i've written about this before, but i disagree with the poster above who stated that this was above-all the most important.
i don't know how the admissions process really went for anyone other than me, but from my experience, one does not have to have ground-breaking publications to get into an mstp.
i have never been published. not first author, not second author, not third. i did write a 90-page thesis for my undergraduate institution (small college), and worked on this project during the summer before and during my senior year (along with other classes). someday, the data might find its way into some secondary behavioral neuroscience journal, but it also might not.
other than this experience, i had only one other summer of research, in a chemistry lab also at my college.
in other words, i did not have "research, research, research."
what i had:
- good grades at a good college
- a good mcat score
- good letters of rec, esp from my thesis advisor
- a very solid understanding of my project/other literature in the area
- a good attitude and well-thought-out reasons as to why i wanted to be an md/phd
- two x chromosomes. i have to think this probably helped me, or i would be fooling myself. just to clarify, i don't mean this in an "i'm hot and i pulled a sexy bend-and-snap after all interviews" way, but in a "program director seems eager to balance out the program" way.
i applied to 16 schools, all in the so-called top 25 (except for one, i think, my state school). i got interview offers from 11 schools (actually 10 md/phd, one md/only, which i didn't attend), went to 8 of them, was waitlisted at 2, and was accepted at 6. i attend a top5 school and i like it a lot, for the most part.
i shudder when i think that i might have been reading this forum 3 years ago while applying and thinking, "oh, i might as well not even bother, because i don't have NEARLY enough research experience." i would have been wrong. i just posted this to save someone like me from drawing the wrong conclusions.