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BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER CAREER
ARCHIVE

BY JENNIFER KING

What is perfection? Don't ask a philosophy student -- ask a pre-med.

A philosophy student will ramble on about God, Plato, subjectivity and a bunch of other metaphysical hooey. Pre-meds are concise: a 4.0 grade-point average and a 45 score on the Medical College Admissions Test. And every day that pre-meds spend applying to medical schools, these two numbers stand in evidence of how far they fall from the ideal.

Lest this sounds like dragging out the Sturm und Drang for those who neither have the brain power nor the patience to become doctors, consider the following statistics. Though approximately one out of every three applicants eventually finds a spot at one of the nation's 125 allopathic (that is, traditional) medical schools, acceptance rates at the majority of the nation's schools are well below 10 percent. For top-flight schools like UCLA, Johns Hopkins and Harvard, the rate often drops below 5 percent. Applicants to med school are generally a self-selecting bunch; pre-med majors tend to be those competitive, alpha pupils who map out their futures early and know they'll need good grades to get there. For this reason, medical schools generally get to pick and choose between highly qualified students, and those who do gain acceptance have an average of 30 on the MCAT (about the 75th percentile) and a science GPA near 3.6, as opposed to an average MCAT score of 27 and science GPA of 3.3 for all applicants. For most students, the prognosis is so poor that pre-meds must prepare for the worst.

Ariela Gutierrez has dreamed of becoming a doctor since high school, she studied biology in college and got an above-average MCAT score. But after facing rejection from 14 medical schools last year, she began to rethink her career.

"It was the numbers," mourns Gutierrez, 24, now a graduate student in public health at the University of California-Berkeley. "You could be the greatest, well-rounded person and it just doesn't matter."

A pre-med's GPA and MCAT score must be at least average (around 3.5 GPA and higher than 25 combined score on the MCAT) to make the first cut. Otherwise, you're dead on arrival unless you have some unusual claim to fame (like Stanford pre-med student Chelsea Clinton) or some compelling or original scientific research to your credit.

"It's a mind-numbing process," agrees Greg Chronowski, M.D., a recent graduate of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, who worked for a year as a student admissions coordinator at Jefferson and authored one of the most popular pre-med sites on the Web. Chrononet at times receives more than 1,000 hits a day.

Chronowski, who had a 29 MCAT score but a GPA below 3.0, beat incredible odds to get into school. "The irony is that I did extremely well once I reached medical school," says Chronowski, who graduated from Jefferson in the top third of his class.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Why use these standards if they don't mean better doctors?