See example AMCAS applications from HMS students

BU Medical Sciences
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Would you pay $50 to see HMS AMCAS applications?

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OptoDraft said:
That's okay, because I wouldn't want you to read them--you already succeeded in getting into medical school. I am interested in helping those who are not already where you are.

Is there a particular reason you object to this idea? As far as I can see, there is no source of excellent AMCAS example applications available anywhere.

Perhaps if you can give me a link to excellent--anonymized-- whole applications (i.e. personal statement, academic background, activities, and secondaries for the same student), I may be persuaded to forgo providing premedical students with example HMS AMCAS applications. However, if I can help premeds legitimately get into medical school, why would I stop?
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Do you realize that you sound worse than a used car salesman?

Get over yourself. We're not *****s...
 
I looked at princeton review's guide to personal statement (I think that was the title). Cheaper than what you're offering and plenty of solid examples of essays from people who got accepted to not only hms, but multiple other schools. What exactly are you offering that would make it worth more?
 
OptoDraft said:
That's okay, because I wouldn't want you to read them--you already succeeded in getting into medical school. I am interested in helping those who are not already where you are.

Is there a particular reason you object to this idea? As far as I can see, there is no source of excellent AMCAS example applications available anywhere.

Perhaps if you can give me a link to excellent--anonymized-- whole applications (i.e. personal statement, academic background, activities, and secondaries for the same student), I may be persuaded to forgo providing premedical students with example HMS AMCAS applications. However, if I can help premeds legitimately get into medical school, why would I stop?
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Your feelings are clearly hurt by the fact that people don't like your idea. I especially resent the fact that you are trying to make a quick buck off of poor gullible premeds that think reading HMS apps would actually benefit them. It's not a good idea; as others have said, get over yourself and move on.
 
OptoDraft said:
That's okay, because I wouldn't want you to read them--you already succeeded in getting into medical school. I am interested in helping those who are not already where you are.

Is there a particular reason you object to this idea? As far as I can see, there is no source of excellent AMCAS example applications available anywhere.

Perhaps if you can give me a link to excellent--anonymized-- whole applications (i.e. personal statement, academic background, activities, and secondaries for the same student), I may be persuaded to forgo providing premedical students with example HMS AMCAS applications. However, if I can help premeds legitimately get into medical school, why would I stop?
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If your goal is really to help premeds get into medical school, why are you charging $50 (which is quite a substantial amount of money to a lot of students)? You're not going to convince us that this is a not-for-profit product..
 
OptoDraft said:
As an attending physician and administrator (I assume you work with admissions by your post), your response carries a lot of weight. While it may be true that HMS students are no different from other excellent applicants, the point of this service is to provide excellent application examples to help premedical students get into their dream medical school. Is what I am proposing not going to be at least helpful to premedical students? I would have found such a service helpful, and so would those who responded "yes."
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I would not have paid for this service when I was a premedical student. There's simply no reason to pay when there's a wealth of resources here online for free, provided by seasoned veterans who would answer questions that were pertinent to me specifically. SDN and MDApplicants together would make your service only marginally useful at best even if you offered it for free. People already know what it takes to get into HMS because it's readily available online, that's not the problem. The difficulty in getting in comes from maintaining very competitive GPAs, obtaining high MCAT scores and stellar LORs, while pursuing research and other ECs. Reading some essays about other people's accomplishments is not going to help with that at all.
 
This is probably not a popular opinion here but some people would pay for this. People shell out thousands of dollars for MCAT tutoring and application coaching. I foresee many helicopter parents buying this book as a Christmas present for their aspiring premed.
 
OptoDraft said:
As an attending physician and administrator (I assume you work with admissions by your post), your response carries a lot of weight. While it may be true that HMS students are no different from other excellent applicants, the point of this service is to provide excellent application examples to help premedical students get into their dream medical school. Is what I am proposing not going to be at least helpful to premedical students? I would have found such a service helpful, and so would those who responded "yes."
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No, you are trying to make a quick buck off of people who, provided they had a real shot of getting into HMS, do not require this service or, provided they do not, will gain little from this compared to a myriad other, free services available to them when putting together their application (this website included).
OptoDraft said:
That's okay, because I wouldn't want you to read them--you already succeeded in getting into medical school. I am interested in helping those who are not already where you are.

