Show Summary
In this episode of Admissions Straight Talk, host Linda Abraham interviews Dr. Jeffrey SooHoo, Assistant Dean for Admissions at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. They discuss the unique aspects of the Colorado Medical curriculum, including the new Trek curriculum, the importance of longitudinal integrated clerkships, and the various tracks available for students. Dr. SooHoo also shares insights into the secondary application process, the role of the CASPER test, and the criteria for interview invitations. The conversation highlights common mistakes applicants make, the importance of research experience, and the support systems in place for medical students. Dr. SooHoo emphasizes the competitive nature of medical school admissions and the holistic review process used to evaluate applicants.
Show Notes
Welcome to the 599th episode of admissions straight talk. Thanks for joining me today.
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The next step in achieving the Admissions Straight Talk’s goal is introducing today’s guest. Again, the goal is getting you into medical school. The guest is Dr. Jeffrey SooHoo. After attending Boston College as an undergrad, Dr. SooHoo earned his MD at Loyola Stritch School of Medicine in 2009. He did his residency at the University of Colorado in ophthalmology and also did a fellowship in glaucoma at the University of Colorado. He has been an assistant dean for admissions at the University of Colorado School of Medicine since 2020.
Dr.SooHoo welcome to Admission Straight Talk. [1:38]
Thanks for having me, Linda. My pleasure.
Can you give us an overview of the Colorado School of Medicine’s curriculum focusing on the more distinctive elements in it? [1:44]
Absolutely. We launched a new curriculum in 2021, so we’re fully engrossed in what’s called the Trek curriculum. And there’s a number of unique features that I would want to highlight. I think one of the most important features is a change, as many medical schools have done, from two years of preclinical work to one year of preclinical work.
And so our core clinical year is now the second year of medical school. Something I get asked a lot is, well, did you just take two years of content and smush it into one year? And we did not. We’re not that mean. Rather, what we did is we looked at what we were teaching over the course of those two years and said, well, what does somebody really need to know to go out into the clinical spaces and learn to take care of patients? They might not need to know some brand new CRISPR therapy, gene therapy thing.
They might be able to learn that a little bit later once they have a more solid foundation of some more basic medical principles in clinical care. And so we created, and I’ll talk about this in a little bit, some more advanced science courses that happen after that core clinical year when students are actually in a better space to absorb that more specialized information. So in that first year of the curriculum, students are doing sort of your, what you’d think of as preclinical work.
So, biochemistry, anatomy, organ systems, how to interview a patient, how to do a physical exam, all those types of things. And then we send them out into the core clinical year, the second year. The other really important thing about the curriculum is how that clinical year is designed. Many of us trained in a more traditional clinical scenario where you did chunks of learning in different specialties. So for instance, when I was a medical student, I did six weeks of pediatrics at a very specific time in my clinical year.
And then I didn’t do any other pediatrics the rest of that year. And so those sort of core domains of surgery or obstetrics and gynecology, et cetera, were these discrete chunks of time. We’ve moved to what’s called an LIC, a longitudinal integrated clerkship model. And what that means is that across the course of that year, students are getting more longitudinal experience with patients and preceptors. And so for instance, you might be scheduled to be in surgery on Tuesdays with the same preceptor each week and a pediatrics clinic on Wednesday afternoons, for instance. What that allows you to do is develop a relationship with a preceptor over the course of an entire year so they can see how you grow in a particular discipline, and they can give you feedback and watch you develop and grow your clinical skills over the course of 52 weeks instead of over the course of let’s say six, where that time is much more compressed. You get to know your preceptor really well because you’re with them every week.
And so they’re able to give you sort of more specific and nuanced feedback than maybe if you were just on their service in the hospital for a week or even less and didn’t have a relationship with that person. It also allows you to do the same thing with patients. So our students will select patients that they follow throughout the year in a longitudinal fashion. And so if you’re seeing a patient in clinic and they get hospitalized, you might then go round on them in the inpatient hospital.
