You don't need leadership at all to sign up for the military, but you have a good chance of having "greatness thrust upon you" in the military.
Ok say I'm interviewing the 40 MCAT applicant and the 35 MCAT applicant.
"Tell me a time when you were a leader"
"Well I was in this club" vs.
"Well we were pinned down in fallujah"
Tell me about a time you failed
"Well once I got a C" or "I wasn't a good girlfriend/boyfriend" vs.
"Well an IED hit our caravan and I had to choose which of my friends I would try to save knowing that the other would die"
Do you see why adcoms go nuts for military service? Sure some military people just sit around and don't do much, but those aren't the guys that get a big leg up in the admissions game. It's worth noting that 30 years ago the median MCAT was like a 26 or something, and yet we still have competent surgeons today from that era.
And yeah Harvard could:
>300 people get a 41 every year, not sure where you're getting 100. Harvard accepts 230 for their class. I would say the majority of people with a
LizzyM of ~80 apply to HMS. If only for the intellectual curiosity component.
It's telling their
median is literally 1/10 as selective as what they could get if they accepted only people with crazy stats.
WUSTL values lizzyM...sure. But WUSTL is less desirable (on average) for people compared to stanford/JHU/Harvard/Penn/UCSF etc. since they're usually in better locations, don't have preclinical grading (except Penn) and offer more prestige. This is in aggregate, I think WUSTL is a great school but it's not hard to see why they can't poach from the top 5 effectively. Look at the bottom 10% for WUSTL though, they're clearly accepting on more than just stats too. There's no reason why WUSTL would need to accept anyone with less than a 3.8/37 yet they accept people with 34s/3.7s and below. And this is the allegedly stat-crazy school!
If you look at Harvard's breakdown they actually only accept ~5% of the 41+ MCAT scorers. That's surprisingly low to be honest.
The bottom 10% at Harvard stats-wise would be advised to retake their MCATs on this board. It really is more than stats these days, like it or not.