Is this real life?

[da8s0859q]

Excuse my ignorance but I don't have very many pre-med friends.

Everyone on SDN seems to have a 33+ MCAT score and a 3.9+ GPA. People on here think their entire application is a waste because of one typo on their AMCAS. Others freak out if they are close to breaking their precious 4.0. They start studying for the MCAT during the Spring of their Freshmen year. Then they freak out when they get a 9 on VR. They are self-titled "PMS-1". People have 10,000 hours of volunteering, community service, and shadowing hours, each. A girl in my physics class wears scrubs to lectures everyday. Some people refuse to help me in the lab in fear of me getting a better grade. So I must ask:

Is this real life?

No. I donated to SDN because it's a great source for information on both getting in and thriving in med school, but don't think for one second that it's representative of all premedical students (or medical students, for that matter). If you came up with a general index for pre-med neuroticism -- some numerical measure for morals-in-your-face, save-the-world, 98%-isn't-good-enough attitude -- and made a Gaussian distribution out of it, SDN would be somewhere between 1 and 2 standard deviations to the right.

And anyone who refers to him/herself as "PMS-1" needs a serious reality check. Quite possibly the goofiest thing I've read in awhile.

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[Trojan88]

I think the users who post their GPA and MCAT on SDN tend to be self-selective: the ones with the good stats are more likely to post their numbers.

It's also possible that some people put down false grades and scores. There is no way to know for sure since this is the internet after all.

Finally, I think it's common for many of us to underestimate ourselves a little, so that even if another poster has similar stats as us, we will somehow convince ourselves that the other poster is more qualified.

I would take the self-reported GPA and MCAT with a grain of salt. They are a good reference, but I won't let it be any more than that.