***Official Thread for 2016 BSMD applicants***

For the WashU medical scholars program, for the additional rec letter that you have to send, do you just have your recommender send it in an envelope w/ your info or do you have to give them a form to put in the envelope?

When I inquired about my TCNJ application status before the winter break, I was notified that it was moved to NJMS and I will be hearing from them by mid January. Any idea about the interview dates at NJMS (through TCNJ)? I am OOS and I had my phone interview in November.

Hi to all. Has anyone heard from these schools?
-Siena
-NJIT-RUTGERS medical program and honors college
-VCU
-GW 7 year program

@adamrocks, I’ve gotten an interview notification from Siena (snail mail)

@lyfe33 I got into California Northstate BS/MD, did you get in?

@HS2DirectMed My TCNJ Undergrad interview is on the 26th so NJMS is probably not for a while!
@fifteenpapers the wash u rec letter is the same as the one you put in through common app

@remi1117, I applied and got into the 7-year program at CNU. Are you going to the 6 or 7 year one?

@allefficace , @remi1117 My D got into 7 year Program at CNU also. But it is not guaranteed program right? What do you think of that program?

@allefficace @bsmdkid I got into the 7 year too. I think the program seems good, the requirements seem manageable

@remi1117 did you get any scholarship? It is very expensive since we are out of state.

Didn’t apply to the CNU program, but just curious what are the requirements?

@bsmdkid No I didn’t get any scholarships. I read the packet emailed to us and was confused on if they wanted us to give them our intent to attend the program by the deadline to turn in the packet in January. I’m still waiting on other schools, so I’m not sure if I’m going to attend yet. What do you think the agreement in the packet meant?
@APScholar18 All the requirements are on the CNU website, I think it’s a 3.5 gpa and 510 mcat

@remi1117 we are also waiting on other schools. I didn’t understand the agreement either so I will call them on Monday to make sure.

I don’t think Cnu is guaranteed. It says that besides the 510 mcat you also need to pass the medical school interview. so unless they said that the interview was more of formality, I think the program is like Temple

As I understand CNU is first for profit LCME accredited medical school in usa. What it means is that they have no access to federal loans or they dont have to invest profit in research or thru grants or scholarship. Shareholders can keep profit. Last year they got in news for wrong reason and were not able to start first class, as there accreditation didnt go thru. This year could be first class if they fill it up. Nonetheless, don’t expect any scholarship or grants or housing subsidy or anything. Also don’t expect any loans to get from federal as they are for profit no loans for medical school as well. Having said that I think if they can keep clinical alliances for rotations and when time comes residency hospitals don’t look at them with suspicion, then this may turn out to be better option then carribean. It will be very interesting to see how graduates from here match on residency. If it turns out good, this school can entice all wealthy kids who dont need any loans for medical school and fill all the seats. Question to ask is- do you want to be guinea pig? Or rather just do regular undergrad and apply medical route instead of going here? Congratulations and Good luck to all CNU accepted students !!!

@remi1117 yes, I got accepted to the CNU 6 year program. But they gave me an option to choose between the 6 or 7 year program, so I’m still debating on which one I want to go with (if I choose to attend). It seems like if you change your mind about attending CNU then you only loose the $100 deposit, but I’m not completely sure.

@bsmdkid please let us know what they say after you call them!

Hey for NU HPME, if I forgot to write the weeks/year for a couple of my activities in the activity chart and submitted does that mean I am disqualified, or will it be okay to just call and ask them to update it…

@lyfe33, @remi1117, @allefficace, @bsmdkid,

On par with what @Dadofhskid is saying, regarding CNU (California Northstate University College of Medicine):