If you’re an OB clinic and a patient of yours goes into labor, you might attend that delivery of that baby. And so again, trying to create an experience of learning that’s a little, that’s more longitudinal and less fragmented. So I think that’s a really unique aspect of the curriculum and something that our students have responded really positively to. After that LIC year, there is the, what I alluded to before, the ASCs or advanced science courses. Those are a blend of clinical and didactic experiences.
Again, in more sort of advanced sciences, things that are important for future physicians to know, but are probably too advanced for them to necessarily understand in depth without having a better core clinical understanding. So the students then do the advanced science courses. After the advanced science courses, students go on to take step one and step two at that point in the curriculum.
So after the clinical time, again, wanting students to understand science in the context of clinical care. And we think that makes them better physicians and better able to pass those exams. After the advanced science courses and the step exams, students sort of move into the more individualized phase of the curriculum. And that’s probably what’s most similar to most medical schools where students are doing acting internships or sub internships, whatever they’re called at your school.
That would be the fourth year?
Yeah, it is. It’s a little bit actually longer in our current curriculum than just the fourth year. It’s probably you know, it’s a year plus, and that was sort of part of the design of the curriculum as well, was to say, we want to deliver this foundational content, but then we actually want to create more space for students to tailor their medical school experience to their future career.
And so it leaves a little bit more time for career exploration if you’re deciding between multiple specialties, or if you firmly decided on a specialty, you might be able to do multiple rotations in that specialty or some of the subspecialties. Students, of course, also have time to do away rotations at other institutions if that’s something they choose to do. They’re able to do blocks of research. So if they want to really dedicate some time to research, they’re able to do that. There’s some downtime because students are interviewing for residency.
And so, you know, they can’t be on a rotation necessarily all the time. So it’s a little bit more flexible that way. And so also expanding that individualized time in the curriculum allows the students to be more flexible with their time.
It was a great overview, by the way. I noticed that Colorado has also, on one hand, you have this well-rounded curriculum, but as you mentioned in terms of the fourth year. But I think it actually starts earlier, you have the tracks and they’re somewhat diverse and it’s not like they all fit together really nicely, right?
So I noticed there’s rural medicine, there’s global medicine, and there’s also a research option which you alluded to. Can you dive into those for a second, and perhaps other tracks that I didn’t notice?
Yeah, I think the way that I think about it is, know, many undergraduate institutions might have a core curriculum that you need to complete a certain number of courses in English or math or whatever, and then they…
You have a major or minor. And so again, in a similar vein, we want students to be able, if they choose, they don’t have to participate in one of those tracks, but if they want to direct their learning in a particular way, they can apply, as you mentioned, to be part of the rural program, global health tracker, or research track. And to some degree, those are relatively self-explanatory. The rural program, we’re looking for students that are interested in learning how to take care of patients in a rural setting that can be differently resourced or the patients have different needs.
Colorado is actually overall a very rural state. Most of our counties are rural counties. And so there’s a big need for rural physicians in Colorado, as well as many other parts of the United States. And so looking to help fill that need by educating physicians that are interested in that. The global health track allows students to explore issues in global health and to go abroad at times to do clinical care or research to fulfill that track, and then the research track is for students who want more in-depth guidance on research as a possible career as a physician scientist down the road. So those programs require applications because we would certainly want to make sure that we have the right people in those spots. And again, you’re not required to participate in any of them.
So let’s turn to the application. And I think you did a great job covering the curriculum and the distinctive elements of Colorado’s curriculum. What is the secondary like for the University of Colorado Medical School?
I’m sure you can Google Student Doctor Net and find out what we asked.
I could do that, but I’d like to hear from you.
Yeah, no, no, I’m sure that’s what many of the applicants do. I think like many medical schools, we’re trying to highlight things that are important to us and trying to see how students or applicants think about things that we value and looking for that value alignment between applicants in the school.
Something I didn’t mention when I was talking about the curriculum, but that is applicable when we’re talking about our secondary is what we call the pillars of our curriculum. When we were going through our curriculum redesign process, our senior associate dean for education really sat everybody down and said, we’re going to break this down to the studs, right? So what are we really interested in?
And if we could say, this person is a graduate from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, what would be potentially distinctive about that person? And so the pillars of our curriculum are leadership, curiosity, and commitment. And so we try and think about the things that we’re delivering and the content that we’re delivering and the type of care that we’re providing in the context of those pillars.
