Silence from the T20s, is something wrong with my app?

[Lucca]

@skk_ how common are first-author papers in Nature or journals of similar caliber - like Science or Cell? How about MacArthur Genius Grants? Ever had a full tenured professor change careers and apply to Stanford?

Lmao super uncommon. Like 0.01% uncommon. MacArthur and Professors? Nah, maybe once every 100 cycles who knows. First author Nature/Cell/Science will make your career, but an UG w/ one is far more likely to be mid author after joining the right project nearing completion at the right time.

Also if you have tenure and apply to medical school then you are an idiot.

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[Lucca]

The people who I have known that got into top 20 medical schools went to a top undergrad (t10), had great GPA/MCAT, a good amount of volunteering (if gap year, clinical research job), and a good amount of research. They were all ORMs. Princeton -> Columbia MD/PhD, Columbia -> Columbia x2, Penn/Duke MD/PhD, WUStL MD/PhD, Penn -> Yale/Columbia MD, Yale -> Sinai MD.

I think it's more like undergraduate admissions than you think. You have your elite prep schools (Exeter/Andover/Horace Mann etc.) and they and their collegiate equivalents (Ivies) feed students to top postsecondary institutions or professional schools. Getting in that pipeline means that you are very smart as is and are good at standardized testing. If you are outside of that bubble, and especially as an international, it's important to have some national or international awards along with the grades/scores/ECs.

It's just another game. I regret playing it when I was a burnt out mess. You just need to be really focused throughout to win it early (as a traditional applicant).

Especially on the MSTP side, scientific fields are small. Having someone recognize your PI is big, IMO. I can’t quantify it, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that at the “top” schools I’ve received IIs at, our lab has collaborators / professional ties to the department which I am also writing in my app I want to do a PhD in. Comparable schools with similar standards to those I’ve been fortunate enough to receive IIs at have rejected me. This is one way, I think, that prestige plays an indirect role in the admissions process (at least for MSTP applicants) given that the majority of cutting edge research in any given field tends to cluster around a handful of institutions (sometimes the same few, many other times not so much).

 

[mmmcdowe]

moving to wamc.

 

[Walter Raleigh]

Do you know if there has ever been a Medal of Honor winner that then went on to matriculate at an American medical school after 1940?

 

[Goro]

Do you know if there has ever been a Medal of Honor winner that then went on to matriculate at an American medical school after 1940?

None

 

[Walter Raleigh]

Median MCAT 525

Median MCAT 528!

No, I think the best they could do in a perfect world would be ~526, and that's if they got all of the highest-scoring applicants in the nation.