Back to the topic of spring break, I’m thinking of taking D25 on a college road trip. The early spring break has the snag of often overlapping with college spring break, but hopefully we can squeeze some visits in.
Anyway, I dug up this website that I used for D22 when things weren’t very open yet and we squeezed 1250 miles and 8 colleges in a 4 day road trip. It was a lot but it was just the two of us and it was a blast. It’s great… you input the campuses you want to visit and it gives you the most efficient route.
I planned our spring break college trip a few weeks ago and just a word of caution, there were several campuses that reduced the number of admissions visits over S25’s spring break which falls over Easter. May not be the case if you have an earlier break, but we wound up having to do some crazy back tracking to make “official visits.”
Looks like a cool site though, it’s a pain to sit with google maps and try to figure out driving distances.
FWIW, my college kiddo has off that week and I expect her campus to be pretty dead. I would look at the academic calendar for the schools you want to visit and see if that’s their break week. If they aren’t on break then it should be business as usual.
As a lay person, your strategy seems like a good proxy to me! But again, I have no inside info.
This is very interesting. It says undergrad selectivity matters & the top feeder schools are all non-merit/expensive/highly-rejective schools. I keep hearing that medical schools don’t care where you did undergrad, they care about MCAT and GPA, go someplace inexpensive.
I think both things can be true at the same time. The highly rejective non-merit schools on the list attract a lot more students on the front end that are planning on going into law, medicine and banking, etc. and those schools have very robust pre-professional career support. It is no surprise that many more of them apply and are accepted to professional schools. Big state schools have a large percentage of students who are going into other fields, so the numbers are skewed against med school.
Agreed! My DS is at a top 25 with merit scholarship, knew he would be a humanities major, and passed on Calc (against the college counselor’s wishes) for AP Stats.
It definitely matters to some extent. The target gpa that premed advising groups say is successful from many of these top feeder schools is lower than the avg gpa accepted to med school from all colleges, and is often around the median or just above at these schools. So one can be an average kid at some of these feeder schools and get in, but would have to be much closer to the top at other undergrad schools. How hard is it to be avg to above at some of the schools on that list , vs a superstar top5% at other colleges? That indeed is the big question.
Additionally: the quality of premed advising and premed opportunities on campus should be thoroughly investigated. I have had students from schools with lackluster or nonexistent premed advising hav NO idea what classes to take to be ready for the MCAT, and then end up needing an extra year or summer school. Some of these kids have been tracked into anatomy and physiology courses (but do not have the correct basic Science classes) by well meaning advisors who just do not know that the MCAT does not test that material.
There is a large pre-med section on College Confidential. If you haven’t checked out those threads, you might. @WayOutWestMom might be able to answer the question or direct you to threads with more information.
Thanks for the thorough explanation. This makes sense. My older kid’s school is on the feeder list and you would have to be a damn fool to go there for undergrad if the #1 goal was to get the highest GPA possible.
This table–Table 1. Mean Importance Ratings of Academic, Experiential, Demographic, and Interview Data Used by Admissions Committees to Make Decisions About Which Applicants Receive Interview Invitations and Acceptance Offers– ranks academic metrics, experiences, demographics and other data into highest, medium and least important categories.
In the least important category under academic metrics:
Degree from a graduate or professional program
Completion of challenging non-science coursework
Ungraduate major Selectivity of undergraduate institution(s)
Non-science undergraduate major
So the undergrad attended has some importance but isn’t a major factor in deciding who will be interviewed and accepted.
The initial round of applicant screening is tyically done a computer program which assigns a rank to the application based upon sGPA, MCAT score and demographic information. Highly ranked applicants are given priority consideration for a human eyes review. (Typically applications are sent to 2 volunteer readers for review and scoring… so the luck of the draw plays a part in how an application is perceived.)
While some selective undergrad institutions may have some name recognition among some application reviewers, how much that name influences their perceptions of the applicant is unclear and variable.
Adcomms are not a monolithic group, but a group of volunteer faculty, staff, med students students and community members which changes from year-to-year. The adcomm members use a scoring rubric to rank each applicant under consideration for admission on how well each fulfills the The Premed Competencies for Entering Medical Students | Students & Residents and the institutional needs of the school.
BTW, the lowest acceptable GPA and MCAT score for a particular med school is proprietary information and not publicly available, but in general is much lower than most people think because med schools don’t want to screen out career-changers, military vets, low SES, disadvantaged, and other non-traditional applicants.
You are a wealth of information! As is that download you linked, thank you. There were items in different buckets of importance than I expected. For instance, I thought research/lab experience would be higher on the list. And I didn’t realize that demographics were so important for the public schools.
Medicine is first of all a service profession so patient-facing experience and community service volunteering are more highly valued than lab research. Med schools are training physicians not research scientists.
One of the main missions for public med schools is to provide the next generation of physicians who will work in their state. Also the bulk of funding to run a public med school comes from state coffers so in-state residents get a very strong preference boost.
Can someone inject some reality into me? I feel behind. D25 doesn’t have a list, is still recovering from mono, and doesn’t have a vacation with all her classes not in session until school is out. I keep thinking we’re going to try to squeeze some campus visits in because her demonstrably too long list needs to be culled, and I can pick ones I think would help in the decision making process, but she’s overwhelmed with schoolwork/being sick/a dance injury/supposed to be studying for the SAT (ha!).
I know that not everyone has a list and multiple campus tours neatly organized into folders here, there, and everywhere, but today my cheerleader self can’t muster much gusto. I also know she’s supposed to drive this process, but she feels like there’s no free time to do any of it (and she’s not really wrong, especially if we’re supposed to remotely follow the pediatrician’s advice that she sleep 10 hours a night to get her over mono).
So, can you all just tell me to chill out and that it will all come together? Thanks.
D22 didnt see any schools until August, and that was fine. I WILL, in fact, come together. What I would do is focus less on the school to apply and more on “the type of school.” See what is close to you/easy to get to. Visit and urban school, a small school, a rah-rah school, etc… If she can figure out what things are important to her you will be half way there.
I always recommend a trip to a place like Boston. There are so many different types of schools to visit.
Here to say, it’s OK! You spend time scrolling thru these boards and it can seem like every kid has a near perfect GPA, takes the most rigorous class load, has a targeted list of schools they plan to visit mapped out and has already improved their ACT/SAT score already
Reality check: it is a process and some are further along than others, totally normal. You and kid will be on a schedule and timeline that works around life!
We have two kids in boarding school, both class of 25, and they each are on their own path. We remind them that what is important now is to not loose sight of being present in the now and to keep focused on the experience, not some magical outcome in the future.
Keep a steady ahead mindset and help keep your kid focused on recovery of health! You got this!
Answering although I’m usually on the 2024 Parents discussion. You have plenty of time! The first time my daughter really had to start doing things (brainstorming and writing the Common App essay) was in May before the August applications opened up. Also, I was the one doing a bunch of research, and that isn’t always a bad way to go. My daughter was terrified of going off to college, and, although she had a couple of schools she was interested in due to friends, she didn’t have much idea of what was out there in terms of her needs and desires. We had been on a couple of college tours throughout junior year, so I used that to get a clear picture of what she thought she wanted. Then, I found every school possible that met the criteria–urban, large, only in specific states, etc. She didn’t have to start thinking about it until she started drafting her essay over the summer. Then, however, I made her draft six or so essays so she could start figuring out what was good and representative of her. It was not a hard process. She applied to 14 schools in the end. You have time!
