Guaranteed acceptance to med school, 1 condition

[limit]

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I read somewhere about a statistic that like 70% (for both male and female) of applicants that are 20 or younger at the time of application get accepted. Anyone know anything about correlation of age to acceptance ? I'm just curious... Did any younger applicants find that they were favored, or called "born doctors" by certain AdComs (as I heard somewhere that some do)...

ps. I'm not trying to put down the older applicants, they indeed deserve an equal chance, and many turn out to be terrific physicians and surgeons, but sadly statistics say that their acceptance rate is a chunk below average.

 

[tonem]

I've never heard that but its probably safe to assume that someone who "blew through" college and graduated at 20 or younger is probably very intelligent. The 30% that didn't get accepted probably lacked maturity.
That's just my opinion though.

 

[limit]

Well, that's the interesting part. I'm not talking about graduating (which at 20 is definately impressive), but I'm talking about time of application. 20 or younger has a 70% acceptance rate, while the 21-23 group (just a few years older) drops down to 30-40%... the average. I agree with your assessment of maturity though.

Does anyone know if these younger applicants get preferential treatment, and get in despite less-than-average stats ? Has anyone experienced it ?

 

[WYDO]

Here's what I think is the answer to your question. Anymore, if your going to go to medschool, you need at least a Bachelors degree, which means that your appling sometime during your senior year. If you under 20 during your senior year, it probably means that your fairly smart and started college early. Now, there are a more students who are over 21 graduating from college than those 20 and under. Therefor the application pool has a ton of students over 21 and a few students under 21. It's fair to say that if you are 20 or under when you graduate college, that you are pretty smart and did well on the MCAT and had a higher GPA. If this is all true, and there are a handful of 20 and under apply, most are going to get accepted. If you are a "normal joe", you probably graduated high school at 18 and the four or five years latter college at 22 or above. This applicant pool is very, very large, and therefor a lower % will recieve acceptances. I don't think schools give any prefernce to or look beyond the grades of the younger applicants. This is silly. If the younger applicant has lower grades, they probably need to spend a few more years in school to mature and learn to study. I think it all has to do with the number of applicants in each pool.

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JMD
KCOM Class of 2004

 

[fruitbat]

I have never heard of favoritism shown to extremely young candidiates, nor do I believe it. There are some people who are probably considered "born doctors" and looked upon very favorably for admission....people who are from "medical families" where their parents, siblings, granparents, etc. have always been doctors. Not that this will cut you any slack for crappy grades or MCAT scores, but I'm sure medical schools, like all institutions, enjoy keeping their traditions alive.
If you have heard of very high acceptance rates for 20 year olds, keep in mind that very few people younger than 21 or so apply, so one can assume that those who do are really bright and probably skipped some grades and went to college early, so they're getting in because they're really smart, not because they're really young.
If I were an ununsually young applicant, I would probably play that angle down because you never know if someone on the admissions committee would (perhaps unjustly) doubt your experience or maturity level just because of your age.
Doctors aren't just kids who did really well in science classes in school, they have to be really good at relating to and counseling people of all ages and walks of life to be effective, which can be hard when you're so young your patients don't take you seriously.

 

[fruitbat]

Incidentally, I went to school with 4 people around 20 on admission and 3 of the 4 were fine, you'd never even think about their age or maturity level.