And so we ask about that in our secondary application. We ask about where applicants have seen growth in those areas in the past or maybe where they’ve demonstrated strengths and we’re looking to see again that value alignment between the curricular pillars and our applicants.
Colorado School of Medicine requires the CASPER. What do you hope to learn from it that you don’t learn from the MCAT, the application, or the other materials?
Sure. Yeah, so for those that don’t know, CASPER is an online situational judgment test that was developed in Canada several years ago. There’s a similar product, PREview, from the AAMC. I think the goal with CASPER is to provide a standardized metric that’s a non-cognitive metric. So something like MCAT is really based on knowledge in those subsections of the MCAT, your ability to acquire and regurgitate and assess really discrete facts in certain ways.
The Casper’s a little bit different if you’ve read some of the scenarios, and they’re non-medical scenarios, but they’re asking, “How would you respond in this situation?” And there are trained standardized raters. We don’t have anything to do with the rating or the scoring, but it’s to some degree a measure of those other non-cognitive competencies that we value in our entering medical students. I think like all standardized assessments, it’s not perfect. It doesn’t always tell the whole story about who someone is.
And we much prefer, of course, to meet people and hear their story. But we can’t do that across our entire applicant pool. But we also, from a metric standardization point of view, we don’t want to be solely reliant on GPA and MCAT. We want to also have something else that’s another part of the puzzle to help us evaluate applicants when we’re looking at the application holistically.
Is there any way, like, I think one of the puzzles with the CASPER or the PREview is to try and figure out how important is it. Is it decisive? Is it that kind of question? Is it on the margins decisive? Is it if you have concerns, let’s say, about an applicant’s judgment, where does it come into play?Is it important in terms of determining who gets the interview?
We use all information pretty much at all stages in our process. So we are not a school that you know, sort of once you get an interview, we throw out the rest of your application and only your interview matters at that point. Or, you know, we really try and look at, we try and contextualize people’s experiences and their performance as much as we can. And so it factors in at all stages. If you get an interview and then as our admission committee reviews your interview performance in your whole application, you know, I think we’re looking for congruency, right? Do you have a low CASPER score, but your letters of recommendation in your interview suggest sort of an entirely different person, well, then we’re gonna go with the person that’s known you for years and our assessment of your sort of live performance versus some number from a standardized test, right?
So we, that congruency or lack thereof, can be helpful at times. Schools use it in different ways. Some schools do have a cutoff where they, that’s just their, what they’ve decided is important. We don’t have a strict cutoff. I think I would need some data around that, right? That, okay, below this number, the performance is worse.
Right, reverse engineer that.
Exactly. And so until I have that kind of data, I don’t use it as a strict cutoff. And it’s just a piece of the puzzle, such as it is.
Are you planning any changes to your requirements for the class that will be applying in 2025 and entering in 2026?
So in terms of requirements, we don’t have any specific course requirements. It’s challenging across the number of our applications to sort of parse out and adjudicate differences in undergraduate coursework, right? So you, we used to say, you need this many hours of math. And then it, you know, you get a hundred emails, statistics, math or not, or, you know, all these different things.
What about the quarter system?
Yeah, exactly. So we just have suggested competencies in subject areas where we expect people to come in with some foundational knowledge in biology. But if they didn’t take Biochemistry 532, which may not be offered at your school, we just don’t have a way to manage that. We are talking about moving to some kind of MCAT threshold to automatically receive a secondary or not. We are not a school that sends a secondary to everybody, but we don’t have any sort of strict cutoffs, and we are thinking about the potential value-add of being more transparent with applicants and sort of setting this a particular standard.
One thing that we’re doing is working with our assessment team to see, you know, is there a point at which below a certain value, we really do see people struggle more in our, current curriculum, particularly with the pace of the first year, even though, as I said, we didn’t smush two years of content into one year, it’s still a busy and challenging year going from, you know, not being in medical school to a year later being ready to start helping take care of patients in the clinical setting. So it’s a busy year. So we do want to make sure that people are academically prepared.
