To add to this, just because a school prioritizes stats first does not mean they don’t also review the rest of the app. A 518+ is only the 96th percentile, meaning there are (80,000 test takers *0.04) still 3,200 applicants with T20 stats applying for around 2400 T20 seats. Plenty of room for stellar applicants with stellar stats.
How strict are they on format? Could I use "crayon" with 1 syllable, or does it have to be 2?
I think you are dead on. The only things I can think of that would be genuinely of interest/boost an app is specific anecdotes from stellar experiences - novel research during a PhD, leadership in the military, multicultural and teaching experience in the PeaceCorps, etc. 90%+ of applicants and matriculants are just pretty standard and none of their stories can really contribute to anything but conversation pieces, it would seem.
Yeah and most of that stuff is going to be present in the primary anyways, in the activities entries and/or personal statement.
Even with many people beginning to take gap years, the vast majority of what students do in undergrad is fairly cookie cutter - continued research, become a scribe, become an MA, go on vacation and travel. Very rarely do gap year activities actually stand out.
Even so far as diversity of a class goes, the essays can help contextualize the application but we are not as unique as we come off. Save for things like Vandy where you have the opportunity to write a novel about yourself, there is very little room for you to make your background/upbringing stand out - particularly when only 14% of applicants are first gen, only 5-9% are LGBT, only 20% is any form of URM....The vast majority of applicants just simply don't stand out, even from a diversity standpoint.
Almost all of LizzyM's points can be taken directly off of the primary. The context provided by the secondary may help, but most of the time it would just frame the perception of the information elsewhere in the application as opposed to directly contribute to it. Unless you are one of the rare few who had all 15 activities jam-packed with little room for details as some of us have, then there is not much else you can add to who you are that hasn't already been mentioned in some form elsewhere.
they most certainly should give the secondaries proper attention. Not because they will necessarily benefit the applicant, but they certainly can be detrimental.
Zilch, but I operate my opinions on the matter based on the experiences of others that I read across the various forums here and based on available admissions statistics. So I am producing an informed opinion with SDN bias and will likely form my own as I continue through my application cycle!
I dunno if you've actually seen what the interview cohorts or class composition looks like at high ranking med schools, but from my experience, it's not a bunch of fascinating nontrad paths. It's a bunch of people like me, that had strong numbers and took a year or two off to do research. Occasionally something like one of the teaching/volunteering organizations or a tangentially related job like consulting in the healthcare sector. Several people with masters or even PhDs in related areas. "Real" nontrads that started a career doing something else and were late to realize they wanted to do medicine are few and far between at the most competitive schools. Building a competitive app for these places nowadays tends to requires a lot of advanced planning.
From my conversations with others, the only real non-trads at higher up schools are the ones who had a gap between high-school and university, not between university and application. In that sense, the experiences of a non-trad can still be present with the academic achievement and planning of the traditional route.
Any idea if similar statistics show how students perform based on age or SES status?
It's holistic only for those who are stat rockstars.
Never seen anything about age. SES data I've only seen for the MCAT, where lower SES scores lower
I figured as much. Although, I do see the "FAP recipients" column is a solid 4 points below average, so low SES really does perform a lot poorer. I would wonder if we don't see non-trads at T20 types as often due to something similar? Like, are non-trads rare up top simply because they/we tend not to score as high on MCAT?