Right now you have nothing to compare the medical school on in terms of metrics – no students to talk to regarding the quality of basic science instruction, no one to talk to on how well they prep students for USMLE Step 1 or how well students do (pass rate, failure rate, average board score), no one to talk to regarding the quality of their third year clerkship rotations (do students write notes or more just shadow?, are there too few patients per student that gets them acclimated enough before the progress on to internship, etc., the types of patients they are seeing in terms of disease severity, the academic centers that students are rotating at, etc.) which are critical not only to getting letters for residency that actually mean something to residency faculty, but for being prepared for internship (no one in residency is going to reteach you something your med school should have taught you). Right now their clinical clerkships are at Kaiser and Dignity, which are community hospitals, not university affiliated academic teaching hospitals, one of whose main jobs is to actually teach and educate medical students. Academic hospitals are well versed in how to teach med students, how to grade med students properly and credibly, etc. How are these community hospitals going to ā€œlearnā€ to do that? Again these things are not ā€œprofitableā€, and it takes a while to get into the groove of doing that. This matters because it takes time to teach med students. If you removed all med students from a hospital, I guarantee you the hospital would move very fast in terms of patient care. But there are teaching hospitals for a reason, as learning medicine takes time. And I haven’t even touched the ā€œfor-profitā€ for their shareholders status of the school.

That’s another thing - where do they plan on putting their graduates? Do they have residency positions specifically set aside for them? If so, in what specialties? Residency program directors realize this and will judge your education accordingly when your school is new, and your education will be evaluated on more than just a three digit boards score. It’s not a simple I’ll get a fantastic board score and I’m set (I would know, as I did quite well, but that’s not how my residency application was evaluated in full, that was 1 metric of many). They know which schools pump out great graduates and which ones really don’t. Oh and you can forget about getting any real good clinical research at this med school in certain specialties as medical research isn’t often ā€œprofitableā€, it’s part of a medical school academic mission as are other components – ie. didactic teaching. UC Davis in the same city has their own students, so those students will get those opportunities before CNU students ever will, who will be seen and treated as visiting students. A lot of what medical schools do for their students to match into residencies isn’t ā€œprofitableā€ from a Wall Street shareholder’s perspective but are critical to medical student education. In one of the articles CNU says it is focused on primary care (this is usually general IM, general Pediatrics, Family Medicine). That raises alarm bells for me, as it makes me think they may not be able to get their students into non-primary care specialties as they just don’t have the resources and opportunities needed and w/no previous reputation residencies have nothing to go by).

In other words, this school would fail on so many of these questions from the AAMC that you should ask of medical schools, as we just don’t have the answers to them or we do and the answers aren’t that great: https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/1/docs/advising/prehealth/New_Logo-35_Questions.pdf

To get into the 6 year program requires an SAT score of 1360, and the 7 year program a score of 1290. I mean these are ridiculously low cutoff scores for a combined medical school program like this. It tells me they are really shooting for as low as the market will allow them, even if it means their students may end up failing out with the debt incurred. You’re committing yourself to attending this combined program, without knowing any of the things above or ability to find out, at max if you do the 6 year, the inaugural class will be finished with the 2nd year of med school before you enter the med school, if you do the 7 year the inaugural class will be finished with the 3rd year of med school before you enter. By then, you’re already effectively locked in without getting to act on that information, and a real expensive price at that, at $56,500. This is more expensive than Emory, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Miami-Miller, Mt. Sinai, and the list goes on:
https://services.aamc.org/tsfreports/report.cfm?order_by=tot_res_fee_sort&year_of_study=2016&select_control=PRI (you can sort by cost by clicking on the specific underlined header)

I’m not even going to comment on what a slimeball I think Mr. Cheung is, based on reading the California Business articles below and comments from credible veteran SDN faculty both in admissions and attendings commenting on the school in terms of accreditation.

Even in their first inaugural medical school class of 60 students, they have an MCAT score average which is fine at 32, but their cumulative (so not just science) undergraduate GPA is 3.48, which is ridiculously low for an allopathic US medical school: http://medicine.cnsu.edu/shareddocs/DemographicData.pdf

Media articles:

http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2015/06/11/california-northstate-university-accreditation.html
http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/print-edition/2013/07/12/medical-school-elk-grove-front-burner.html
http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2015/03/11/northstate-medical-school-dean-resigns.html
http://fox40.com/2015/06/11/elk-grove-medical-school-gets-rare-accreditation/

SDN (there are many more threads about this but this is the main one):
http://ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– /threads/california-northstate-gains-accreditation.1142846/

@Roentgen, @Dadofhskid Thank you so much for the info. @lyfe33 I will let you know on Monday

@sonpat thanks! I was worried that I needed to send in another rec letter
@ultimate314 it might not matter that much - how many did you forget it for? Was it for activities that didn’t have a set time commitment?

Also, does anyone know what the process for the George Washington BA/MD is?