I was wondering will i be obligated to fill in my ethnicity on my application to medical schools? and if i don't, will i be penalized for it in any possible ways?
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regarding races
Started by Cleavername
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I'm pretty sure they can't make you, but why wouldn't you? Either you're URM and you'll get an advantage or you won't. They can probably guess your ethnicity from your name anyways.
i am chinese, i am fairly certain that my race, or whether my use to be nationality is not contributing much to my acceptance.
I filled mine out - it's just ridiculously obvious that I am Chinese as well simply based off my last name, so it seemed silly to leave it blank.
Well think of it this way, if you don't include your race, they'll just assume you're asian/or white and hold you to those standards anyways. Just curious though, would your name give it away?
I know, but I doubt it's SO much easier that it would increase your chances of an acceptance when compared to a white person so much so that you would avoid stating your race. By that I mean if you have an asian kid with a 3.7/33 and a white kid with a 3.7/33 the asian kid isn't going to get his secondary thrown away because he's not white. (look at the AAMC admission grid for whites: http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/table25-w-mcatgpagridwhite.pdf and asians: http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/table25-a-mcatgpagridasian.pdf and you'll see the percentages are pretty close for a lot of the GPA/MCAT combinations)
Besides isn't this conversation kind of useless, seeing as how they see you IN PERSON during your interview anyway...
lol, yeah that would have been the most obvious answer. Unfortunately my mind was working overdrive ready for tough questions and this was almost too easy. 😳
yes, yes it would instaneousely lol. i kind of wish i was a korean so that i have a chance to have a name like lee, cause americans, by that i mean white people have that too lol.
must i attend an interview to get accepted? like can i be accepted just like how its done in colleges? mail in my application then get mailed back.?
Seriously? You were asked this? By whom?
Isn't this information optional? I can't remember the AMCAS specifically, but this information is typically not required for anything...
Most definetely you must attend an interview! I think you need to research the process of application a lot more before you worry about things like checking the race box. After all, like people have said, it will be obvious what ethnicity you are from your interview, and also likely inferable from your name.
Honestly, I roll my eyes when I see people try to "hide" being asian. It just makes you look ineptly sneaky. Not exactly a personality trait you want your interviewer to be pinning on you.
And listen, don't worry about being discriminated against as an asian. The most damaging perception of asian applicants is that they are being pressured into it by their families, so just make sure your app reflects that you are wholehearted in your personal desire to be a physician and no one will be able to think that of you.
If said URM were good enough to get interviews anyway, they would at that point be noticed to be black/hispanic/native american. Their file would be amended and from that point treated as URM. Honestly, the amendment would likely happen earlier. URM individuals often are heavily involved with diversity clubs, mentorship programs and other racially suggestive programs, or went to high schools which are primarily of one ethnic origin. They also often have racially suggestive first or last names: "Lashonda Butler" "Hugo Hernandez" "Katherine Blackfoot"
I actually knew one guy from undergrad whose last name was Cortez. He had borderline scores, but randomly got an interview from a reach school. The first question was about his "hispanic culture." As the applicant in question was not "hispanic" but instead was an american white mutt, he was confused. He hadn't answered the race question on his AMCAS. The rest of the interview, he said, felt prefunctory and he got a rejection from them a week later.
Yeah, it was pretty baseless of them to send out interviews based on last names. To be honest, I think the whole thing is messed up. I can understand how some people (black, white, purple, you name it) who were born and raised in other countries deserve some credit for managing to get their foot to med schools while struggling with the language/culture/etc. But come on, those who have been living in the United States for 20 generations have no business pulling off that card.
I'm gonna put that my people came from Africa and migrated to all corners of the Earth.
You don't have any control over the family/environment you are born into genius...
Leave it blank if you want to. It's always voluntary.
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this is how you should reply:
i don't believe in competition. whoever gets there first isn't necessarily the winner. why do we have to call it race? i view myself as human, man, part of the human race, cause we're all in it together, you know? like, as one. one big group, racing towards the finish line of life, man. mind if i light a j?
