Good afternoon. Admissions. How may I help you?
So the full title of this office is the Office of the Committee on Admissions,
and it's actually the committee that makes
the admissions decisions, and these are all faculty and students.
We receive about six thousand applications each year.
We invited 933 of those people to come to campus and interview,
and among them 219 received offers.
So I'm often asked, "What is the perfect Harvard Medical School student?"
"What are you really looking for?"
And the answer is, it's not really any one thing.
We're looking for future leaders in American and International medicine,
and how one defines leadership is really up to them.
You might have one person has done just tons and tons of research,
they might have publications, sometimes we have people who have PHD's,
and you might have somebody else who's done no research it all -- they've done all
the prerequisites. They're very academically ready
but they focus more on perhaps community work.
We're looking for a very diverse class.
A diverse class not just in terms of geography and ethnicity and gender,
but we're also looking for a diverse class in terms of passion.
Sometimes people just have the sort of amazing life stories,
and that might be the sort of
extra piece that they're bringing besides the fact that they are
academically prepared to be here.
For other folks, they might have a much more standard sort of background.
If everyone in the orchestra played the cello we wouldn't have been
orchestra, and we very much want to have an orchestra, because that creates
a much better learning experience.
And if you think about it that's kind of appropriate, because the world of medicine has
lots of different careers -- it's not just one thing that doctors do, there's
lots of different things that they do,
so we need to bring in a pool of talent
that can go out into this profession that, you know,
fills those different niches.
Harvard Medical School's medical school curriculum
has two flavors. The majority of the students are part of our traditional
medical school curriculum.
We also have the Health Sciences and Technology program, which is
a joint program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The HST-MD program receives approximately 1200 applications.
Of those applications, approximately 170 applicants will be invited to
interview with the HST-MD program. Of that number,
30 students are selected to be members of the class.
My favorite part of the job is interview day.
I remember my interview day, and I remember driving onto
Avenue Louis Pasteur and seeing the Quadrangle that the and
block and saying to myself, "Wow."
So much goes into the logistics of interview day,
not just coordinating the space, the media,
the catering, but, you know, months but before that. Recruiting interviewers...
Every group seems to have its own little personality.
Sometimes you walk in and it's a very lively group and they laugh at all your jokes,
and then other times they're very serious and nervous and your trying
to put them at ease.
Throughout the season I communicate with a lot of different applicants about
various issues or questions they have, so it's nice when they actually
come and I know who they are.
The applicants are here, and they're wonderful. They're traveling from
all over the country. They all show up in their black suits.
They're very excited and very nervous to be here.
We could fill the class several times over with people who have
great numbers
who may or may not be good doctors, and so this is why we do interviews. It's an
expensive process, it's a complicated process, but we do them because we really
need to know how people can interact with
with patients, and you really need to meet people in person to do that.
I came to Harvard Medical School
initially in 1965. I never thought I'd
come to Harvard because, as with so many of our
students, Harvard is a reach for everyone.
It is a real joy
to interact with such
people and to see the enthusiasm of our
faculty working together with students to identify these promising people.