God saints than like what you or I might think of when we see medical students. This is your competition for the Geffen: the applicant who grew up herding cows in Liberia, lost his leg to a stray bullet in the civil war that wracked the country, came to America, and founded a free clinic in the heart of Detroit. The woman who grew up in foster care and overcame her adversity to play soccer for Stanford, publish a first-author paper in Cell, and serve in the Peace Corps. The ordinary-seeming Iowan who is deeply committed to medicine, has thousands upon thousands of hours of volunteering, first-author publications, and has some difficult-to-articulate quality, some charisma, that makes adcoms think: "This man is the real deal." Your competition is tough, some would say legendary - and it is impossible to tell if you will receive the Geffen.
