What am I doing wrong?

[Bernoull]

OP how's ur research background? How many yrs and how many pubs?

It's February pretty much, so not having invites at this point is worrying.. Interview cycle starts ending soon. Call the schools and find out what's holding up ur app, also ask when they stop interviewing.

I hope u get in somewhere, if not it's an expensive lesson learned.

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[JSU]

I suspect that you have not been given very good medical school admission advice. Is CLU Cal Lutheran? Admission to medical schools in California is very competitive and how many schools you apply to and which schools you apply to depend on how competitive you are as an applicant. Your academic record is looked at in the context of your college, types of courses taken and course load, gpa, MCAT and LOR's. Medical schools also want to know that you understand what you might be getting yourself into and will not quit once admitted. Medically related EC's? Research medical schools and MSTP programs like applicants with lots of good research experience. Decent publications are a major plus.
I am guessing that the schools you have applied to see you as a average plus applicant as you have great grades from a average college and good but not great MCAT's. You would be a below average applicant for Stanford, UCSF, UCLA and UCSD. Reasonable applicant for USC, UCI and UCD. My guess is that you are probably a below average applicant to your unknown upper tier east coast medical schools. This means that you have only applied to 3 schools that you have some chance of admission and those schools have somewhere around a 5.0% acceptance rate. Someone in your position probably has a decent chance of getting into medical school if you applied to the right number of reasonable medical schools. Your college advisor should have told you this. You need to start making plans for next year.

CLU is Cal Litheran. Thanks for the advice.Though I hope I don't have to take it into account next year. I was thinking about taking the MCAT again as I scored on the low side of my practice tests and have taken a lot of serious Bio and Chem since then but I have been advised against that (MCAT forum). I have started planning for next year but haven't finalized anything yet.

OP - From what I understand, the majority of MD/PhD programs don't consider you for MD if they reject you for MD/PhD, although I could be wrong. But I have a friend who had "awesome everything", 35 MCAT, but stupidly only applied to 6 MD/PhD programs, no MD. She is now reapplying, 4 years later, with a lower MCAT score (oops!). Of course, I state freely that this is n=1, but I believe that mostly, its MD/PhD or bust for most of those programs. (Echoing above posts) moral of the story, next time, def apply more broadly, and probably skip the MD/PhDs unless you have a few publications as first author.

That's interesting. They all state that they will consider you for MD and it will not hinder your application (the second part may be false). Thanks for the story.

OP how's ur research background? How many yrs and how many pubs?

Was really weak when I applied. It's better now but still no pubs.

It's February pretty much, so not having invites at this point is worrying.. Interview cycle starts ending soon. Call the schools and find out what's holding up ur app, also ask when they stop interviewing.

I hope u get in somewhere, if not it's an expensive lesson learned.

Thanks. I guess I should start calling schools to assess the damage.

 

[LizzyM]

Yes, schools will consider you for MD only but only after the MD/PhD program drops you in the discard pile which happens late in the cycle. So rather than being "early" you end up being last and with the feeling that you don't really want MD only and that it would be a consolation prize and one that you'd accept only if you don't get into an MSTP.

Strategic errors:
Applying MD/PhD without an awesome research portfolio
Appllying to schools on the coasts only
Applying to only 12 schools particularly if the majority were in California

 

[Raziela]

...probably skip the MD/PhDs unless you have a few publications as first author.

I agree that you need great research experiences to get into an MSTP, but you do not need to be published!

 

[slatermd]

for some reason, you sound like a robot in my head (good input btw).

The formatting of the post was boring so I skipped it.

When I went back and re-read it in robot voice it was way more fun, and strangely, more credible.