How do you make a medical school list that gives you the best chances of acceptance
into medical school? Hey BeMo Nation! Welcome to another episode of One Question Podcast! We have
absolutely nothing to sell you, just pure content and what we're going to do is we're going to share,
during these episodes, our strategies and tips that we learn during our private consultation sessions
In case you've never watched one of these, we don't do anything fancy, there's no fancy visuals, there's
no fancy sound effects, there is no fancy music, just pure content and we have exactly 10 minutes
to tackle a hot topic in admissions every week and as I mentioned at the beginning, today we're
going to discuss how to make a medical school list that maximizes your chances of acceptance.
So with that, we're going to start our timer. So here's our time, so there we go on my phone
we just started 10 minutes, counting down. So first of all, my name is Behrouz Moemeni, I'm the CEO and founder
here at BeMo and I'm joined with Meng Yang who is one of our senior admission experts.
Meng, why don't you tell us what are the first - let's, let's first talk about the
most important factors that one needs to consider before even going into choosing a school list?
Factors to consider before choosing a school list. Well, there's there's a lot, as you can
imagine, there's a lot of schools out there so a lot of different factors will matter.
Some of the things, one of the things I think a lot of people forget to think about
is location and that's something you can start thinking about before, during the whole process
of selecting your medical schools and then even afterwards when you start getting acceptances
at the very end, that's still something that you want to be thinking about. Location is important
because it can, number one, determine whether you have an advantage at a school. It's also important
because it determines your cost of living as well as your tuition costs, so it can determine, you know,
how stable financially you'll be in the process of applying and going to medical school. So a lot
of factors could go into it. That's one of the big ones that I think people should pay attention to
before they even start considering their - coming up with their list.
I think that makes perfect sense and you know what I'm going to step a little bit back further
back even is why is it even important to be strategic about the school list and it's important
for a couple of reasons and then Meng if you have some other thoughts you could also share as
well one of the things I think is that one: cost. The more schools you add the more you got to pay.
It's you know people forget medical school itself is not free neither is its application process. Two:
time which I think is even more important than money in that sense
because the more schools you you choose the more your limited attention is going to be divided
amongst all these different applications that you have to fill out. The other thing is
there is an element, unfortunately, there still exists an element of luck in the admissions
process. Are you the first person that the admission officer is you know reviewing on that
day or are you the last? So you want to make sure that you apply to sufficient number of schools
that it makes sense. So those are the things that I think I would consider and then we're going to
go into tell you how to do this. Anything else of why essentially why this is so important to choose
very strategically the schools before actually going through the process, Meng?
Well, I'll just extend on one of the points you brought up which is the
limited amount of time that you have to devote to your applications. To extend that you know
a lot of students think well I just have to do the primary once right like if you're applying to US
schools, Canadian schools is a slightly different story, but for those applying to us schools if
you're applying a primary, yes it's just once that you create a personal statement, that you create
your activities list, however you have to think about secondaries right? The secondaries takes a
lot of time, there's a different set of questions for each school, the more schools you apply to
the more secondaries you have to do, and there's a limited amount of time that you have to get those
into the schools to have a good chance at being considered for interviews. For Canadian schools
obviously you know for Ontario schools, it's one application however each school will have its
own separate component, separate essay questions that you have to complete, and then for anything
outside of Ontario obviously each different school is a different application so definitely
something very important to think about and the more time and energy you can devote to each
application the better its quality and the better chances you will have. So you're essentially
trying to balance a lot of different constraints to come up with the optimal number of schools.
Exactly and okay so now let's get into it, and this is so important to choose the right
list of medical schools because if you choose it right you're going to significantly increase
your chances of acceptance. So one of the things you don't want to do is hey I have unlimited
amount of time for whatever reason that is which is probably impossible and I want to apply to
every school there is to maximize my chances no that's not going to maximize your chances.
You maximize your chances by applying to the schools that actually make sense.
So how do you do this? You look at the schools and first of all
eliminate any school you're not eligible to apply based on the prerequisite courses, simple.
Very simple, a lot of people miss that and they try to negotiate with schools like if I don't
have this and that course can I, no they already told you don't even ask them, they're gonna mark you
as someone who doesn't follow instructions so don't do that. Two you want to make sure that
you exceed the average or I should say the median GPA and MCAT scores for the accepted group of
applicants from previous year. This is usually published for each school and you could find
it one way or another you should be able to find this, if you can't find it contact admission office
well in advance they may be able to provide that to you. This tells you that if consistently and
you shouldn't just look at one year you should look at multiple years if you can,
if consistently they're looking they have a median average of let's say 3.8 and your GPA is 3.6,
you may not necessarily want to choose that as one of your schools unless you just have
no other choices, I would look at two things is what is the range of acceptance and what is the
median. So let's say you notice that people have been accepted anywhere from a 3.2 to a 3.8 and
you're 3.6 so you're within that range and the median is 3.6 so you're like okay I'm right at
the median and i'm within that range that looks good ideally you want to be above the median so
you check off that criteria you do the same thing for MCAT and you could do that for science GPA
and you know overall GPA, you could do that for your overall MCAT, you could do
it for every section. So that would be the first thing I think i would do. Second is
what is their mission statement? If they have published statistics, what's the number of
people who have military experience, research experience, clinical experience, and how is that
tied into their mission statement? Do you have those activities and experiences that you know
you would believe qualify you to also apply to that school? So that would be my second criteria
and I think this should give you, and then I'm going to allow Meng to add any final thoughts,
this should hopefully give you ideally I would like to if you were me apply from you know 10 to
15 schools I think is good, you go a little bit more than that it gets a little bit too much,
you go a little bit below that you're gonna play your luck a little bit,
although i would actually go to minimum possible so if you have
absolutely fantastic GPA and MCAT and you have all those experiences, I would only do five schools
max because of the again it would allow me time to perfect the applications, I don't have undivided
attention but if you're average and you're not sure then you want to have a little bit
more schools but not too much that it will take away your time, also never choose schools where
you don't meet their GPA or MCAT requirements as we discussed not the minimum requirement
what whatever we just talked about and or those where you don't have their necessary experiences
or meeting their prerequisite courses because even if it makes your school list very small
it's not worth choosing schools where you're guaranteed you're going to get rejected,
it's very demotivating and it chews up your time, money, and energy, it's not worth it.
Any final thoughts? Yeah I just want to say when you do compare your own scores to those of
the schools that you're considering one thing to look at is if they have a strong regional
preference because sometimes the benchmarks that you're looking at could differ significantly
for those who are applying from in the state or in the province, good point, compared to those who
are applying out of state or out of province, so you kind of want to see what category you fall in and
then use those specific scores as benchmarks. Also you want to sometimes schools will have
a stronger emphasis on certain sections of the MCAT for example that's another thing you could
consider, maybe your overall MCAT score isn't strong but that school has specifically stated
that they are only looking at this section or that section or they're placing an emphasis on
this section or that section that you actually did quite well on despite the overall scores,
right, so there's some small, there's some more, there's nuances that you could that could help
you or maybe hurt you and you want to be aware of those. Very good point I think that wraps it
up for us we still have seven five seconds left so this was good and with that we like to
thank everyone for either watching or listening to another episode of our One Question Podcast. If you
like this give this a like, comment if you have any questions subscribe so that you don't miss