Pre-Med Hopkins! Help! Help!

sakky
Sat, 25 Jun 2005 18:05:33 +0000

Collegiate, I think you are taking a rapidly boxing yourself into a minority position with which very few people would agree with.



Is amherst similar to JHU? is amherst a university with a medical school?



I fail to see how that is relevant. So Amherst doesn’t have a medical school. So what? What does that have to do with anything? Are you saying that if your university has a medical school, you automatically have to run your premed rec process differently? After all, Amherst premeds seem to enjoy high rates of success in getting into med-school, so it’s not like Amherst premeds are poorly qualified.



I want you to look into the policies of ivy schools.



What I can tell you is that the policy of, say, Princeton University, is that they will basicaly write a positive letter for anybody who wants one, and require no interview or anything comparable to the JHU rec process. If you don’t believe me, we can write a joint email to Princeton and ask them what their policy is regarding premed certification/rec letters, and we can post their reply here.



But at the same token, if you have earned a 3.0 (below JHU’s average GPA), should JHU give the applicant its full support merely because the applicant has paid 40k per year to study there?



Nobody is advocating that the JHU rec committee should lie. On the other hand, it should be up to the individual student whether he/she wants to try to submit a rec from the committee. If the committee feels that it cannot honestly endorse the candidacy of a particular student, then the committee should tell the student that, and the student can choose to try to get rec’s elsewhere.

The specific problem I, Sam Lee, and afan have is that the student is forced to get a rec from the committee even if it turns out to be a bad rec. Why? I’m not asking for the committee to lie or otherwise compromise its integrity. If the committee doesn’t want to give a good rec to a candidate, fine, don’t do it. But let that candidate get a rec somewhere else.

It follows the old axiom that you shouldn’t go around talking bad about people - that if you can’t say anything good about somebody, better to not say anything at all. More specifically, you may remember back in high school how you had to get rec’s from teachers. Obviously everybody went to the teachers that liked them the best and could thus write them the best rec’s. Nobody went to get a rec from a teacher that didn’t like them. And if a teacher felt that he/she could not in good conscience write a positive rec for somebody, then the professional and courteous thing to do is tell the student that, so the student can then get a rec from somebody else. But I think it is the position of myself, Sam Lee, and Afan that students shouldn’t be forced to get rec’s from somebody who doesn’t want to endorse them.



While some may say yes, this cannot occur as the validity of JHU’s recommendation would be severely compromised. As stated in the article, schools take JHU’s rec very seriously.



Again, nobody is saying that JHU should submit false rec’s. However, a much more humane process is perhaps for Fishbein, Savage, and everybody else on the committee to act in a pure advisory/consulting role. Premeds can go to them and ask what their chances are, and the committee can assess. Then, a premed has the option to go to Fishbein, Savage, etc. and ask for a formal recommendation. If they feel they cannot give it, then they say so, and the candidate has the option can go get recs from other people. That gives the students maximum freedom while still preserving the integrity of the endorsal process. No false endorsements are ever created. The committee never endorses anybody that it doesn’t want to endorse. Yet at the same time, students are still allowed to construct the best application they can. Nobody is forced to use a lukewarm rec.



In the end no one gets “lucky” when getting in to med schools. Its a thorough process. Those who get in do deserve it as there is a thorough interview process with other factors such as recs and mcat scores taken into account.



I’m afraid I have to disagree. The fact is, the admissions process is not perfect. There is in fact some luck involved. Some people do indeed get admitted when maybe they shouldn’t be. Surely you are not taking the position that the process is 100% perfect. This is a people-driven process, created and run by people, and people are not perfect.



The bottomline is if one’s dream is to become a doctor and they are easily dissauded by an advisor telling them their chances are low and subsequently drop their pursuit of said dream without internal fortitude…



Again, this is not the sticking point. The sticking point is that the advisors force students to get a rec from the committee, even if it’s a bad one. Like I said, I think it should be your choice whether you want to get a rec from the committee or not. If the committee feels it cannnot write you a good rec, then you should be free to get a rec from somebody else. If Fishbein feels he cannot write me a good rec, then I should be allowed to submit a rec from some other prof who will write me a good one.

It’s one thing to advise a poor candidate that he should probably not be applying. It’s quite another thing to then actively damage that candidate’s chances of admission if he does apply. That’s what being forced to take a rec from Fishbein and company, even if it’s a bad one, effectively is. You said that the admissions process will figure out who the bad candidates are and will reject them accordingly. Well, if that’s really true, then there’s no need for the committee to write bad rec’s anyway. So what’s the point of writing a bad rec at all? If you can’t write a good rec, then don’t write any rec at all.