It's interesting you say this because of this current thread: State school vs. competitive private school
Guess I haven't been in a thread about the topic in a while. I can share some highlights later if you're curious
I can confirm that almost everyone in my interview at a top 20 school came from a well known school. However, I don't think graduating from these schools was the major factor for these students to get invited for an interview. I think it has to do more with how good these students are in the first place to get accepted for UG in a prestigious school.
Yeah this is a theory that always pops up in threads about college names - that the students are there because they're great academically, so they go on to build fantastic MD school resumes, and so we can't say there's any impact of an Ivy name on an app reader.
Thank you for sharing this link. If I am reading applications and ranking applicants, I would give a Harvard student with 3.9 more points than a student with 4.0 from an unknown school. I am saying this as a student graduating from a small school in the south.
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Thank you for sharing this link. If I am reading applications and ranking applicants, I would give a Harvard student with 3.9 more points than a student with 4.0 from an unknown school. I am saying this as a student graduating from a small school in the south.
I think students with high percentile MCAT coming from a low ranking school also get some credit for being able to score highly with a low quality education.
I hate the subjectivity in the whole process. We have to go through this again for residencies
Education quality includes things like research opportunities and resources available to students.
At the end of the day you can only do a finite amount of things. There's always more you could be doing, but everybody has to make hard choices about what they are willing to cut out. This is true for pre-med, medical school, and life. I think it's very mature and reasonable to put a high priority on healthy living habits (that's something I struggled with mightily in college and have only recently gotten a little better at). I believe very strongly that if you put in the effort to do all of the things that you need to do, you'll get into medical school.
And if those dice come up with a psychiatrist, you're screwed.
Ah yes, I'm finally starting to learn how that works. In high school I had ample amount of time to pursue whatever I wanted, now I am constantly strained for time and motivation. For example I really love the nonclinical volunteering I'm doing so that's where I put my spare time and energy, but hey that sort of activity probably been done many many times so do not make me unique. But I'm finding a lot of fulfillment in a less-than-unique activity so I keep doing it.
Thank you. I do believe health comes before anything else. As long as I've got a healthy body and mind, I have the potential to achieve anything, no matter how long it takes me.
Appreciate the encouragement. 🙂
I don't mean getting an easy interviewer or a hard one, rather getting someone who clicks with you or doesn't. I'm too lazy to dig it up right now, but someone ran a study where they put actors among actual applicants during a cycle, and compared how consistently the actors were scored among different interviewers. The interviewer agreement was abysmal, the interview assessment varied something like 50% based on matchup
So here's what I don't get - why are interview assessments reported as the most important admissions decision factor, if you all know that the applicant being scored poor vs good is mostly a reflection of who they got assigned? Like how the heck can Dr. B saying they love this candidate, just like they love all the other ones, be the leading determinant of your vote? You know it's not meaningful at all that they loved them and she's probably wildly inaccurate about whether they were actually lovable.
Sure, but let's say that Interviewer A marks almost everyone poorly for minor details, Interviewer B marks everyone as amazing, and Interviewer B actually seems to consistently differentiate between interviewees.
Not unfair necessarily, it's a roll of the dice for all interviewees. I just never expected it to be so variable considering how much weight it's given.
Feeling you. I let my 515 give me a bunch of false confidence.
I think this downplays the importance of location and connections. At my HS, I saw students with 4.0 GPA, perfect/near-perfect test scores, lots of extracurricular involvement and volunteering, etc.--people who were clearly both naturally gifted and hardworking--who got the shaft in college admissions. In fact, only 3 students from a class of 500 were accepted at colleges OOS (note: there are no "great" colleges in my state), and those were places where they had family ties. Maybe I'm just cynical, but it seems to me that if you start in a poor community in a state known for poor education, then hard work is not enough to get you out of that hole. And this is something that was corroborated during my first application cycle (2015-2016) when an adcom member told me that my research experience didn't mean much to top programs because it wasn't on the coast (or at one of the few "reputable" programs elsewhere), and my LOR's didn't mean much because they didn't recognize the writers' names.
