Hi Sunder, I am a Ph.D. currently accepted to med school for 2002. I chose this chaotic year to apply and here is my feeling about Ph.D. applying to med schools. Proceed with caution. Avoid the following schools: 1) Columbia, 2) All UC schools, 3) primary-care oriented schools. I was quite surprised to know that a Ph.D. does not at all imply automatic acceptance. I came from a top five Ph.D. institution in this country, and UCB was my aluma mater for undergrad, and the take home point is: your undergrad GPA no longer matters, and journal publication becames a requirement, and you have to do well in your MCAT (30 or above), and you must be lucky in your interview ( it only helps if you are interviewing with a M.D./Ph.D. physician, or a physician who currently is involved in research). I interviewed with a few pure M.D., and they implicitly ridiculed my decision to pursue a M.D., and quite a few of those interviews yielded waiting lists at the end. I have quite a few first author publications, two secondary authorships in Cell and Nature, with a very strong recommendations from my RESEARCH P.I. (this is crucial, if you don't have a letter from your P.I., your application will be very weak). Last but not least, in-depth patient exposure and proficient in one or two aspects of medicine. (I had experiences in the bone marrow transplantation center and ER). Coming from UCBerkeley, which is great school for basic research, students are short-changed in hospital exposure. Your expertise in endocrineology is a big plus, however. Some med schools do not believe that research will make a better physician, and Columbia is one prime example for it. Schools in UCs do not even care about your Ph.D. if you don't have the numbers to survive the computer screening rounds. Don't be discouraged, I simply gave you the facts that I learned from my experience. Do well in MCAT, that is the most important factor.
