How did you secure a scholarship for Medical School?

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Jay2910

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Alright . . .so taking the advice of Mad Jack . . .starting new thread . . .would LOVE serious answers . .please

So far, I am hearing are military/navy scholarships and different kinds of loans are ways to pay for med school. I would like to hear more about other scholarships. Is there a scholarship thread out here?

To all of the former pre-med students out there that did manage to secure a scholarship( be it full ride or partial and no, not military/navy based):

1) How did you end up knowing about your scholarship?
2) Is there a website or something( Like Petersons) that can help you find "Graduate/Medical" school scholarships? Or is there a book that you recommend?
3) Let's say that you got accepted into the school of your choice but they gave you no aid( or not enough). How would you approach them in order to give you more aid? How would you write your letter?
4) What threads did you use, to find out which colleges are more prone to giving need based financial need? ( besides the school threads themselves).

Thank you!

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Medical school isn't like UG with scholarships/financial aid. For the most part, you will be expected to finance your tuition with student loans. Scholarhips are available to very high performing applicants, but you probably shouldn't count on getting one. "Aid" really isn't a big thing with medical schools, outside of a few schools (I believe Harvard is one). Regardless of your family's financial situation, you will probably not be getting a discount.
 
There are quite a few scholarships available to current medical students, usually with a certain background/religious beliefs/hometown etc (i.e. there's a scholarship for Jewish people, a scholarship for people from X county in X state, etc). You can apply to the ones that apply to you once you are a med student. The financial aid office at your school should be able to hook you up with a list of scholarships like this. Personally, none of these seem to apply to me, but I know several of my classmates who have applied for them.

All I did was fill out FAFSA for consideration for need-based grants. I was randomly offered a $10k/year Dean's scholarship from Temple, but that's something you don't apply for, they just make the selection based on whatever criteria they use.

Most people receive very little (or no) aid, so writing to the school and asking for aid generally won't work.
 
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What I have seen Pritzker likes to give scholarships to URM's in the 160k and 180k mark. I don't know much about it, but I know some people here on SDN were given the chance to receive this scholarship.
 
1) Apply to schools that give a relatively large portion of their class scholarships and that you feel like are still good fits (ie. CCLCM, Pritzker, etc)

2) Have the differentiators (I have been told by 2 adcoms that there was a cutoff MCAT for their Deans scholarship, but that after that other factors were used to decide who to give scholarships to) that will get you a merit scholarship (a lot of schools will have something like a Deans scholarship of varying amounts, though I wouldn't count on getting one, and sometimes you'll be offered one at one place but not another, so it can be quite hard to predict)

3) Large national scholarships can make a bit of a dent (ie. Soros, Truman, etc). Some of the deadlines for these have passed, and some you can apply for while in medical school, but they are often very, very competitive (more competitive than getting into medical school by a long shot) and not limited to just students in med school, so think carefully about investing the time it takes to enter to competitions if you do consider them.

4) Military

5) Know you're entering a field that will have loan forgiveness programs afterwards (ie. primary care)

6) Small scholarships may add up and make a very slight dent; for example, there are scholarships for graduating seniors through honors societies, thesis competitions, etc (ie. Phi Kappa Phi fellowships, etc)

I haven't come across many websites that are great, and google searches haven't been too fruitful for me personally. I would generally agree with TheWeeIceMan that it's not like undergrad and that securing scholarships prior to matriculation seems to be difficult. Furthermore, the scholarships that exist are often for grad school more generally (so anybody, from PhD to MD can apply for them), which can make them harder to locate by a simple search.

As for approaching a school that didn't give you enough aid, I think it's quite variable. Being confrontational never helps, but other than stating the truth and expressing how much you want to be at their school but won't be able to financially, it seems to be up in the air. Personally, one school matched an offer from another when I went to speak with them, but I had two friends that had different experiences. One went and mentioned other acceptances to the adcom in the hopes they would offer him money and they essentially said they didn't care. Another went and just mentioned he couldn't attend the school without more financial help, but the school said they didn't have money to give. All this is to say it seems it's going to be somewhat up to the finances of the school, how "badly" they want you, and a lot of luck when it comes to conveying to a school that you need more financial aid to make attendance a possibility.

Good luck getting that dough.
 
I think this varies by school to a large exten. The texas MD schools seem very generous with scholarships.

I recieved $10K per year at UT Houston and Texas Tech respectively. And, from my disucssion with another school, they may be willing to match those amounts.

Two of my high school friends (who are MS1s at Baylor) recieved 33K scholarships there. One also recieved 10K per year from UTMB and UTSW.

So the Texas schools are quite generous (and ridiculously cheap).
 
There are loan forgiveness programs for students who choose to practice primary care in underserved areas for X number of years after medical schoool.
 
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