Is there a particular reason you object to this idea? As far as I can see, there is no source of excellent AMCAS example applications available anywhere.

Perhaps if you can give me a link to excellent--anonymized-- whole applications (i.e. personal statement, academic background, activities, and secondaries for the same student), I may be persuaded to forgo providing premedical students with example HMS AMCAS applications. However, if I can help premeds legitimately get into medical school, why would I stop?
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Mdapps.com
 
order66.exe said:
This is probably not a popular opinion here but some people would pay for this. People shell out thousands of dollars for MCAT tutoring and application coaching. I foresee many helicopter parents buying this book as a Christmas present for their aspiring premed.
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Unfortunately that may be true, but it's not that surprising considering all of the other junk being sold these days. :laugh:
 
Lucca said:
No, you are trying to make a quick buck off of people who, provided they had a real shot of getting into HMS, do not require this service or, provided they do not, will gain little from this compared to a myriad other, free services available to them when putting together their application (this website included).


Mdapps.com
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Please be more specific. After digging through MDapps, I have not found a single profile of someone who got into HMS/(another great school) with a full application included. This is an example of why there are many people who would want my service.
 
OptoDraft said:
Please be more specific. After digging through MDapps, I have not found a single profile of someone who got into HMS/(another great school) with a full application included. This is an example of why there are many people who would want my service.
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You haven't looked hard enough then. When I applied years back, there were many very detailed profiles available of people who got accepted to multiple top 10s with full scholarships etc. They included everything from their stats (undergrad, GPA, MCAT), their application (personal statements, research and volunteering ECs), their cycle (where they applied, were interviewed and accepted, and their impressions of schools), to advice for future applicants (reflections, study plans), etc. And with every cycle, profiles like these only continue to grow.

And by the way, are you actually a medical student?
 
Cyberdyne 101 said:
OP, are you aware that some sdners have actually prepared comprehensive resources for pre-meds at no cost?!

Anyway, I'm gonna take this moment to shoutout @WedgeDawg, @hellanutella, @Lawper, @efle, @differentiating, @mehc012, @breakintheroof, @Lucca, @Planes2Doc, @SN2ed, @mcatjelly and everyone else who has devoted their time to help others navigate this process.

Thanks guys.
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Exactly. SN2ed could have charged for his MCAT prep schedule, for example, but fortunately he's not interested in exploiting pre-meds who are trying to navigate their ways through the confusing and stressful system.
 
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OptoDraft said:
Please be more specific. After digging through MDapps, I have not found a single profile of someone who got into HMS/(another great school) with a full application included. This is an example of why there are many people who would want my service.
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I understand that you are doing market research, I really do, but there are actual services out there you could monetize that people need that do not boil down to being predatory.

You want me to be specific? The AMCAS contains two things: a compilation of stats and applicant information and the descriptions of activities. The stats and app information we can get from md apps. The descriptions themselves provide little added value. First, the descriptions should be honest and authentic to you and grammatically perfect; you don't need to read someone else's writing to manage that. Second, if you are a piss poor writer there are free, readily available resources for improving your writing at every single university and on SDN. Specifically, you are providing a service with negligible value add at a premium cost (50$ for your target market, largely college students, is like 8 days of lunch).
 
It's quite obvious that you are trying to start a business for profit. There's nothing inherently wrong with that!

Lack of transparent successful full applications may cause a demand for some people to buy your product, but don't pretend that you're primary concern is improving the disparity of access to quality application strategies. If that was he case you would lower the cost of your product or even make it free.

And don't ask everyone for their opinions then completely disregard them. That's just rude.

That's why you are getting so much flack.
 
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It's so apparent what OP wants: To make money.

