It is >/= Torsades des Pointes
We don't have student interviewers at our school, so I can't really speak to this. On the committee, my vote carries equal weight to the rest of the adcom members, though.
I gave my reason for my account being created today. I've utilized your advice once or twice in the past, @mimelim. I just figured I may as well share my experiences, having gone from an applicant to an adcom member in a relatively short period of time. I have no intention of overstepping my boundaries or offering advice beyond my experiences to date. I've made clear that this is an AMA, not an advice forum. I'll leave that to the career adcom members that have posted on here thousands of times.
I thought that it might offer some interesting perspective, and maybe I could see through the app-on-paper and fight for students that might be overlooked because of low scores, lesser experiences, etc.
You are my hero
I try to get a feel for whether someone was merely completing the "checklist" or if they actually showed some passion for the things that they were involved in. An applicant that I came across put down 10 different organizations that they were part of, but didn't show much initiative in any single one in terms of actually getting involved and building something from it. You can be involved in a ton of things superficially, but medicine is not the type of career that you can be superficially involved in.
State school.
I want to like this post, but I think you've had enough likes
Show us proof so we know it's real.
I'm not really sure how to do that while remaining anonymous or without disclosing my affiliation, neither of which I'd like to, or can, do. If you don't trust me, then feel free to ignore the thread.
We actually had a discussion about this at our last meeting. We are located in an urban area, and so we generally look to ensure that an OOS applicant will have a support system, or that they have more than a generic reason for coming here (aside from "research opportunities" or "the curriculum"). We just want to make sure that they will be able to adjust upon arrival and be successful. Being that we're in a pretty densely populated area, the school's mission isn't necessarily to keep every graduating physician in-state, but it tends to happen anyway.
What if we mistyped 200 when it was actually 2000...
I wouldn't worry about it. Often, the amount of time put in is really apparent when we read what the applicant writes about his/her experience. We've discussed situations where applicants have noted that they put 500 hours into an experience, but wrote three generic sentences about their "involvement." I was in college recently enough to know that "Attended meetings, took part in community service events and assisted with..." means that a person went to the minimum number of meetings/events to be an official member of an organization. You can call it 500 hours, but someone on the adcom will offer that it was likely a typo (AKA 50 total hours).
I don't imagine that it would receive any more weight than helping anyone in a lab. So many of the breakthroughs in medicine (and the teaching in medical school) comes from PhDs - they are just as much "one of our own" as med students, residents, attendings, etc.
I think that so far, some of the biggest disagreements have been over students that have great scores (3.9+, 34+) but seem to have very superficial applications. For example, sometimes applicants have two parents that are physicians, and write about their motivations coming from their families pushing them towards medicine, but don't show any passion of their own for a career in the field. Sure, family can be an influence, and of course their scores may be great, but if they are doing it to satisfy their parents, they will very quickly find themselves losing motivation.
What background would you like?
I think on the spectrum of research powerhouses to community-based clinical practice, my institution falls somewhere in the middle. As a state school, there is a local bias in terms of IS vs. OOS, but I wouldn't say that there's a bias regarding parts of the state. I'd say the distribution is relatively similar to the population density (although I don't have any exact figures to confirm that). We definitely don't aggressively recruit high stats applicants, but many high stats applicants apply, and it's hard to turn many of them down if they are not the "robots" that I described in a previous post. There's no preference made here between non-trads and traditional applicants, at least in my experience.
Lolwut
It depends on how many hours you list on your AMCAS application. Not sure if you'll be able to get credit for all of the hours you've put in since it limits you to 9999.
