<p>The admission rate is dropping, but nearly half of all who apply to med school are admitted. Looks like a Williams student with a 3.6 GPA and decent MCAT’s would have a good shot.</p>
<p>National medical school applicants 2002-2006. Each year is total of all applicants nationwide, regardless of date of graduation or ethnicity.</p>
<p>Thanks, so now I’ve seen Chicago’s and Cornell’s, but still not Williams’s. Does anyone else have a link to historical information about the GPA at Williams? (I may just be missing the one that Mini said he linked to here).</p>
<p>mattmom-No offense intended and I could have been a bit more delicate about it, but if you check the “overlaps” or “also applied to” for Williams you’ll find a bunch of Ivies listed. There is no shame in being an “Ivy wanna be”. I mean let’s face it, you’ve got be incredibly bright to get into a “baby Ivy” as well, ie., Williams. Wouldn’t you agree that the vast majority of kids who look at baby Ivies hold out hope they will be accepted first at say, HYP etc.???
Also the kid that this post pertains to DID apply to numerous Ivies and was waitlisted or rejected. As such it was not inaccurate to refer to him as an “Ivy wanna be” Sorry if you find the term insulting but if Williams is a third or fourth choice, as it was here, it is in reality the silver, not the gold.</p>
<p>The fact that Williams and other top LAC’s is often a third or fourth choice behind HYP does not really merit much pause or a mark against the top LAC’s. In this day and age, including when this student was applying to colleges, being rejected/waitlisted by Ivies is NOT AT ALL an intrinsic mark against the applicant–and certainly not a mark against that applicant’s intelligence, in my opinion. When a school only accepts 10% of its highly qualified applicants, and does not do so based solely on academic merit (which is fine with me, but it bears saying), applicants every bit as intelligent–and often every bit or nearly as accomplished in other ways–find themselves left out of the Ivies. So, while this student, and myself, and many other students, could <em>technically</em> be called Ivy Wannabes, the implication there as I see it–that that student is necessarily lesser than the average Ivy student–is insulting and often incorrect, in my opinion. </p>
<p>There’s not really a non-huffy way to say it, but there is no doubt in my mind that I am every bit as capable and intelligent as the average HYP student. As accomplished in other ways? No, usually not, and I admit that and count that as the likely reason I was rejected/waitlisted. I would imagine that this student is also highly intelligent and does not deserve to be stuck in the “Ivy Wannabe” category. It’s irrelevant anyway–of the Ivy grads that I have personally met, including but not limited to my parents, the distinctions between the top schools are rarely as black and white and dire as many seem to think they are. I am sure that there are some highly pompous Ivy grads out there–just as there are highly pompous state school grads, and highly pompous college-less folks–but the ones that I have spoken with seem if anything more aware and appreciative of the many excellent schools in the country, especially if they themselves remain in academia.</p>
<p>Not to mention the fact that Williams is currently pretty much as hard to get into as an Ivy, and the fact that most of the other Ivies would be third or fourth choice behind the top three, anyway.</p>
<p>Actually I’d characterize “the vast majority” of students at Williams (and Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona and Wellesley) as HYPSM DON’T Wannabes. Many of them had that choice and, like Bartleby, preferred not to. :)</p>
<p>On the other hand I’m sure there are those who accepted an offer from AW or S because they were rejected by HYPSM and they still wanted a maximum prestige factor. It sounds like Nightingale’s friend and/or his parents never recovered from their disappointment. </p>
<p>I don’t deny that these people exist, but I don’t personally know them. I do know several kids who turned down HYPSM for LACs (or who like my son didn’t apply in the first place) because they knew the kind of education that they wanted.</p>
<p>It’s apples and oranges, as noted earlier. If Williams was a third or fouth choice behind HYP the specific student in question may have shown a certain lack of awareness of the difference between various types of schools and was perhaps more concerned with ranking than with more subjective but more meaningful aspects of the educational experience. That was my point and I still think it is an important one. A lot of people who apply to and get into Wiliams have not applied to the Ivies because those schools don’t represent the kind of experience they think would be best for them. Of course there are also people who simply didn’t get in and chose Williams as the highest-ranked school they had available, but I don’t think that’s the general reality these days and to keeep thinking in those terms confuses the issue both in terms of selecting an undergraduate school and in considering what it takes to get into med school.</p>
<p>I see I cross-posted with momrath, with whom I very much agree, but will keep my somewaht repetitive post in since I view this as an important point.</p>
<p>I would also say that you shouldn’t assume that just because a school was 4th or 5th or worse on someone’s list means that that school wasn’t highly desirable as well. Except for the last couple of schools on my list (and even those would have been fine, if need be), I was almost equally excited about schools 1-7 that I applied to, and beyond the obvious disappointment of some rejections and waitlists, was not in any way upset with the choices that I had left. That may not be true for this student or every student, but I would think that there are many other applicants like me who could have been perfectly happy at a number of schools.</p>
<p>I’m guilty of it, too, but I would warn people not to draw too many conclusions from just a list–my list probably looked pretty weird on the face of it, but I could explain why each and every school was on the list and how I felt about each school and it would make sense, and it wasn’t simply a prestige grab or anything like that.</p>
<p>My D’s approach was similar to advantagious’s. While my D had Williams and some Ivies on her list, she didn’t view them in any sort of heirarchy or ranking. She saw them as different and appealing to her in different ways. There were good sound reasons why she could see each one as a first choice, even her safety (our state U honors program with a big scholarship). I like that approach for a lot of reasons, not least because it minimizes any sense of “settling” for the school the student eventually ends up attending, which may be more of a problem for the parents than for the student.</p>
<p>Come to think of it, my S should be labeled a Williams wannabe. He was very tempted by the school. In the end, he found that there were not enough math offerings at an advanced level for him. And if Williams did not have enough, other LACs would not, either. He had to settle for Harvard. Yup.</p>