But for the fun of it, let's just ignore the ethical considerations of this deal and just look at it from a financial standpoint (i.e., as an investment). Unlike the OP's intentions, I'll provide my advice for free 🙂

First, as the poll indicates, not many people are going to want to purchase this. It's not really a mystery what it takes to get into a top medical school. The hard part is getting those things. MDApps/SDN contains plenty of information that is free.

But let's assume a few gullible people do.

If it sucks, well people are going to post about what a scam it is and future people won't buy it.

If it's so great, it will quickly become shared across the internet (via torrents) and you won't make money off of it.

I'm not even going to get into the initial capital costs (i.e., setting up the website, maintaining website, getting HMS students to provide this info*, etc.).

All in all, don't do it.


*Plus, why would a HMS student even provide this anyways? It's readily apparent what is going to happen - their work will be plagiarized and they run a great risk of losing anonymity. Keep in mind that if you scrub the PS/activities to maintain anonymity, then the entire value of providing this info diminishes greatly. After all, the personal statement is supposed to be inherently PERSONAL.
 
There's a lot of crap on mdapps but I've found a bunch of great profiles, I'll see if I have them saved anywhere. I remember nicknaylor having a good one
 
Psai said:
There's a lot of crap on mdapps but I've found a bunch of great profiles, I'll see if I have them saved anywhere. I remember nicknaylor having a good one
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Nicknaylor does have a personal statement, a list of activities, and academic background, but activity descriptions are missing, secondaries are not included, and the extent of information in Nicknaylor's profile seems to be an anomaly for MDapps. Are there more examples? Thanks.
 
OptoDraft said:
Nicknaylor does have a personal statement, a list of activities, and academic background, but activity descriptions are missing, secondaries are not included, and the extent of information in Nicknaylor's profile seems to be an anomaly for MDapps. Are there more examples? Thanks.
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Please explain what you think people will gain from reading the descriptions of what other people did. Dude, just give it up!
 
We trying to explain to you that you have a poor business model, and a rather redundant idea at that. While you may think you have a Nobel Prize of an idea, your peers and target audience disagree.

Yet you keep hammering away. Cognitive dissonance in action.


OptoDraft said:
That's okay, because I wouldn't want you to read them--you already succeeded in getting into medical school. I am interested in helping those who are not already where you are.

Is there a particular reason you object to this idea? As far as I can see, there is no source of excellent AMCAS example applications available anywhere.

Perhaps if you can give me a link to excellent--anonymized-- whole applications (i.e. personal statement, academic background, activities, and secondaries for the same student), I may be persuaded to forgo providing premedical students with example HMS AMCAS applications. However, if I can help premeds legitimately get into medical school, why would I stop?
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What reception did you expect here?

You were going to get negative knee-jerk responses anyways, but I'm sure you lost everyone at (paraphrased) "I can get Caribbean-level matriculants into Harvard."

Harvard candidates/matriculants are the ones who don't need any help. They, for the most part are the real deals...like the Stanford neurosurgeon who died of cancer. They aren't the ones looking for cheat sheets on how to access high-end admissions. Your average "above-average" applicant can't mimic those kind of candidates (at any of the very top schools).

And there are books that can be bought that do have full examples of a full AMCAS application for Ivy matriculants....

Here's an example of what you find for the 3 most important experiences....

1) Designed and built an irrigation system in West Africa that evolved into an eye clinic for blind orphans, ob-gyn services for teens pregnant from sexual assaults, an orthodontics free clinic, and a school in collaboration with Teach for America that offers AP classes....and during my gap year will return to see the completion of a town square that, among other amenities, will include a Starbucks, a Target, and a Brueggers Bagels.

2) During a 2 year fellowship jointly offered by NIH and Hopkins I was part of the team that found the genome inside the genome. I was really the first author but I insisted that the PI get first author because I am an incredible person.

3) A former D1 athlete and silver medalist in the last Olympics, I gave back by entering a team of homeless Navajo kids into a local Little League, which required protests and a profound social justice effort just to get in the league, and then we went on to defeat the Dominican and Japan in the World Series in Williamsport.
 