So we’re thinking of some kind of MCAT cutoff to receive a secondary. If we do go that way, it’ll be publicly advertised and on our website, things like that.
If you go that route, would that be the sole determinant of whether you receive a secondary or would there still be a review on top of that?
I think it would probably be the sole determinant, although we haven’t gotten all the way there. But the problem is we get such a large volume of applications that to do an in-depth review of every single one is a big lift for what is in many ways in lot of admissions teams, you know, there’s a lot of volunteer work that goes into the admissions process, which I think is great because it means that there’s so many stakeholders that care a lot about the admissions process, but it also just the numbers are challenging. So I think I’d rather be able to say, you know, I can give a smaller number of applications a better, more thorough review.
And also, I think on some level, it’s kinder to the applicants. If you can give an objective measure below which it doesn’t pay for them to submit an application.
Exactly. I think that’s true. And I think one of the things that’s tough on the applicant side is I get asked a lot, how does your school or this school weigh x?
Well, I just did. I just asked you that.
You have the GPA, Casper, your clinical experience. And frankly, I think depending on who’s reading your application, that’s quite variable. And schools might value different things. Their curricula might be set up in a way that someone with experience is more successful versus not. But there’s just no formula for getting into medical school. If it is, it would be on Reddit, and you and I wouldn’t have to have this conversation.
Or SDN. Right.
Does the University of Colorado have a, it’s a state school, does it have a preference for in-state residents?
We don’t have any defined sort of quota or preference for in-state residents. I was on a panel recently with an admissions dean at a school where her requirement from her state legislature is that their school is 95% residents of that state. And we don’t have any sort of quota like that. Something I think many people don’t realize is actually the vast majority of our applicants aren’t from the state of Colorado.
So in any given year, about 6 to 7% of our applicants are in-state residents. And so over 90% are out-of-state applicants. We don’t end up with a class that’s quite that skewed. We end up with a class that tends to be roughly 50-50 in-state versus out-of-state residents. There’s, of course, a number of reasons for that. I think our Colorado residents that receive interviews and acceptances are more likely to attend. The cost of attendance is lower for in-state residents.
They’re more likely to have a support system or established ties to Colorado at that stage. And so they’re more likely to attend. So our class ends up being about 50-50, but we have no specific requirements around it.
Now I checked on the website on November 4th, and it was as of that day. I think I checked later, the school had received 10,404 primary applications and 6,138 secondary applications. Probably have updated numbers. But as of that day, it had interviewed 270 applicants and extended 43 offers of admission. There are 184 seats in the class, again, per your website.
What makes an application worthy of an interview invitation or an offer of acceptance?
I’ll start with the interview. I think, and that’s even in most schools, I think that’s the sort of biggest cut, right? If you get to the interview stage, your chances are certainly much higher. We’re looking for a number of different things. We are looking for academic preparedness for medical school. And then I think we’re looking for how someone’s experiences, and again, we try and contextualize those, right? If you started at community college and then transferred to a four-year university to finish your degree, you might not have had the same longitudinal research experience as someone that went to a four-year undergraduate institution that has a more robust research enterprise.
If you worked a couple jobs to help put yourself through college, you might not have been the president of as many clubs as someone that didn’t do that. And so we do try and look at people’s experiences and what they’ve done with what opportunity they’ve had. Something I like to talk about too is not only what the experience is on paper, but what your reflection on that experience is, right? What are you choosing as your most meaningful experiences? What are you talking about in your personal statement or your secondary about your path to medicine? And do I see some value alignment there?
I’m also looking for congruency. If you talk in your personal statement about how much you love volunteering in the community and then I don’t really see that backed up in your experiences, you know, that’s a little bit surprising to me. But again, there isn’t a formula. I say that people can be well balanced applicants. I do see applicants that have sort of done the traditional things that you’d expect. They’re academically prepared. They’ve done some research. They’ve done some clinical care of some kind. They’ve volunteered. Maybe they have some leadership experience.
And those are often those people, you know, have developed some of the skills and competencies that we expect of an entering medical student. I also see applicants that are what I call well unbalanced. You might spend a ton of time doing research and that crowds out the time that you might have done doing some of those other things. But through that research experience, you have a really nuanced understanding of the way that research impacts healthcare and informed how you think about the clinical experiences that you’ve had.
