3.62 cgpa, 3.6 sgpa / 35 S MCAT, CA resident....List of schools please

[1002737]

Sept 2011, BS Biological Sciences from a UC
CA Resident
3.62 cgpa
3.6 sgpa
strong upward trend ( 3.9 Jr. yr, 4.0 Sr. yr)

35 S MCAT ( PS:11, V;10, BS: 14)

Undergrad Research Student for 2 years (17 Q units)....lot of patient contact.
(currently volunteering 6 hrs / week at Research.

Hospital Volunteer over 2 years (approx 400 hrs).....currently 4 hrs/ week
Volunteer at Community clinic 100 hrs....currently 8 hrs / week
Physician shadowing: Internal Medicine 80 hrs, Pediatrics 80 hrs, Nephrology 80 hrs
Leadership; trained students at research, tutoring high school kids, train volunteers at hospital

LOR: 2 from science prof and 1 from non science prof......not sure how strong.
1 from Research PI................willing to write a strong letter
1 from the community clinic...willing to write a strong letter
I still need to request letters from the Physicians I shadowed.Should I request from all 3 Physicians? That will bring the total letter count to 8....is it too much?
My school sends a letter packet to AMCAS. Should I send Physician letters with secondary applications?

Please suggest which schools I should apply to and approximately how many. Do I need to apply to DO schools because of my gpa (3.6) ? Do I have any chance to get into CA med school?

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[sotto voce]

Nice application and excellent MCAT score!

For the letters, I have yet to see an allopathic medical school that requires a letter from an MD. I think a very strong, personal physician's letter (if you know the doc well; also, just one, not three) would boost your app. Otherwise I wouldn't bother.

And your numbers are very good so I don't think you will have to consider osteopathic medical schools. Good luck!

 

[FrkyBgStok]

OR you could get MSAR and do the work yourself. You have excellent scores so you don't need to consider osteo, however if cali is more important than MD, you may want to apply to the cali osteo schools.

There is so much subjective info that goes into making a list that you really need to do the work yourself. Plus it is a lot of work.

 

[MedBound1]

Please suggest which schools I should apply to and approximately how many. Do I need to apply to DO schools because of my gpa (3.6) ? Do I have any chance to get into CA med school?

national avg gpa for md applicants: 3.52
national avg gpa for md matriculants: 3.65

national avg mcat for md applicants: 29
national avg mcat for md matriculants: 31

Your GPA is fine, especially with a 35 MCAT. Apply to 20+ schools of all tiers, grab an MSAR and do the research yourself so you pick schools that fit you the best. There are plenty of OOS schools that grab CA applicants like yourself with much lower stats than yours.

If you applied DO and got accepted, but didn't get into any of your MD choices, would you go or would you try to re-apply again? I swear every applicant needs to ask themselves this before they apply DO. There's countless threads on here of people agonizing over this decision later, it should be made up before you go through the trouble and time commitment of applying. With your stats there's no reasons you need to apply DO to get an acceptance, unless you're just attracted to some of the DO programs.

 

[1002737]

Thanks soto voce.

 

[1002737]

OR you could get MSAR and do the work yourself. You have excellent scores so you don't need to consider osteo, however if cali is more important than MD, you may want to apply to the cali osteo schools.

There is so much subjective info that goes into making a list that you really need to do the work yourself. Plus it is a lot of work.

Will do that. Thanks.

 

[1002737]

national avg gpa for md applicants: 3.52
national avg gpa for md matriculants: 3.65

national avg mcat for md applicants: 29
national avg mcat for md matriculants: 31

Your GPA is fine, especially with a 35 MCAT. Apply to 20+ schools of all tiers, grab an MSAR and do the research yourself so you pick schools that fit you the best. There are plenty of OOS schools that grab CA applicants like yourself with much lower stats than yours.

If you applied DO and got accepted, but didn't get into any of your MD choices, would you go or would you try to re-apply again? I swear every applicant needs to ask themselves this before they apply DO. There's countless threads on here of people agonizing over this decision later, it should be made up before you go through the trouble and time commitment of applying. With your stats there's no reasons you need to apply DO to get an acceptance, unless you're just attracted to some of the DO programs.

Checked out the MSAR and thinking about applying to 54 schools including all (8) CA med schools and 46 OOS friendly schools. I think it is too many schools but I am having hard time cutting my list down to even 35 schools.

 

[Keepitclassy]

Checked out the MSAR and thinking about applying to 54 schools including all (8) CA med schools and 46 OOS friendly schools. I think it is too many schools but I am having hard time cutting my list down to even 35 schools.

That's a pretty ridiculous number to apply to...but if you have the money and patience to complete all the secondaries, by all means go for it

 

[MedBound1]

Checked out the MSAR and thinking about applying to 54 schools including all (8) CA med schools and 46 OOS friendly schools. I think it is too many schools but I am having hard time cutting my list down to even 35 schools.

You may want to cut that list down a little. It will be very expensive to apply to that many and unless you just have nothing else going on at all, filling out 50 secondaries would be expensive, time-consuming, and the quality of your secondaries may start to decline because you are trying to get through so many. Up to you.

 

[anguisette]

You may want to cut that list down a little. It will be very expensive to apply to that many and unless you just have nothing else going on at all, filling out 50 secondaries would be expensive, time-consuming, and the quality of your secondaries may start to decline because you are trying to get through so many. Up to you.

I know you shouldn't choose which schools to apply to based on the ease of their secondaries, but what if out of the 50 schools on your list, about 20 of them have no secondary essays/do a hard pre-secondary screen/only hand out secondaries if you're selected for interview invites? Does that make a list of 50 schools seem more reasonable or do you think just filling out the basic info for 50 schools would still burn you out and is not worth the extra money investment for a shot at an interview?