OptoDraft said:
Nicknaylor does have a personal statement, a list of activities, and academic background, but activity descriptions are missing, secondaries are not included, and the extent of information in Nicknaylor's profile seems to be an anomaly for MDapps. Are there more examples? Thanks.
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Why in the world would anyone need to read other people's activity descriptions.. It's usually clear from the title itself. No one needs to read other people's secondaries either. If they ask for "biggest challenge you faced," you literally just answer that.
 
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Lol as intriguing as this is, the problem you are promoting is that people will try their hardest to emulate those exact activities (or similar). Each application should (key word, should) be unique in the sense that it's the applicant's story. My story is different from your story which is different from the person sitting next to me. Letting somebody find their own story will not only make them a more compelling applicant but it'll be significantly more introspective.
 
How did you intend to get the HMS applications? Would the students get royalty fees from the proceeds? How would you authenticate that the apps did indeed come from HMS students?

Your better bet would be to write a book off of HMS student "stories." The Road to Harvard Medical School: Real-life Students Share their Stories. I'm sure there already are quite a few books like this, but the general public (especially the segment interested in elite things like elite college admissions and such) would be a better target audience than med school applicants who mostly are too far along to substantially alter their "stories."
 
OptoDraft said:
That's okay, because I wouldn't want you to read them--you already succeeded in getting into medical school. I am interested in helping those who are not already where you are.

Is there a particular reason you object to this idea? As far as I can see, there is no source of excellent AMCAS example applications available anywhere.

Perhaps if you can give me a link to excellent--anonymized-- whole applications (i.e. personal statement, academic background, activities, and secondaries for the same student), I may be persuaded to forgo providing premedical students with example HMS AMCAS applications. However, if I can help premeds legitimately get into medical school, why would I stop?
Click to expand...

C'mon man is this about helping pre-meds or is this about cashing in on a vulnerable time in one's life by giving them a false resource? You don't need to read someone else's CV to know what a good one looks like.
 
I feel like we will continue to say "no, this is useless" and OP will still waste his/her time compiling HMS applications and try to hustle a bunch of 18 year old pre-meds and maybe sell 2 or 3 copies of this until he/she realizes that this was, in fact, not a good idea.
 
Lmao how exactly OP will get 50+ students to share something that personal?? Like how the f do you have access to that OP? Are you even somewhat connected to the medical field? Do you plan on just walking into the HMS student lounge one day and asking students for this stuff? Why would they be cool with you selling their personal details? Do they even get a cut of the profits? Also most students who go to top schools have such unique ECs that even if you knew what they did you couldn't replicate it?

OP is a troll and u guys are all toasting in roll bread
 
911 Turbo said:
Lmao how exactly OP will get 50+ students to share something that personal?? Like how the f do you have access to that OP? Are you even somewhat connected to the medical field? Do you plan on just walking into the HMS student lounge one day and asking students for this stuff? Why would they be cool with you selling their personal details? Do they even get a cut of the profits? Also most students who go to top schools have such unique ECs that even if you knew what they did you couldn't replicate it?

OP is a troll and u guys are all toasting in roll bread
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image.jpeg
 
I have a hunch OP is possibly one of the students on the HMS adcom. If OP is, then this would be very illegal...
 
It seems like it would be legal with the right permissions. I just think OP is confusing incredible content with well organized presentation of that content.
The items in a Caribbean app aren't going to get you into HMS no matter how much you perfect or edit your writing about them.
 
Dr Tony T. Chopper said:
I have a sneaking suspicion that referencing HMS apps will only further encourage cookie cutter approach to ECs.
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An even worse consequence is that it will propagate the very inequality he's professing to address. Premeds applying to medical school are not the market for this kind of resource, because they are mostly too far along to change what goes into their application. It's those with the foresight to know they want to be doctors before they enter college who will look at this and see what others did to get into HMS, and start positioning themselves to acquire the kinds of standout experiences that they believe adcoms are looking for. Those kinds of people are generally not from the sorts of challenging backgrounds that throw up obstacles to pursuing medicine, meaning that those who have means get help, while those who do not get left further behind.

