Tailoring School List Based on Application Items

[deleted645092]

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[WedgeDawg]

The easiest ways to narrow down a school list to an acceptable number to sort through individually, here are some variables to sort through:

1. Regional preference - this is a big one that eliminates likely more than 50% of schools for most applicants. You shouldn't have a Montana resident who has lived their whole life in the northwest applying to UNC, for example. This also rules in all state schools or schools that give regional preference to the applicant.
2. Stats - stat profile can be good as an initial screen for ruling out certain schools (i.e. if you have a 512 MCAT, you generally have no business applying to Stanford), but it can be hard to use as a rule-in measure, at least initially; more on this later
3. Mission - mission based schools like HBCUs and religious schools (like Loma Linda) can usually be ruled out for most applicants (or ruled in for those who meet their specific criteria)
4. Research profile - an applicant with no research will have a harder time at the brand name schools in most cases, but there are enough exceptions to this that it's not very high the list and shouldn't be used to rule out or rule in schools by itself (only in combination with other factors)

That initial screen should narrow the school list down to a much more manageable chunk. After that, its best to create a profile for what percentage of an applicant's list should be devoted to top tier, mid tier, and low tier schools, and then start looking at individual schools. Thinks like "oh this school values leadership more than others" or "this school really likes non-traditional applicants" are hard to use on a wide basis and really only apply to very specific individual schools. For example, Dartmouth is a fairly non-trad friendly school, but that doesn't preclude a traditional student from successfully being accepted there. A more concrete example may be the importance Rush places on having a lot of clinical experience hours compared to other schools. However, it's very hard to say "you're the type of applicant that will do very well applying to Northwestern and WashU but not Vanderbilt and Yale" because we don't have a 100% transparent process and thus have no basis for saying this type of thing beyond very generalized characteristics.

Now, all this being said, creating a school list, in my opinion (as someone who has been helping people with this for a fairly significant period of time), is an art that is hard to hammer into a scientific algorithm that can be applied to every applicant. I have tried - see my signature for my applicant rating system which is a tool explicitly for helping applicants figure out their school list. However, it is merely a tool and the best way to utilize it is to use it to come up with a preliminary school list, then post your profile here on SDN in the WAMC forum and get people who are good at this sort of thing to tweak it.

This is what you should get your friends to do. If they are concerned about anonymity, you can post their profile for them on your account (with their permission), or you can have them PM me and I, as a moderator, am more than willing to do so.

If you want my 100% honest opinion on what you should put in your presentation, you should tell them to start out using my rating system (found in my sig) to construct an initial school list, then take that school list and post in the WAMC forum with their full profile, then list the names of the 5-10 posters here who consistently give good school list advice and have them listen mostly to them. That is the quickest, most efficient, and likely most accurate way to develop a tailored school list for any given applicant.

Now, I realize that is likely not going to fly, so what I recommend is focusing on the 4 factors that I listed initially, then take a look at my rating system methodology and explain that competitiveness and the spread of schools you should apply to exists at the nexus of a multitude of interrelated factors that apply to broader categories of schools and only rarely to individual ones.

I think it's very cool what you're trying to do here and I think it will be quite helpful - I'm convinced that a sizable portion of applicants do not get into medical school each year due to their school list alone. If you have questions for me specifically, feel free to ask them here or via PM. I'm sure other posters who are very knowledgable about this subject will stop by and give their thoughts as well.

 

[avgn]

Noble goal, impractical method of achieving it