The science of getting into medical school

An excerpt from Med School Admissions Secrets.

by Jason Spears

There are currently 134 allopathic medical schools in the United States and you need to select approximately 20 schools.

You are not going to randomly pick, instead there is a system to getting into medical school.

The first step is ranking schools in the following manner:

Top-tier/Dream Schools
Competitive Schools
Safety Schools

Obviously, the top-tier med schools have high admissions standards based on MCAT and GPA. No more than 20% of your schools should fall into this category unless you have excellent credentials.

I always tell students, “you can’t get in where you don’t apply,” so if there is a school you’d definitely attend if admitted then go ahead and apply because you never know what a medical school is looking for in its entering class. But be sure to adhere to the 20% rule.

Competitive schools

These are the med schools where your numbers are going to make you competitive and you should have a decent chance at getting admitted. This should compose approximately 60% of the medical schools you apply to.

Please be aware that medical school admission is never a clear-cut process.

There are many stories of applicants getting rejected from competitive schools while getting into top-tier institutions.

This also cuts the other way too.

So be open to the rollercoaster ride of med school admissions and take everything in stride. The goal though is to have you apply strategically so that at the end of the day you get admitted.

Safety schools

These are the schools where looking purely at the numbers you should definitely get admitted.

There is more to admissions than just numbers otherwise it would be very simple to determine where to apply and who gets in. As medicine is part art and science so is getting admitted.

I have known students who have been rejected by their safety schools … usually because their credentials are too high and the admissions committee doesn’t believe they would attend if accepted.

Major advice for safety schools:

Only apply to a medical school that you are actually willing to attend.

It is not unheard of someone to choose a particular medical school as a last resort and find out it is the only school they get accepted into. Treat every school like it is your only option.

Jason Spears is author of Med School Admissions Secrets and founder of DoctorPremed.

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Comments

jenga
Silly me, I only applied to one. The state school where I lived.
soloFP
I think the med schools inflate the number of applicants by counting multiple people applying to dozens of schools. My classmates applied to 20 or more medical schools on average, hoping to get into one or more local schools. Also thousands of people apply who are not qualified. As a side note, each class magically had professors’ kids in them, who I am sure did not have difficulty getting in. One of the professor’s kids took the six year plan to go through four years of med school at half pace for two of the years. On rotations the professors kids would get the VIP treatments but often scored no better and often worse on national, unbiased USMLE tests while getting glowing grades in the rotations.
There are still a lot of politics behind the scenes in med school. If you have a close relative who is a doctor, this also seems to get you into med school more easily. Finally, my med school required at least 10 percent minority to get special state funding. I watched my nonminority classmates get kicked out of med school for not passing enough rotations or the USMLE within two times, while the minorities were passed along at lower pass rates in the classes, such as a biochem test where it was supposed to be 70% to pass and minorities were passed at 40%. It was common to allow lower pass rates for favored students, either professors kids or minorities in my med school.
The great equalizer was the USMLE. The USMLE step 1 needed passing to go onto year three, with 100% of the minority students in the class in front of me joining my class for having to retake the USMLE multiple times. Most of the minority students were on the 5 year plan for four years of medical school, despite having special free extra prep courses that were only open to minorities and sponsored by the school. There are a lot of behind the scenes politics in med school that the public is unaware of. A final note is that USMLE step 2, required to get your temporary license, was repeated multiple times by two minority grads in my residency who had to join the group behind me. The national tests stay unbiased.

The science of getting into medical school

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