<p>No, it makes even more sense to apply broadly to a wide spectrum of schools.</p>
<p>If I’m reading that applicant’s profile correctly, she’s an international student who did college in Greece–probably in the health sciences. She has excellent-but-noticeably-imperfect English. Her comments on several schools are mildly obnoxious; if that’s an accurate reading, that could easily have come through in interviews and essays.</p>
<p>There’s a lot that’s invisible about this process. We don’t know when she applied; whether that was her only MCAT score; what her essays and interviews looked like. NCG might be right that there’s a lot of randomness in this process, but it’s also possible that something “invisible” to us actually harmed her quite a bit.</p>
<p>[MDapplicants.com</a> - View Profile](<a href=“http://mdapplicants.com/profile.php?id=4856]MDapplicants.com”>http://mdapplicants.com/profile.php?id=4856)</p>
<p>I actually think she did pretty well.</p>
<p>You can be rejected for any number of reasons: for being too qualified, for not being qualified enough, for not being interesting enough, for nothing having the right EC’s, or simply as a matter of demographics. Although med schools stress the importance of conveying interest as a way of getting off the waitlist, I personally believe that that most med schools simply use the waitlist to round out the demographics of the class. The med school might need an extra female or person from the West Coast or another African American. Or may the med school for whatever reason hadn’t accepted anyone from Harvard that year but had 5 Yale acceptee, then the waitlistee from Harvard is more likely to be accepted than the waitlistee from Yale.</p>
<p>That’s why you apply to 15-20 schools. You hope the randomness balance out. Even though she was waitlisted a lot, in the end, she still got into 3-4 top tier schools and that’s what you’d expect for someone with her resume.</p>
<p>She got into Yale, Columbia, and Hopkins, along with some good cash from Sinai. I’d call that doing pretty well. Especially if my read on her personality is correct (which it might not be; I’m extrapolating from just a few sentences).</p>
<p>heres the link for that amazing applicant: [MDapplicants.com</a> - View Profile](<a href=“http://mdapplicants.com/profile.php?id=4856&refname=Search%20Results&refuri=search,search_totalmcat_from:42,search_totalmcat_to:44,search_overallgpa_from:3.9,search_overallgpa_to:4.0,search_sciencegpa_from:3.9,search_sciencegpa_to:4.0,search_school:0,search_year:0,search_age:0,search_ethnicity:0,search_state:0,search_areaofstudy:0,psr:0,orderby:,order:]MDapplicants.com”>http://mdapplicants.com/profile.php?id=4856&refname=Search%20Results&refuri=search,search_totalmcat_from:42,search_totalmcat_to:44,search_overallgpa_from:3.9,search_overallgpa_to:4.0,search_sciencegpa_from:3.9,search_sciencegpa_to:4.0,search_school:0,search_year:0,search_age:0,search_ethnicity:0,search_state:0,search_areaofstudy:0,psr:0,orderby:,order:)</p>
<p>And here’s what mmmcdowe was talking about: [MDapplicants.com</a> - Search Profiles](<a href=“http://mdapplicants.com/search.php?style=basic]MDapplicants.com”>http://mdapplicants.com/search.php?style=basic)</p>
<p>Those are amazing applicants and like all of them have been rejected at at least a couple top schools.</p>
<p>They also get accepted into other top tiered schools.</p>
<p>4856 got into HOPKINS as an international… an American student would surely have gotten into Havard too with those credentials.</p>
<p>Here’s another 43 ~4.0 that got rejected from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Not an international as far as I can tell. Profile 10136. Jason, the bottom line is that no one is a sure shot for any specific school, that is the sad reality of this process.</p>
<p>a 3.7 or 3.8 gpa with a 35+mcat with with a challenging course load, leadership experience and research work under his/her belt is somewhere between 1.2 and 1000000 times more likely to be offered a spot at hms then a 4.0 45 with none.</p>
<h1>bringingbackthe7yearoldthread</h1>
<p>And you get the final word, closing.</p>