<p>Hey , I am currently a high school senior who is going to NYU on scholarship. I also got a Guaranteed transfer to Cornell University after 1-2 years, which I might accept. What exactly should I do in the next 4 yrs to have very good chances at getting into top medical schools, more specifically Harvard? Thank you.</p>
<p>High GPA, Good EC’s (Volunteer, Research), and a high MCAT score (35+). This goes for pretty much anyone who wants to go to med school.</p>
<p>Um you do realize that MCAT score is extremely rare and hard to get. What you said would be pretty close to a 100% guarantee of med school. Now all you really should have to be competitive is over a 30 on the MCAT, a 3.5 or above GPA, and good EC’s. That suffices for most people to get in. 35 is pushing it.</p>
<p>You won’t have very good chances of getting into top med schools because med school admissions are very competitive. </p>
<p>You can give yourself a okay chance by getting a high GPA, high MCAT scores, good recs, excellent EC’s, etc. But obviously that’s easier said than done.</p>
<p>For Harvard and Duke…35 is reasonable…According to <a href=“http://www.mdapplicants.com%5B/url%5D”>www.mdapplicants.com</a> the average MCAT score for Harvard is 36.4 and for Duke it is 37.0…So I think a 35 is necessary to stay competitive and I don’t think that’d be pushing it. I know its a very hard score to get but it’s competitive for those schools.</p>
<p>hmmm… mdapplicants is full of overacheivers like this site… besides you can’t really believe all the profiles there, much like you can’t rely too much on info from wikipedia.</p>
<p>isnt the mCAT out of 45…why is it difficult to get a 35?! Are there students who get >42?</p>
<p>Because a 35 is 95th percentile so only 5% of test takers score 35 or above.</p>
<p>I hope you are not comparing the MCAT wtih another standardized test that high-schoolers take like the ACT. On the ACT it is not very hard to get 10 pts. less out of the 36…on the MCAT it’s out of 45 and a 35 is a very hard score to get. Getting a 30 is quite an accomplishment in my opinion. I think the average is 27 (9 on each section), or am I wrong?</p>
<p>1.) The maximum score in the country for the past several administrations has been 42 or - occasionally - 43. In general, only 130 or so kids score a 40 or better each year out of the 67,000 who take the test.</p>
<p>2.) The average for all students who take the MCAT is a 27. The average for students who are eventually admitted to medical school is a 30.</p>
<p>3.) Roughly half the students who take the MCAT will not apply to medical school. Roughly half the students who apply to medical school will be admitted to no medical schools whatsoever. Only the top 25% of these people attend medical school.</p>
<p>4.) There are roughly 18,000 students who attend medical school each year, and only about 700 of them attend a top-five program. Round that up to 900, and you see that to attend such a school, you need to be in the top 5% of the top 25% to be there. This means you should be aiming for the top 1.25% if you are trying to get into such a program. This does not necessarily mean your MCAT score, but your overall application.</p>
<p>4.) Trying to get into elite, private med schools is hard, obviously. As is the case with all admissions processes, the single most important factor - by far - is your race. If you are an ORM, you need to plan to BEAT those averages considerably. Duke’s average is a 36, meaning that an ORM scoring a 35 needs to make up for it in other ways.</p>
<p>5.) With rare exceptions, the prestige of your medical school and residency is frankly unimportant. There is no need to shoot for such high places, since doctors do not have trouble finding jobs.</p>
<p>*The exceptions are for extremely difficult specialties (radiology, ophthalmology, dermatology), academic medicine (i.e. faculty at a medical school), and extremely elective procedures (non-emergent plastics).</p>
<p>BDM is right about all of that (I especially like #5)</p>
<p>One thing: average for everyone on the MCAT is about a 24, average applicant is about a 27, and average matriculant is a shade under 30. However, the most important stat one should worry about is what the average MCAT score for a medical school is, b/c that will help you in determining your competitiviness at that school. Obviously if you have a 28, applying to a school with an average MCAT of 30 is going to be more favorable than applying to a school with an MCAT of 36.</p>
<p>Yeah, the double 4’s were probably the first indicator that I was a little off at the moment.</p>
<p>Sorry about the slightly off MCAT scores.</p>
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<p>I would add that the other exception is if you ever envision yourself in a career outside of medicine. What kinds of jobs would somebody with an MD get outside of medicine? Well, a number of things come to mind. For example, becoming an executive in a pharmaceutical or biotech firm, or for an HMO. Or if you want to work in the public sector dealing with health care issues, i.e. for the government or for an NGO, or even in politics. Mark McClellan, former head of the FDA and now head of Medicare/Medicaid, did his MD at Harvard. So did Andrew Weil. So did the current Senate Majority Leader and possible 2008 Presidential candidate, Bill Frist.</p>
<p>Right. Given that this (policy sector) is my career plan, this is now my dilemma.</p>
<p>But for those of you who actually plan on practicing medicine as your career, then forget prestige. Just go to whatever med school takes you.</p>
<p>Hey, you could always be like the aforementioned Mark McClellan who actually got his MD/PhD, where his MD was completed at Harvard Medical School and his PhD was in Economics at MIT. His specialty was health-care economics and policy. </p>
<p>You can read his MIT doctoral thesis here.</p>
<p><a href=“https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/12703/1/28732611.pdf[/url]”>https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/12703/1/28732611.pdf</a></p>
<p>Haha - Harvard didn’t even want to interview me. It’s a nice thought, though.</p>
<p>And yes, I’m going to get either a PhD in Economics or a JD.</p>
<p>sakky, how do you find so much information?</p>
<p>if MCAT tests only the “basic science” materials, why is it so hard to get a good score? How come no one gets a perfect score in the country?</p>
<p>The content is reasonable, the test itself has some very hard questions.</p>
<p>Don’t forget that the top kid in the country (at least!) will get a perfect score on the section for which he is the top kid - but that’s extremely unlikely to be the same kid on all three sections. Thus, no 45’s.</p>
<p>Hey, I have a few questions regarding getting into the top 5 medical schools.</p>
<p>1.) Is it basically a statistics game that is MCAT and GPA to get into a top five med school. Plus a little bit of research and hospital volunteering. I mean weren’t there kids in high schools who took like 10 APs and got 5s, plus had a perfect GPA and got a 1600 on the SAT… I mean are these the really high scoring acheivers who get into the Top 5 Med schools? Put it this way. Do you think that usually the valedictorians of high schools are the ones to get into the top medical schools?</p>
<p>2.) I know the SAT has a bit harsh grading like 1 wrong in math and you drop from 800 to 790… These scoring charts are everywhere when you search in google. Can you give me an idea or best, a web link, showing how MCAT scores are curved. I know it varies test to test, but if you have any chart, that would be great.</p>
<p>3.) Are most top medical school people ones who tend to graduate summa cum laude or are in the honors program/full scholarship type of people?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>