You know, it really varies quite a lot. But I think if I had to sum it up, I’d say I’m looking for someone that I want to meet and learn more about.
A great way to put it. That’s a great way to put it. Interestingly enough, I spoke today to somebody who reapplied a few times. I just don’t … academically, he was extremely qualified. But in terms of his experiences, they were very monochromatic and his reflections about those experiences were rather shallow.
I think you’re, I hope that anybody listening to this podcast will hit pause, go back to the beginning of your statement, because I think you hit a lot of really important points in your response to my last question, not to mention that the other responses were fine, but specifically the last one, that it’s, you know, what you’ve done in the context of your experiences and the reflection that you bring to bear on those experiences that really makes an enormous difference in whether you want to meet the person or not.
Absolutely. And I’ll highlight something you alluded to, which is that academic qualification, while part of the puzzle, is only one part of the puzzle. If you look at the guide to how admissions officers use MCAT and GPA in admissions, there’s great data out there for the new MCAT that’s updated every year.
And there’s a set of tables that I really like that plots GPA on one axis and MCAT on the other axis and shows things such as likelihood of acceptance to medical school as well as markers throughout medical school, likelihood of graduating on time, likelihood of passing step one and step two on the first try, those kinds of things. And in the admissions space, if you look at the very top right corner box, which is the highest combination of MCAT and GPA, I could be slightly off on the number, but the last time I looked at was roughly 82% of those applicants get into a medical school.
But that means almost a fifth don’t of the most academically qualified people. And I think it is those people that you’re talking about that have sort of tried to check some boxes, but aren’t really showing me anything about what they’ve learned from that experience and why it’s informing their decision to apply to medical school. So while the academic preparedness is important, we’re definitely looking for more than that.
And I think that table really highlights how holistic review works in medical school admissions.
Necessary, but insufficient.
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
We’ve talked about the importance of the interview. Can you share what the interview day is like?
Yes, absolutely. Is virtual or in person? Our interviews are all virtual, and they’re now a half day on Zoom. When we initially switched to a virtual format, we were doing a full day, trying to sort of recreate what we were doing here when we were doing it in person.
You know, got some feedback that you know it’s a long day. We moved it to a half day, and we’ve tried to take some of the presentations we might have done live. Let’s say an hour presentation about the curriculum and given that to them asynchronously. We were giving the same presentation every time we were interviewing. And yes, there was a little bit of, you know, back and forth in question and answer, but we still have time for the question and answer part.
But we’ve moved sort of the content delivery to an asynchronous format to allow for the interview day to just be a half day virtual. There’s some time for the students to learn more about us. So we have a panel about our coaching program called the Compass Guides. We have a student panel and some other opportunities just for the applicants to interact with one another and learn who their future colleagues in medicine might be. And then we have two sort of assessment pieces. We have a group interview, and then we have a sort of individual interview.
And those are opportunities to demonstrate different competencies that we value. And the group interviewers you might imagine is sort of more focused on teamwork and how the applicants interact with one another. And the individual time is a little bit more time for the applicant to sort of highlight their personal journey to medicine and share that with the people that are talking with them.
So the individual interview, are they interviewing with one person or with several people? And is it more of a traditional medical school interview?
Great question. So our individual interview is actually two on one, so two interviewers with one applicant. And so we call it individual because the applicants are by themselves. But what we’re trying to do there is have more than one view of the interaction on the interviewer side. If you look at the data around one on one interviewing, a lot of it really can boil down to, know, do I like this person or am I having a good conversation with them?
And that’s not necessarily how I think we should be selecting our future physicians. And so we always want to have more than one view of any interaction. I actually had this come up just last week where an applicant said something in an interview, and one interviewer thought it was a positive comment, and one interviewer thought it was a negative comment. And it was, the words were the same. They were hearing the same words, and they interpreted it differently. And so it’s really helpful to have those different lenses as we’re thinking about the applicants.
