•••quote:•••Originally posted by jfksenior:
•Can someone explain what kinds of students they accept, other than grades/mcat?
what are they looking for as opposed to other schools?
Are students happy there?
is it stressful?
any opinions would be much appreicated.•••••HMS of course takes students with excellent MCATs and GPAs, but I think they don't put as much emphasis on the numbers as some top schools--Wash U, Columbia--do. As someone has said above, personality is extremely important to them. But like all top schools, they look for compassionate, intelligent, energetic, mature candidates who would take full advantage of what the school has to offer. It's really difficult to tell the difference between HMS and other schools in this aspect.
However, I can tell you that HMS students are generally very happy. I have many HMS friends in New Pathway and HST and a few in the MD/PhD program and know that all of them but one are enjoying their time here. The one exception is this girl who totally hated her first year in the intense, heavily lecture-based HST program. However, she's now used to the curriculum and enjoying it much more. The students are a diverse bunch of amazingly talented and wonderfully friendly people. Some have had their PhDs, some are fresh out of college. Some were Rhodes scholars, while some look quite ordinary on paper. However, they all have a kind of passion and energy that I find very contagious... a sense of confidence in their idealistic dreams... And no, I don't think the students are stressed out too much, or at least they don't show it.
If you have decent numbers, apply! Don't be intimidated by the Harvard name. Confidence, not arrogance of course, makes a candidate attractive. I don't know how the formal education here is different from the other top schools. But I think Harvard as a university, i.e. the collection of the college, the professional and graduate schools, and other institutions, is second to none in the world. If you only care about medicine, there are plenty of similarly excellent institutions. But if you care to learn about other things as well, you'll be very happy here. There are endless resources for you to explore. (It also helps that the school has the second largest endowement for a non-profit organization in the world; the Vatican City has the largest.) The people, both students and professors, that Harvard attracts are simply amazing... HMS occupies a central place in the university and will get much help from a new university president who is working to make Boston the Silicon Valley of biotechnology.
You can see that I'm quite biased.
But really, you can't go wrong attending HMS. Don't hesitate to apply even if you think you're quite ordinary. Good luck.