It would also encourage (to an even greater extent than now) technically perfect but phony applications, filled with activities people do because they want to look good for medical school, not because they were genuinely interested in them. In the worst case, you get travesties like that person who wanted to "increase [his] life adversity" because he found that medical schools consider such things.

OP, if you read this, you're getting hung up about Harvard's name. I would not pay for your service just because it came from students from HMS. There's nothing that makes it that much more valuable than applications from students who get into Yale, Stanford, Upenn, Hopkins, or Columbia, and that kind of information is freely available online for the person willing to look.
 
OptoDraft said:
Nicknaylor does have a personal statement, a list of activities, and academic background, but activity descriptions are missing, secondaries are not included, and the extent of information in Nicknaylor's profile seems to be an anomaly for MDapps. Are there more examples? Thanks.
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You have to be kidding me lmao
 
It may not be my place to say this, but I think we should all just drop it. OP is certainly not going to change his/her mind, and came here with a very strong and unshakable confirmation bias. It's clear that this product is mostly redundant and borderline exploitative, but in all honesty it has the potential to be profitable if he/she targets a sufficiently naive market. We've all spoken our piece in regards to the morality of the product, and while OP clearly has a different stance on that issue, it's still fully within his/her rights to try to make money this way.

My point is that while OP initially received a substantial amount of valuable feedback, there doesn't seem to be hope of making progress anymore, so we should probably just save our time and energy for the inevitable point at which we have the opportunity to dissuade potential buyers of this product from making that mistake (i.e. look out for threads like "Should I pay $50 to see full HMS apps??").
 
911 Turbo said:
Lmao how exactly OP will get 50+ students to share something that personal?? Like how the f do you have access to that OP? Are you even somewhat connected to the medical field? Do you plan on just walking into the HMS student lounge one day and asking students for this stuff? Why would they be cool with you selling their personal details? Do they even get a cut of the profits? Also most students who go to top schools have such unique ECs that even if you knew what they did you couldn't replicate it?
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WeGotIn, the website that used to do this for Ivy league undergraduate applications, would pay people ~$100 for submitting their application to them. For example, if someone got into Harvard and attended, they would email their applications to WeGotIn from their Harvard school email (to verify they actually got in there). That application would then be available on WeGotIn under the Harvard section.

I think the fact that people find NickNaylor's MDApps so valuable shows the power that such a service could have. I wish there were more like NickNaylor's, and NickNaylor even states that so many profiles on MDApps are never completed, rendering them useless. Yes, personal statements and extracurriculars are personal, but it is comforting to see those written by people accepted to medical school to see what kind of structures, stories, etc. are acceptable. The Adcoms on here say that they get so many PS which are not written well or aren't hitting the main idea of Why Medicine. Thus, such a website that OP is offering could possibly alleviate this issue. I do want to say that $50 is definitely too high of a price though, you would have to bring it down to $20 for it to be worth it.
 
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Lannister said:
Hahaha it is awesome, very true. I didn't put it on my apps tho cuz I didn't start till August. But I shall include it in my letter of intent/update letter.
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I would eat way too much ice cream if I worked there. You have much better self control than me.
 
For those looking for examples of activity descriptions, when applying I used NickNaylor's, DAPI's, and SparklingMoscato's to get an idea of how to structure the descriptions. I believe there are a handful of others on MDapps but I can't recall the users. Je Suis Prest also contains a great list of people with detailed apps and posted PSes. If anyone's interested I also can post my semi-anonymised activity descriptions.

But I concur with the posts on here – there's a lot of predatory pre-med (and pre-college!) "advising" groups floating about. Aside from the $27 bucks or so I dropped on the MSAR, all my med application advice, personal statement edits, and school selection tips came from SDN fo' free.
 
