What constitutes a rural community??

[Jessica]

I am applying for disadvantaged status, and I was wondering what exactly a rural area would be defined as.... do you think a small town in the mountains (pop < 9000) would count? 😕

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[tonem]

Only if cows are involved somehow.

 

[Jessica]

how about wild horses?? do they count?? 😀 And to correct my previous pop. estimate, our town (Twin Peaks, CA) had a pop. of 2,700.

 

[none]

It's VERY easy to know if your county is considered rural. It's on the application! You'll see an R in a superscript next to the name of your county and a U if if it is considered underserved, RU if both. This comes up when you go to the "Print your Application" button. It will be hard to impress adcoms with your disadvantaged status if your county is not considered officially rural, but you can try. Quite honestly, it'll be hard to impress them if it IS considered officially rural. I don't entirely understand how that alone is a hardship.

 

[Billie]

Because usually rural areas are very lacking in resources and educational opportunities. Sometimes there is no library in town, no computers in the schools, no internet access, few jobs, access to nearby cities can be difficult depending on the distance and terrain. On other applications you can get help in medical career goals if your county/city qualifies as "medically underserved" meaning that there are hardly any docs there or any wanting to come there.

I think some ad comms feel that it can be a hardship because of not having all the "modern conveniences" that perhaps other schools/towns have. But this is just a guess. 🙂

 

[labangel]

Hi, I'm new to SDN, but I wanted to add my $.02 I would hope that adcoms don't just look at whether your county is labeled rural for you to be considered coming from a rural area. For example, I grew up on a farm and only had 1 neighbor, yet my county is not considered rural by AMCAS standards. (I talked about growing up and working on a farm in my app) Of course, I'm not applying for disadvantaged status, so maybe they do look more closely at that.

On another note, what's up with the Medically Underserved labeling on the AMCAS app? Do you guys know if they made mistakes with this? The county I live in now is labeled with U, but I find it highly unlikely that this is true.

 

[none]

No, they didn't make a mistake. They just tend to err on the side of assuming an area is underserved if it's near. Kind of...if it's not overserved, it's underserved.