Is applicant 'concentration' considered?

[Deleted member 737595]

Advertisement - Members don't see this ad

With the rise of the non-trad with incredible volunteerism and work experience from either gap years or from a different walk of life, it seems like these applicants are more likely to succeed because they have more hours.

Is the amount of time you did all your activities since the beginning of college taken into account? In other words, can a student who has more hours simply because of having taken a gap year get in more readily versus the same candidate who did the same stuff in a shorter amount of time? If not, is it fair that in order to get into medical school, all one has to do is delay, delay, delay their application until they have thousands of hours and beat the trad students?

Poorly phrased questions, but still, I've been ruminating about these things for a while now.

 

[Oso]

I imagine schools want a good mix of people from all walks of life.

I also imagine that after a certain number of volunteer, shadowing, etc. hours, you get diminishing returns and having additional hours just isn't going to make you more competitive (and definitely won't make up for poor GPA/MCAT)

Perhaps someone who took a few years off and did something truly unique or impressive may have a slight edge, but in reality I feel like most people taking time off are doing it to make up for deficits in their apps, do personally cool but not necessarily unbelievable things, work to make/save money, chill, and/or some combination of those things. I think if you are applying straight from college (no gap year) and have strong stats and solid EC's then you will be competitive.

Just my opinion though.

 

[Deleted member 737595]

I imagine schools want a good mix of people from all walks of life.

I also imagine that after a certain number of volunteer, shadowing, etc. hours, you get diminishing returns and having additional hours just isn't going to make you more competitive.

Perhaps someone who took a few years off and did something truly unique or impressive may have a slight edge, but in reality I feel like most people taking time off are doing it to make up for deficits in their apps, do personally cool but not necessarily unbelievable things, work to make/save money, chill, and/or some combination of those things. I think if you are applying straight from college (no gap year) and have strong stats and solid EC's then you will be competitive.

Just my opinion though.

Sounds good. I say this because my school doesn't stop harping about how a gap year is the norm now and that it's hard to fit in all the EC's plus MCAT studying with just four years. I'm handling it just fine and am starting to worry that I will look immature for not waiting...

But this is probably extreme neuroticism at this point. I don't blame me though! When I looked at the new MSAR

 

[maplecookie]

I agree about the point of diminishing returns and wanted to make a point about what you get about of the activities beyond the quantitative hours. There's probably a minimum number of hours for an adcom to consider that an actual activity you participated in but I think what's equally if not more important is the experiences you take away from each activity and how well you can articulate it. As you spend more time in an activity, the chances are that you are more involved and can talk more at length about it.

From that angle, I think the "accruing of hours as a nontrad to beat a trad" could go both ways. The more hours you have, the better chance you have to get more meaningfulness out of it. At the same time, if you do get thousands of hours out of it and can't say anything meaningful about it in your app/interview then I would think it reflects negatively (you did this just to check a box? how is your ability to be introspective/learn what what you do?)

Just my two cents ^^