Letter Of Acceptance For Pre Med: Fill & Download for Free

I can give some perspective: I had a 3.31 gpa average, slightly above average MCAT score. I worked through out college as an EMT, so three years of hands on experience in the medical field during school. I also volunteered on weekends both in an ER and helping teenage kids at a church youth group. Ten years volunteering with the teens, one year performing volunteer research at the ER. I had strings letters of recommendation from heads of Major medical groups, heads of research departments at A UCLA hospital, as well as overwhelmingly positive letters from professors. I had gotten straight A’s in my junior and senior years of college despite struggling in my first two years (partially because I had to work to pay for college, and I was not used to that much strain, but I got A’s in the important classes like biochemistry, Organic Chemistry, Molecular Biology, etc.) I applied to over 40 medical schools and got rejected by every single one. I had people who had worked on admissions boards review my personal statement and they didn’t see anything wrong. I consulted with heads of a couple different medical programs and they saw no reason why I shouldn’t have been accepted. Medical schools claim to take a holistic approach to reviewing candidates, but obviously they don’t. It’s much easier to screen out the low gpas when so many apply with higher gpas nowadays (even if they have no actual experience working in the medical field).

Define “best.”As other Quorans have mentioned, a college student can complete the required pre-med courses at just about any college. Nonetheless, there are huge differences from one College to the next in the percentage of graduates who go to medical school.Hard numbers are difficult to collect but Ivy League schools send about 15% of their graduates to med school. Many highly ranked (top ~40) liberal arts colleges send 3–10%. Berkeley and MIT send 4%. Rutgers - considered one of the better big State universities- sends 1.4% (158 acceptances out of 11,000 annual graduates).All of these schools (except Berkeley. See more below) claim very high acceptance rates - usually 90+%. However, there are about 50,000 applicants for 21,000 slots in US med schools (about half of 30,000 first-time applicants are successful, about a third of 20,000 re-applicants). It is obvious that a majority of applicants do not get in anywhere in the US.It becomes clear that a big fraction of medical school acceptances go to a fairly short list of undergraduate colleges. Just the eleven schools mentioned above account for ~13% of all acceptances. The calculation is further complicated by “incest.” Public medical schools - and some private ones - appear to favor graduates of the their affiliated undergraduate colleges. UMich med, for example, filled 31% of its openings with UMich undergrads.Nationwide, 1.1% of college grads go to med school. If a handful of schools account for a large percentage of acceptances, it seems pretty clear that that the remaining openings are spread thin among the other 2000+ US colleges.Back to Berkeley. Berkeley’s acceptance rate is ~55% (300 out of 584 in a recent year. 7500 annual graduates). Is this a bad program? I would be willing to guess that Berkeley sends more graduates to medical school than any other college. The difference between Berkeley’s 55% success rate and, say, Williams College’s 90% success rate is the degree to which the respective colleges weed out weaker candidates.Colleges with a strong pre-med tradition might have 40% of Freshmen in the pre-med program. Rigorous grading in required courses thins the pack by 60–80%. At most of these schools, a letter of recommendation by the pre-med committee is required before submitting an application. Weak students don’t get a letter. At my undergraduate college, Holy Cross, a pre-med needed at least a B in General Chemistry even to sign up for Organic Chemistry. This was merely a dose of reality. A student who couldn’t earn a B had very little chance of success. The success rate for the 9% who survived the cuts was about 90%.Berkeley appears to let a lot more marginal students continue as pre-meds who are destined for failure. Stanford appears to take a middle ground with an acceptance rate of 70–75%.Which program is the “best”? You are not a percentage. All you need is acceptance at one medical school. If you were to enroll at, say, Williams you’d be in a pre-med program that starts with 40% of the Freshmen class. It’s pretty obvious that Williams has a well-oiled process to weed out those who would not be successful. A big State University with an affiliated medical school might provide an easier path to one school (be careful with this approach. UConn med, for example, enrolls only 80 students. Many medical schools are at least twice that size). In my opinion, a school that sends only a handful of graduates to med school (or only one every few years) is unlikely to have the rigor needed to be consistently successful.Nonetheless, there are plenty of stories of students from plain vanilla colleges who are successful. A classmate of my daughter at Georgetown med had graduated from one of the secondary campuses of UMass. Not only did she get in but she graduated with honors (top 10%) at the age of 25.The “best” program is the one that will work for you. Don’t delude yourself to think that your path will be easy. You will have to take the same MCAT as all those other pre-meds who have survived multiple filters. At some schools there will be a full complement of advisors and professors to help answer your questions. At others, you might have to get advice from yourself.I hope this answers your question.

As a medical doctor whose parents are not even college graduates, much less medical doctors, I will provide my opinion.The biggest hurdle in becoming a physician is getting into medical school. Only about 20% of people who apply to medical school will be accepted. Although medical school is challenging, of those who are accepted into medical school, some 99% will go on to graduate. So, it can be justified by these statistics that getting into medical school is the most logistically challenging part of becoming a doctor.Having parents who are medical doctors will not necessarily help with obtaining the prerequisite high GPA needed to get into medical school. Typically, a student will need to have a GPA of 3.5 or higher. However, medical doctor parents may help in the provision of advice for studying for the MCAT. Also, medical doctors invariably have good study skills, and that kind of guidance can also be helpful. What I think is most helpful, however, is having the opportunity to shadow physicians in order to obtain a letter of recommendation. Letters of recommendation from physicians are looked upon very favorably by admissions committees. Consequently, shadowing a physician is one of the harder things to arrange, as doctors are inundated with pre-meds who want to follow and many simply don’t have the patience to oblige. I was fortunate enough to have a cousin-in-law who was a doctor that I could shadow. But having a parent who is a doctor provides a treasure trove of contacts, many of whom would be more than willing to help out a friend’s kid. (Heck, if your mom is a doctor and she retained her maiden name, she could even write the letter — but this is probably not very ethical for applying to med school so don’t quote me.) You can see, though, how helpful this could be.So, short answer, yes. At the very least, I don’t see how it could possibly hurt to have someone close in your life who has trod the path you are about to go down.Hope that helps answer your question.Dr. Paul