 

[flodhi1]

Rosalind Franklin University
Commonweatlh Medical College
Loma Linda University (If you're religious )
University of Louisville School of Medicine
Wright State University
Creighton University School of Medicine
East Virginia Medical School
Medical College of Wisconsin
Saint Louis University
University of Toledo College of Medicine
University of Washington
Albany Medical College
Drexel University College of Medicne
George Washington University School of Medicine
Rush Medical College
Temple University
University of Central Florida
University of Maryland School of Medicine
Virginia Commonwealth University
Wake Forest
Uniform Services University of the Health Sciences
Brown University
Penn State
Georgetown University School of Medicine
UC Davis
UCLA
UC Irvine
USC
NYMC
Einstein
UVA
VA Tech
Vanderbilt

Add some reach schools like UCSF, Stanford, Baylor and you got yourself a list of little over 35 right there.

 

[Mazdave]

I know you shouldn't choose which schools to apply to based on the ease of their secondaries, but what if out of the 50 schools on your list, about 20 of them have no secondary essays/do a hard pre-secondary screen/only hand out secondaries if you're selected for interview invites? Does that make a list of 50 schools seem more reasonable or do you think just filling out the basic info for 50 schools would still burn you out and is not worth the extra money investment for a shot at an interview?

There's a point of diminishing returns with adding schools. If you're not going to get in by applying to 35 or 40 schools, you probably won't get in by applying to 50 either. It's better to make a shorter well-crafted list consisting mostly of schools that are reasonable shots plus a few reaches if desired and focus on writing good secondaries for those. Secondary essays for 30 schools will still burn you out plenty and paying primary and secondary fees for 50 schools will probably run $8000 even before you've traveled to one interview.

 

[flodhi1]

There's a point of diminishing returns with adding schools. If you're not going to get in by applying to 35 or 40 schools, you probably won't get in by applying to 50 either. It's better to make a shorter well-crafted list consisting mostly of schools that are reasonable shots plus a few reaches if desired and focus on writing good secondaries for those. Secondary essays for 30 schools will still burn you out plenty and paying primary and secondary fees for 50 schools will probably run $8000 even before you've traveled to one interview.

I don't believe in that. The medical admission process is so subjective at times that if your application is read by the "right eyes" you will get in and at times it might even be the last person (school # 50) to read your application. In the end all it takes is 1 acceptance even if all else is nothing but rejections right?

 

[Mazdave]

I don't believe in that. The medical admission process is so subjective at times that if your application is read by the "right eyes" you will get in and at times it might even be the last person (school # 50) to read your application. In the end all it takes is 1 acceptance even if all else is nothing but rejections right?

That's why I said "probably". Someone who gets in because Adcom #50 is willing to take a chance on them after 49 others wouldn't is a pretty borderline candidate and it was worth it to this person to apply to 50 schools. This is not the OP, and anyone considering this strategy should consider if they are really marginal enough that it's going to come down to their application being read by the "right eyes". If someone has a decently strong application, they would have to get horribly unlucky to get passed over by 25 or 30 Adcoms, and for them applying to 50 schools is a waste of money. Likewise, if someone's application is weak enough, no amount of luck is going to help them out, and they would be better off spending the money improving their app rather than trying to improve the odds that their file is seen by the "right person" by applying to 50 or 60 schools.

You're certainly right that the process has a subjective component to it, which is why you don't apply to just 3 schools and why no one gets IIs from everywhere they apply, but Adcoms and what they're looking for don't differ so much from school to school that once 25-30 have seen your file you're likely to hear something different by applying to more schools.

 

[flodhi1]

That's why I said "probably". Someone who gets in because Adcom #50 is willing to take a chance on them after 49 others wouldn't is a pretty borderline candidate and it was worth it to this person to apply to 50 schools. This is not the OP, and anyone considering this strategy should consider if they are really marginal enough that it's going to come down to their application being read by the "right eyes". If someone has a decently strong application, they would have to get horribly unlucky to get passed over by 25 or 30 Adcoms, and for them applying to 50 schools is a waste of money. Likewise, if someone's application is weak enough, no amount of luck is going to help them out, and they would be better off spending the money improving their app rather than trying to improve the odds that their file is seen by the "right person" by applying to 50 or 60 schools.

You're certainly right that the process has a subjective component to it, which is why you don't apply to just 3 schools, but the way around that is not sending your application to as many schools as possible in hopes of getting it read by the "right person".

The reason why I advocate applying to more places is because a strong applicant will get more acceptances meaning close to May 15 more $$, schools will try to lure the applicant with scholarship and incentives. I'm not even a strong applicant but I got 1/3rd of a full ride. So no matter what if you have the extra cash why not it's win win but again this is just my opinion.

 

[Mazdave]

The reason why I advocate applying to more places is because a strong applicant will get more acceptances meaning close to May 15 more $$, schools will try to lure the applicant with scholarship and incentives. I'm not even a strong applicant but I got 1/3rd of a full ride. So no matter what if you have the extra cash why not it's win win but again this is just my opinion.

What I'm advocating for is applying with a better school list instead of a longer one (25 carefully selected schools beats 50 schools picked from the MSAR based on numbers and OOS% alone). If someone has lots of funds and doesn't mind writing tons of secondaries, there's nothing to stop you from applying to as many schools as you want, but I think that the number of applicants who will actually gain a benefit from doing so is pretty small.

P.S. Nice MDApps.

Bottom line: OP, with a 3.62/35 and good ECs, even being from Cali, a good mix of 15 or so OOS schools plus your IS schools should be fine. Apply early, get someone to read over your essays, don't be really awkward at interviews, etc.