Easier to get into same school’s med. program?

[Jake]

Hey,
I was curious to know if admission into a particular medical school would be easier if I graduated from the same school and majoring in pre med? Would transferring even be an issue or less of a problem as if I were to go to another school and try to transfer? Will it even matter to the particular med school that I have attended their school in the past?

Also, what are the major things that med schools look at when deciding to
enlist students? How can I calculate my chances? Any help would be greatly appriciated from this high school student…

[y82benji]

Average admitted med student has around a 3.6 overall GPA (maybe 3.59 or just slightly lower in the sciences) and scores between 29 and 30 on the MCATs (I read 29.8 somewhere). I don’t know if you’ve taken any statistics, but basically you want to be one standard deviation above the mean. Typically college classes make one standard deviation above the mean the cutoff for an A, so your average med student is right at that 3.5 A/B boundary. The MCATs are designed and scored so that 24 is the approximate mean (8 per section) and the standard deviation is 6 (2 per section) so your average med student is around a 30 (24+6).

Grades and test scores are about half of your application. The other half comes from extracurriculars, volunteer work, work (more as a demonstration of time management or an explanation for a 3.8 instead of a 4.0, etc), research experience, and clinical experience. Through your experiences, essays, and recommendation letters they find out how much you really want to be a doctor, if you could handle it, and whether or not you have a realistic perspective on what it is to be a doctor. You can’t calculate your chances. I read a quote somewhere saying that Hopkins hadn’t admitted a student with a perfect MCAT score in a long time. All you can do is take each of the categories I’ve mentioned and try to maximize your competitiveness in each. If you can honestly say that you are competitive (compared to other applicants) in each of those categories, I can’t imagine you not getting into med school unless you only apply to like the top three or something.

Back to your original question. One, you should check on whether those schools are really affiliated or just have the same name. Two, more students are admitted to a med school from its respective undergrad school than from other schools (maybe because they know the recommenders, courses, etc. better) but I do not know if that is simply because more students from the undergrad school apply to that particular med school (i.e. say 10/40 applicants from UVA get into UVA med, while 2/8 applicants from Stanford undergrad get in… 10 vs. 2, but both at a rate of 25%…). Three, it may be a cliche but finding a school that you really like will help you to do much better in your undergrad years and that will do much more to make you competitive than just going to a school with a certain name or affiliation.

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