And then after interview day, you’d ask how someone gets accepted. Our admission committee comes together and again reviews the whole application. So primary application, secondary, academic history, experiences, letters of recommendation, and interview performance and tries to get this whole picture of who the applicant might be. I think one of the hard things about admissions is in many ways we’re trying to assess for potential because they haven’t been to medical school yet.
So I don’t know exactly how they’re going to perform in medical school. That’s the sort of hardest part about it. It’s, if you talk about the art and science of medicine, for instance, you can make an argument, you know, the science of admissions as well. You know, if you have this combination of metrics, you’ve got a 93% chance of passing step one on the first try or whatever it might be.
But the art is to say, well, you know, what have your opportunities been and what have you done with those opportunities? And I think that’s really where the rubber hits the road and that’s the hardest part of what we do, but it’s also the most fun because it’s where we’re really trying to think about who is this person? How might they add to my community here at the University of Colorado? And can we put them out into the world as a University of Colorado School of Medicine physician who embodies those characteristics, leadership, curiosity and commitment?
Can we go back to the group interview for a second? Is it like where you have five or six people around the table and you give them a problem to solve or project to do? Can you give just a little bit a sense of what that is?
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s three applicants, again, with two interviewers observing the interaction. And there’s a prompt that the three applicants are given, sort of a problem they have to solve together. And then it’s just a sort of interactive discussion about sort of how they solve that problem. And then at the conclusion of that sort of discussion piece, there are some questions that we ask of the applicants about the experience. And again, looking to see how they reflect on the experience of working on a problem with two people that you’ve never met before and what that’s like.
And are people observing the process or is it just the answers at the end that we’re interviewers or observers are?
They’re observing the whole thing. We do ask them to go off camera just so that the applicants can sort of have a discussion amongst themselves and not be distracted, but they are observing the entire interaction.
Now, you mentioned research possibilities at the University of Colorado several times. Do you want students you admit to have both research experience and clinical exposure, or is clinical exposure really the only thing that’s important?
I wouldn’t say that it’s a requirement to have research experience. I would say that across our 10,000 plus applications, people that have sort of done more to sort of demonstrate those skills and competencies are probably more likely to rise to the top of the pile. I think there’s many ways to demonstrate curiosity, one of the pillars of our curriculum, but research is often a way that we’ll see applicants sort of demonstrating a commitment to learn more and to explore why things happen the way they do. So it’s certainly not a requirement by any stretch of the imagination, but I would say anecdotally, I imagine that many of our applicants do have both clinical and research experience.
How do you evaluate multiple MCAT scores?
We are a school that uses single best performance. So we don’t group different sub scores from different days. We look at the single best performance.
And that would be the total score.
Correct.
And how does the University of Colorado view letters of intent or correspondence from applicants after they’ve submitted their secondary either before the interview, after the interview, or if waitlisted?
Yeah, we don’t really have a good way of incorporating those into our process.
Again, we’re trying to be fair and equitable, and we’re also trying to get through a volume of applications. You know, the secondary is your letter of intent, right? Or what do you want to tell us about yourself and your candidacy for the University of Colorado School of Medicine? If I have an email come in from somebody as well-intentioned and thoughtful as it might be, depending on where they are in the process, if they’ve already been screened, I’ve got to somehow feed that back and rescreen the application or, you know, or if they’ve been interviewed, but you know, person A sent a letter and person B didn’t, but we didn’t ask them to.
So does that unfairly bias them one way or the other? So we just tell people, you know, please let your application stand on its own. We recognize that it’s, I recognize that it’s tough, particularly with the timing of the application, because you might submit your application in May, June, and then you get a great paper published in July and you really want to tell me about it. And I understand that we do leave time in the individual interview. If you’re at the interview stage for the, to say, Hey, is there anything new in your application that you want to update us about? And we collect that sort of in a live fashion because the interviewers can put that in their comments. But we don’t have a way of managing these individual letters, and we don’t want some people to send one and some people not to, so we just tell people to not do it.
No, I actually noticed that you don’t want them. On the website it said that. But what about for waitlisted applicants? Do you also not want them from waitlisted applicants?
Yeah, again, I think if I was going to ask for them, I would ask for it from everybody. So it could be equitable. To say, you’re on the waitlist, tell me why you still want to come. But I’m not really in the business of reviewing those kinds of things and adjudicating that.
