Graduating college early?

ttb1263
Wed, 20 Mar 2024 13:04:02 +0000

I don’t want to provide too much info here to avoid doxxing, but she has what I think an average meaningful activities like many students apply straight through. As far as volunteering for disadvantage folks, I think that is a COLORFUL term for food pantry, or HIV testing in front of some grocery stores activities, etc … which she has volunteered in the past 3 years.

My understanding (guessing) of the process are:

1. First screening is to screen out applicants who don’t meet school’s requirements (GPA, score, ECs, or any red flags).

2. Second screening is to see whether applicants fit the school missions. I’m guessing the schools will try to pick a group of diverse and capable future docs, who will be able to thrive in 4 years of med schools. Stats, ECs, PS and essays questions are important at this point, since they will pick a list of candidates for interviews.

3. The interview portion are to validate and to learn more about the candidates. This is also the time for candidates to convince the schools why he or she is worth in the investment. Since, there are many candidates, I’m guess they will have to use stats, ECs and other to pick a limit number of candidates (e.g. Kaiser has about 50 seats every cycle). From there, schools will make decisions to accept , waitlist or reject.

I do believe the reasons for clinical experiences, non-clinical volunteer, doctor shadowing, research and leadership roles are for:

1. Applicants: To ensure that he or she are choosing the right path, to learn more about passion and compassion, and to prove to adcom he or she is the right fit for schools. These activities also help better PS, essays and interview.

2. Schools will use this info to screen out. They also want to learn more about the applicants and possibly rank them when it comes to decision time. However, I do believe, they also include stats as criteria when ranking applicants.

I do think the process is black hole. I have relatives who went straight to med schools from undergrad. I also have a niece who took 3 attempts of applying before got accepted. She got accepted to the same schools she applied twice previously, so the rumor about you can’t re-apply to same schools who rejected you are not true.