Vanderbilt Premed Weed Out

bernie12
Wed, 21 Oct 2015 14:32:51 +0000

@fdgjfg : Basically all of their requirements are more demanding or more nuanced than other schools…naturally they don’t really desire “cookie cutter” pre-meds that played the game to success. I’ve seen so many “paper perfect” (4.0, 36-38 MCAT) applicants get denied post-interview and they often tended to be the duller ones with duller course loads (many acceptees would be the weird biology majors who took advanced math like multi or diff.eq or higher level chemistry or physics courses) and no major international/national awards to complement their achievements (other than Phi Beta Kappa, which most people with 3.9+ will have and which Harvard gets tons of) and the more regular course load students of course had insane (and not pre-med standard) EC’s. They aren’t that desperate to fill the doctor shortage there. They simply want very high performance/extraordinary pre-meds that did extremely well, but not neccessarily under carefully crafted conditions…this is honestly why I wouldn’t use Harvard as a benchmark. Many students who truly are desirable post-interview are quite extraordinary in some way including academically.

Stanford used to be this way as well (they actually used to have a note on their website that said they liked people who took upperlevel chemistry courses like pchem!)…but lesser so than Harvard. Their MCAT scores show that they prefer high stats applicants that have met the requirements and maybe did something cool, but overall their admit rate is so low that it is hard to tell. It seems one is more likely to be denied HMS than Stanford (I’ve seen this many times and didn’t get it at all…maybe HMS is like how Stanford undergrad admits and SMS is more like Harvard undergrad in its admissions scheme) though which is interesting since HMS accepts a higher percent (maybe people who didn’t also apply to Stanford), but there are lots of cross-admits as well.