Comments on: If I ran a medical school, this is how I would do admissions

By: Gagan

Gagan — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:09:04 +0000

My ideal admissions process: Soft Mcat cutoffs (like UofT), make the pre-admissions decisions based on GPA (50%), casper (20%), 30% (ABS, essay, reference letters). Post interview: GPA, MMI and traditional panel interview, and reference letters.

Just my 2 cents.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:34:41 +0000

I though that is exactly how its done nowadays, apart from keeping out the ECs.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:01:51 +0000

Good luck Kristen! =)

By: Kristen

Kristen — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:35:27 +0000

Interesting posts everyone! I am a mature student hoping to apply to Mac this coming year. I completed my undergraduate degree over 4 years ago and have subsequently completed a professional Masters and work full-time. I find it difficult to grasp that Mac will weigh work I did when I was 19 (now closer to 30) versus work I did more recently in my masters. I only came to the decision that I wanted to become a physician later in life and thus did not excel academically in those first few years of my undergraduate degree. However, since they do not take that into account my GPA sits at a low 3.3 I'm not even sure if I have a fighting chance to get in but am hoping for a high VS and CASper!

By: Joshua

Joshua — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 12:09:56 +0000

Hey Sarah,

I agree, if they want to hear about your experiences, they should give you room to describe them for sure! I think something better would be to maybe give you up to 5 items of experiences you want to say about yourself and explain.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 01:36:12 +0000

I totally agree that people do stuff just to get into med school, but it'd be hard to pick out who actually does it because they like it.

I agree with Aisha that it's pretty dumb to just list the positions you held and stuff. I think the autobiographical sketch should let you put more details in and give adequate opportunity for you to describe the stuff you did. It should be more like the applications for top US undergrad programs – more opportunities to describe yourself. You basically get to send as much stuff in as you want and they'd look at everything, but if you write too much, they'd be annoyed so you shouldn't write too much anyways.

Personally, I'd weigh the different components of the application very similar to how MIT would look at undergrad admissions. There wouldn't be a specific GPA/MCAT cutoff and anything above a certain GPA/score is fair game (if it's lower, then your other stuff will just have to make up for it). I wouldn't have specific weightings and anything that stands out (whether good or bad) will make or break it.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:54:35 +0000

You have good ideas. If it were up to me, it would either be literally picking out of a hat…so like 10000 students coming to a campus building one day to try their luck, or it'd be a drinking contest. Having cirrhosis only increases your enthusiasm for treating it in others. So proceeding with that logic, those who were still conscious would engage in a brawl, where there would be a strict, yet entirely not enforced rule of no weapons. Those who were standing at the end would become doctors; first hand experts in poisonings, blunt force trauma, stabs wounds, and snake venom toxicity (probably).

It would make more sense then having the verbal reasoning section.

By: Aisha

Aisha — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:29:10 +0000

Really, I didn't know you could still put in things in the upcoming year on your app…thanks for letting me know, and I shall continue looking around!

By: Joshua

Joshua — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:57:14 +0000

Aisha: I think you are still able to list things you will do in the upcoming year on your application, but of course, those will carry questionable weight during evaluation. If there is space, then I don't see any harm in adding it. There are a lot of options besides specifically working on a hospital. For example, I spent time volunteering with a kids rehab centre and I think that was very valuable and I probably got more out of it than some of my peers who volunteered in the hospital and didn't have much patient contact. Just spend a bit more time talking to friends, family, and others in the community who might know of some opportunities.

JoshNS: Ahh okay, that's interesting. Thanks!

By: JoshNS

JoshNS — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:05:38 +0000

I don't really know. There are extra points for getting an R, S, or T on the writing sample, and they'll make recognition of things like graduate study or something else notable. One thing Dal does insist upon is some kind of medical or health-related volunteer or paid work (I participated in a program for developmentally disabled kids), but I don't know how they assess that, except that shadowing almost certainly wouldn't count.