Or change your name to Jorge Gonzalez from Aguas Calientes (very nice place by the way)
and you should be Accepted👍
Really? I cannot believe that you Do not realize how prejudiced that statemet is. I am a URM with partcipation in any of those programs and without a suggestive name. I am so tired of this BS. You guys yell about URM status while showig why it is necessary.
I honestly don't understand your point here. I'm certainly not against URM status, nor did I say so at any point in my post. I was responding to a post which said it would be "admirable" for a URM not to put their race down on AMCAS by saying that a URM who didn't put their race down would likely eventually have their application amended. I gave several reasons why that might happen, but I never said those reasons were all inclusive. In fact, I used "likely" and "many" and "may" several times. My overall point was that schools try very hard to identify all URM applicants and work to recruit them. This is a good thing, because even with all this effort, URM medical students are still too uncommon.
i thought it was funny...paging Dr. Lashonda...Dr. Lashonda you're needed in the ER.
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There's a lot more to it than I can state here but it is definitely NOT like college.
First you mail your first application, then they may ask you for a secondary application which you fill out again, and THEN if you're lucky they will grant you an interview. If you do well there too, then you might be accepted.
thats fine, but the more important question is that will i be looked down if i do not fill in my ethnicity and i was called to an interview?
Do you know most of the African American, Hispanic, or Native American people in this country? No? Then stop making generalizations.
I already said that interviewers roll their eyes and think asians who do this seem ineptly sneaky. Does this affect our evaluations? Maybe, maybe not. Probably depends on the personality of your interviewer. It's certainly not something one writes on an evaluation, but neither are a lot of other "soft or gut" factors that interviewers subconsciously take into account when they evaluate applicants.
Beleive me, if interviews were only about what you say, everyone would get in. I go to a primary care focused school, and just about every applicant tells me that they want to be a family doctor in the inner city or a rural town. I don't always beleive them.
The main point is this: Don't try to be something you're not, whether it is a cultural or racial background, interested in primary care or a professional marbles player. Own who you are, because everyone is interesting in their own way, and you'll be far more interesting if the image you build with your application and interview isn't fake.
agreed, the die was cast when you were born, it's too late to change it. I can't wait until 30 years from now, Asians will finally have legacy status at most medical schools.
Lord no. They aren't going to grill you about a voluntary non-disclosure at an interview. It's un-ethical and probably illegal.
No one is going through your application with a fine-toothed comb. This is a rudimentary process at best. Adcoms look at your grades and MCAT, then make sure your personal statement doesn't say anything too bizarre, then passively note a couple of your EC's, then bring you in for an interview and screen for personality disorders. Then a panel makes a subjective judgment about whether you should be accepted. As much as you would like to think everything you do in this process matters, it just doesn't. They don't have time to quibble over a couple of checked boxes.
I posted the same the other day.
These questions are voluntary - go look at the AMCAS Instructions PDF - this info is optional (I tried to cut and paste, but the formatting is all screwed up).
Fill 'em in, leave 'em blank - whatever.
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Some do. The places that asked me about this were in fact going through my AMCAS line by line and asking me questions about each entry. That's probably why they thought to ask about the missing race/ethnicity. It wasn't a big deal though so to the OP, do whatever you want.
It's probably the exact opposite of what you're thinking. I can practically gaurantee, having served on adcoms, that the interviewers who asked you this didn't review your application before the interview and were reading it for the first time in front of you. This is, unfortunately, very common.
They then went through it line-by-line in front of you because they didn't know where the important stuff was (because they hadn't seen the packet before). All of the demographic information is on the first page, so they started there and just went through that and asked irrelevant questions about it.
More than likely, they barely skimmed your application.
Yeah that makes sense. I'm just saying to the OP that he may or may not have to answer questions about this optional AMCAS section.
I left this question blank. If asked about it I'd say the information is optional and I don't want to contribute to the propagation of the idea of biologically defined "races"... also I like to keep people guessing 😉
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I'm gonna change my last and first name to something random so that they won't be able to make any assumptions, not even about my gender. Maybe something like Litom Versamillen.
lol wtf.
