Originally posted by Doctor2010
I have a bachelor's degree from a non-US school and a masters from Oxford. I want to get into a top-10 US medical school. Do I need to take a postbacc premed program at a top school or not? I was thinking of getting into the Rutgers program but I'm not sure that will help achieve my aim. Any thoughts? Please be generous with your comments.
Hey,
I can only give you my own experience - do with it what you will.
I'm a US citizen (this does make a difference, if you're not you should probably call individual schools and ask them how many int students they take, some don't take any, some make you prove that you can pay the full tuition up front, etc) and I did my undergrad in bio and my masters in cell bio in Switzerland.
After working for a couple of years, I applied to about 16 US med schools from Switzerland, got one interview and didn't get in. The schools told me that they weren't sure that I had the best understanding of med school in the US. So I decided to do a post-bac prgm - I did have to shop around for one because most were for people who needed to do the basic science courses because they had an undergrad in a non science/non bio major.
I ended up in a post-bac prgm (at UCSF) where I took mostly upper division and grad bio classes along with courses in English, the humanities and social sciences which are required by US med schools and that I had of course not done in Switzerland.
I was all set to apply to med school the same year as I was taking these courses but then I had the bright idea to call up schools and make sure that they considered me eligible because almost all schools require a gpa based on at least one year of full-time course work at an American institution (and some require an American undergrad degree - UCDavis and Northwestern are 2 that I remember). Of course they want to see that gpa when you apply, so I had to wait another year before applying (this would have been the case even if I had a phd in the bio med sciences from the Karolinska institute).
When I finally did send in my AMCAS, I carpeted the country with aps (I had no idea of how different schools would look at my application) appliying to about 30 schools in different ranges. When I saw that I was getting secondaries from strong selective schools, I ended up sending out about 14 secondaries, got 8 interviews, got into 8 schools. All 8 schools have very good reputations.
When I got over the first few (huge) hurdles, I found that schools considered my life experience a plus and that it made my application stand out from that of more traditional students - all I had to do was convince them that I was committed to med school.
So that's my story - I would definitely recommend that you do a post-bac prgm, that you shop around to find the one best suited to your needs, that you make sure that you fill in any blanks in your app that might be a given for students who have done school here (diverse undergrad training with composition, soc sciences, etc, in-school leadership roles, volunteering, community work), talk to admissions officers at schools you're intrerested in, and for bleep's sake don't go into it saying that you want to get into a top-10 med school - cause it's like yeah you and about 25 000 other people - litterally. A place like Hopkins or U Penn has about 5000 applicants for 120 spots. Why don't you just aim for getting into med school - that's a pretty good start...