<p>This is a pretty random question, but my friend claims he’s 1/8th Native American. To my knowledge, he actually had the audacity to put it on his college application and I’m not sure if that affected his acceptance or not, but the fact of the matter is he brought it to the attention of admissions. He has extremely low grades (Less than a 3.0) and basically nothing on his resume. I don’t even understand how he still thinks he’s going to medical school. Nonetheless, could he ever up his chances of getting accepted by pulling the same tactic on his application? If he gets into med school and I don’t I’ll probably slowly kill myself :)</p>
<p>It is harder to fake being a minority in med school admissions. For one thing, you have to do an in-person interview. You will be asked about your connection to the Native American community and you will be asked to show your face. It’s easy to write Native American on an application. It’s hard to defend it in a 1 hour interview. Also, I believe many med schools require a tribal registration card if you are claiming to be a Native American.</p>
<p>1.) Native American URM status is one of the few where admissions committees will seek proof of involvement of some kind. 1/8th, by this standard, is not astonishingly low, provided he has some kind of cultural context to his claim. This is a very unique URM situation – no such standards are applied to (hypothetically) Irish people who want to claim their Irish-ness.</p>
<p>2.) URM status matters considerably – and genuine First Nation people are rarest of all – but 2.9 (or lower) is a very low GPA. Still, if he gets a high MCAT score, applies sensibly, writes good essays, pledges unofficially to devote his time to the underserved, and gets a few EC’s under his belt… well, I don’t know. Less than 3.0 is awfully low.</p>
<p>Put it this way: if in a few years you come back on these boards and tell us that your friend actually did get in, I won’t instantly be able to say, “Oh, that’s a lie.” It would be a plausible scenario.</p>