Rainbow Zebra said:
I would eat way too much ice cream if I worked there. You have much better self control than me.
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LOL I've been working there for almost five months and on Wednesday, I successfully worked my first shift where I didn't buy myself an ice cream. I have zero self control. And now that I'm trying to quit eating dessert, it absolutely sucks. I'm lucky I am a naturally small person cuz otherwise I'd probably weigh about 500 pounds by now.
 
how would you know that she didn't? for all we know, @Lannister could be morbidly obese by now 😛
Rainbow Zebra said:
I would eat way too much ice cream if I worked there. You have much better self control than me.
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back on topic, I agree that there will be a market for this given the neuroticism and competitiveness, especially for applications to top schools.
flyingeagle said:
WeGotIn, the website that used to do this for Ivy league undergraduate applications, would pay people ~$100 for submitting their application to them. For example, if someone got into Harvard and attended, they would email their applications to WeGotIn from their Harvard school email (to verify they actually got in there). That application would then be available on WeGotIn under the Harvard section.

I think the fact that people find NickNaylor's MDApps so valuable shows the power that such a service could have. I wish there were more like NickNaylor's, and NickNaylor even states that so many profiles on MDApps are never completed, rendering them useless. Yes, personal statements and extracurriculars are personal, but it is comforting to see those written by people accepted to medical school to see what kind of structures, stories, etc. are acceptable. The Adcoms on here say that they get so many PS which are not written well or aren't hitting the main idea of Why Medicine. Thus, such a website that OP is offering could possibly alleviate this issue. I do want to say that $50 is definitely too high of a price though, you would have to bring it down to $20 for it to be worth it.
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I think it would maybe cause people to just copy from it so I would think its a bad idea
 
efle said:
It seems like it would be legal with the right permissions. I just think OP is confusing incredible content with well organized presentation of that content.
The items in a Caribbean app aren't going to get you into HMS no matter how much you perfect or edit your writing about them.
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As you're pointing out, it seems that the op does not understand the admissions process. The medians at Harvard are 3.9/37. Those numbers alone make Harvard a longshot for the vast majority of applicants.

Either that, or they're actually trying to peddle snake oil...
 
People are going insane over your post probably because of the "but muh all med schools are equal!!1" but I think tons of people would pay for this service.
 
I think if you market to parents, tons would buy the service xD. Not encouraging this now…lol.
 
The handful of people I know at top med schools got 3.8+ gpas at a top 10, grade-deflating school and 37+ MCATs. Their ecs are cookie-cutter except they had quality research that led to pubs and national conferences......knowing that didn't get me any closer to getting into a top med school
 
How can you swear authenticity? Honestly, it's not hard to pull a dream med school app out of your ass.
 
Dear SDN,

Thank you for your valuable feedback. I am currently reading through everyone's comments and making an assessment of the Pros and Cons. From your collective responses, here is my tentative pros and cons list, along with some thoughts on addressing the cons.

Pros:
1. Excellent content, providing real and extensive examples of full applications all in one place.
2. Fills a need, in that there are no resources that come close to providing as extensive and full picture of applicants.
3. Allows students to see what really belongs in an application, bridging the gap of inequality. While many students have a sense of what belongs in an application from SDN and elsewhere, this information alone is difficult to put into context without real and thorough examples or being privy to such information from connections.

Cons:
1. Potentially exploitative, in that students may buy this product believing it will do more for them than it actually can.
Solution: provide free examples. If the free examples are not useful to you, then you can assume the other 40+ applications will not be either.
2. May lead to more "Cookie Cutter" applications.
Solution: You will see that there is a specific route to medical school, but the 50+ applications will demonstrate a wide diversity of paths.
3. Could be plagiarized.
Solution: Work with admissions offices (i.e. upload all examples to the plagiarism detection software, TurnItIn)
4. Cost, $50 may be too much.
Solution: Sell access to individual applications at a smaller price (~$7) and give extra discounts to those students who qualify for the MCAT fee assistance program.

Can you let me know about any additional cons I should address and whether or not my solution to those cons are sufficient?

Thanks,

OD

P.S. Your responses are all read and thought about deeply. Regardless of whether or not I can make a profit, if you convince me it is immoral, then I will not provide this service.
 
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