You’ve been doing this now for a few years, right? You became a director of admissions in 2020. What’s the most common mistake that you see applicants make, either in the primary or the secondary application, or the interview, for that matter?
I think the number one mistake I see is applicants not understanding how competitive the process is overall. So if you look at the numbers, and this is the AMCAS numbers for allopathic medical schools, but in any given year, somewhere around, let’s say, 40 to 43% of applicants get into any medical school, get a single acceptance. So more than half get in nowhere. And so I think people don’t understand how competitive it is.
And they might think, I did well at my undergrad and I was president of my pre-med club or captain of the soccer team or whatever it might be, I did well on my MCAT and got a good GPA. And again, sort of said necessary, not required, So it might not work out that way.
Necessary, but not sufficient.
Not sufficient, thank you. So I think people don’t understand how competitive it is. And I think we talked about this a little bit before. When I see those applicants that are not telling me the right story, right? Their activities and their experiences don’t really match with what they’re telling me about their motivation for entering medicine. And then I think some people apply incorrectly. They don’t look at the MSAR or other data out there to realize, if I apply to this school as an out-of-state resident, 95 % of their students are from that state, so my chances are very, very low. Or this school’s average MCAT is this, I’m a full standard deviation below that. And I don’t have amazing other stuff. I’m sort of an average applicant otherwise. So I think it’s tough. I think it’s tough to get the right advice and to know exactly where to apply. But I would say there’s no such thing as a safety school in the medical school admissions process. And I sometimes still hear people sort of throw that around that they’re surprised they didn’t get in somewhere. It’s just very competitive. It is very competitive.
And I think there is advice out there, but you know, people sometimes hear or see what they want to hear or see. There can also be pressures from parents sometimes that are not optimal or peers. But again, I was somewhat surprised at this call I had today, this morning, that in some ways, this fellow, as brilliant as he is, was pretty far off in some of his preparation.
How do you feel about applicants using AI or Check GPT in preparing an application?
You know, we are trying to get a sense of who someone is and what they actually think and not what a generative text bot thinks. You know, we don’t, my preference is that people are really sort of being there on themselves and telling me something that’s true and authentic. I’m a hundred percent sure people are doing it. Of course, it’s a tool that’s out there, and whether someone uses it for idea generation and then refines it in their own words versus doesn’t use it at all versus uses it entirely, I have no way of knowing. And so I think that’s the challenge. My preference, of course, would be that you’re telling me a real story about who you are. But I’m a realist. I know how the world works.
Right. I think if they use it entirely, you’ll know it. That’s my opinion. I mean, I read some pieces by AI.
What are the three most important things that you think applicants should be doing to prepare themselves to apply to medical school in two years? In other words, e’re not talking about the upcoming cycle. We’re talking about the 2027, maybe even 2028 cycle.
So certainly having an understanding of the timeline of when you’re going to study for and take the MCAT and devoting the right amount of time to that. And taking practice tests, understanding understanding where your sort of scores are landing and thinking about you know what your goals are for where you want to apply and thinking about you know what the averages are the ranges of accepted MCATs or even MCAT cutoffs at different institutions if they’re if they have them in their public. So I think that’s something that’s important, partially because you need to get that done and partially because some schools have rules about how long that’s good for right? So if you took the MCAT two years ago and you’re not going to apply for another two years, well then, you might need to retake it depending on the school’s requirements. So thinking about that. Thinking about today, if you were gonna apply today, where are the holes? What are the weaknesses? And hopefully you could get someone to really point that out for you. Do you have a lot of clinical care, but it’s a little bit more passive? You shadowed a bunch, but you haven’t really you know, spent a lot of one on one time with patients. Well, maybe you should think about becoming a CNA or a medical assistant or ascribe something where you’re a little bit more face to face.
Do you, you know, you’ve done some volunteer work, but do you have any sort of leadership in those organizations or you know, how long to generalize that experience been? So I think I try and think about things that might take time to accomplish is your undergraduate GPA. Not the best, but it doesn’t accurately reflect your current academic abilities.
