Medical School Admissions Fair

by Timothy Szykula

The schools in attendance were: Albert Einstein College of Medicine, The College of Medicine of the State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Cornell Univer sity Medical College, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann University School of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicin e, New York University School of Medicine, Northwestern University School of Medicine, The Sackler School of Medicine, Temple University School of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Universit y of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and Yale University School of Medicine.

Reporter's Notebook: The best aspect of the fair was the availability of actual first- year medical students to talk to. Some schools, such as Tufts, provided only administrative representatives from the school. These administrator s are knowledgeable of policies and programs, but they lack the experiences of an actual student to share with possible applicants. I spent a considerable amount of time talking with the first-year student who represented our own School of Physicians and Surgeons, who I found to be vastly more informative than any of the administrators I talked to. Another local school, Mount Sinai (on Fifth Avenue amongst the Central Park museum mile), was helpful by providing three first-year medical students to promo te the school. The common trait that all of the medical students held was that they were vastly different. No one ended up taking exactly the same route to get to medical school. Some students went directly from their undergraduate schools to medical s chool, some students did research or graduate work before medical school, while other students worked jobs unrelated to medical school (anything from Wall Street to waiter) before committing to become a physician.

No one at the fair, administrator or student, would provide concrete numbers to analyze, like grades or M.C.A.T. scores. The information that they did provide was intimidating enough on its own. Mount Sinai receives over 12,000 appl ications for 115 seats in the class. Many of these are foreign applications that aren't considered as seriously as the United States and Canadian applications, but the applicant pool is still filled with thousands of competitive applicants. Columbia's S chool of Physicians and Surgeons (P. & S.) claimed 4500 applicants for 150 spots. I asked the student representing P. & S. if Columbia College graduates had an advantage when applying to P. & S. He said that Columbia students didn't have an advantage, a nd went on to describe his class as consisting of seven people from Columbia, seven people from Harvard, seven people from Princeton, seven people from Stanford, and so on, naming the best undergraduate institutions in the country.

The students at the fair also provided a sneak preview of medical school life. The most interesting fact that I was unaware of is that medical schools typically do not grade classes with grades of A, B, C, etc. The standard is a thr ee tier grading system with the simple designations of: honors, pass, fail. The honors designation usually represents the top twenty percent of the class. Some schools had a variation of this system with another designation of "high honors" above honors . Many of the schools stated that clinical classes taken in the third and fourth years (where actual patients are studied in hospitals) are still graded on a five tier system like the one undergraduates are used to.

Each medical school also worked hard at explaining why their school was the most student friendly. Student happiness was achieved at various schools with all kinds of methods, although I thought some of them sounded like superficial gimmicks. Mt. Sinai requires first-year students to take a class on well being, which includes stress management techniques, test taking strategies, and nutrition information. Other schools emphasized that their midterms were spread out over a week, ins tead of requiring students to take all of their tests on one day. Regardless of the programs offered, all of the students agreed that medical school is a lot of work and should be taken very seriously. Happy studying!