Well, then maybe you need to do some post-bac work. But again, that’s going to take you some time, right? You can’t, you’ve got to figure out what you want to do. You’ve got to enroll. You’ve got to take the classes. You’ve got to study and do well. So, thinking about, okay, I’m not going to apply today, but if I was, what are the holes in my application and how might I bolster those?
What would you, well, actually before I get to my next question, I wanted to ask, you mentioned the Compass Guides at Colorado. Can you go into that a little bit? What is that?
Yeah, absolutely. So the Compass Guides is our sort of coaching program. We like to think of students in medical school really needing a web of support. So we want them to have a bunch of different people that they can go to with different concerns. And these are people that know them on an individual level. So we have a curriculum, particularly in the preclinical curriculum called DOCS, Developing Our Clinical Skills, and it’s Learning How to Examine Patients and Take a History.
So have a preceptor for that where you spend time with them in the first year of medical school in the clinical space, learning some really sort of basic exam and history stuff. You’ve got your LIC or longitudinal integrated courtship preceptor. So your pediatrics preceptor, your OB preceptor, et cetera, et cetera. And those are people you know longitudinally throughout the year as well as a director of your LIC. And then you’ve got your compass guide who’s a four year longitudinal partner for you in medical school.
They teach some of our curricular content on Wednesday afternoons during the first year, and they have one-on-one meetings with the students at sort of predefined intervals. And the Compass Guides really get to know the students well over the course of their four years. So the Compass Guides are often, although not always, but often sort of the first line of defense, right? The student has a problem, they don’t know where to go. Start with the Compass Guide, and the Compass Guide can think about the resources available at the medical school and direct them in other ways.
The other part of my office is our Office of Student Affairs. And of course we have Student Affairs Deans that help students navigate problems as well. We have sort of, you know, health resources, mental health resources, other sort of learning specialists, all those other things. So again, that web of support. But the Compass Guide is really someone that’s walking alongside you all four years.
Is the Compass Guide a professor or a student, an employee?
Good question. They’re all physicians. They’re all faculty physicians.
Sounds like a wonderful program, like the students are very well supported in a variety of ways.
Now, what would you like me to ask you?
I think it’s always interesting to be asked sort of what some of the, I’d say, misconceptions are about being a Dean of Admissions.
Okay, great. Go for it.
The one that I like to talk about is, you know, being in this role I get to have these conversations with people like yourself, with applicants, with faculty. I get to sit at the table for all our major decision-making things in the medical school. How are we delivering this curriculum? What are we doing? What are our outcomes? Are we doing it the right way? But one of the things that I think is interesting is that people expect sometimes that I know the answer to what other people are thinking, or even that there’s a singular right answer.
So someone will say to me, how do medical schools, writ large, think about this research experience? And I say, I don’t know. Any of these hundreds of medical schools, there’s probably 100 different people that could be reading that piece of information. And they all might bring sort of a different light to bear on it in terms of how they think about it and what they think about it. I think the other misconception is that I’ve got some sort of secret way of understanding who’s going to do well in medical school.
I frankly don’t. And we don’t always get it right. We do have students that struggle in medical school. And I’d love to say that we only bring in students that are 100% going to be successful, but I think that’s not possible. But I don’t have some magic ability to predict who’s going to be good in medical school or not. I’m doing the best I can with my experience and the information that we have at hand. But it’s a really sort of human endeavor on our side as well. We don’t have a formula. And we really do read these applications cover to cover.
Trying to learn sort of I say, you know where people have come from, who they are and where they’re going and as I said before what their potential might be.
Thank you so much for that answer and I think we’re almost out of time. You’ve been very generous with your insight and your time, so thank you again.
Where can listeners learn more about the University of Colorado School of Medicine?
We have a website You just Google University of Colorado School of Medicine admissions. You’ll find us out there and you can sort of see our requirements to apply, sort of the timeline for application. As you mentioned, we have an admission tracker on the website, so you can see in relatively real time, it says what date it was last updated, sort of where we’re at in the process, and you can compare to prior years and sort of get a sense of how things are going.
Relevant Links:
- University of Colorado School of Medicine
- Accepted’s Med School Calculator Quiz
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- Washington University School of Medicine
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