In this episode of Admissions Straight Talk, Dr. Herman “Flash” Gordon, former chair of the University of Arizona College of Medicine’s admissions committee, shares his expertise on one of the most common questions premeds face: How many medical schools should you apply to?

Drawing on decades of experience in neuroscience, medical education, and admissions consulting, Dr. Gordon explains why fit matters more than sheer quantity. He breaks down the following points:

• Why 20-30 schools is the recommended range
• The pitfalls of applying to 60+ programs
• How to identify schools that align with your background and goals
• The role of mission fit, from research-heavy institutions to community-focused programs
• Whether “reach” and “safety” schools really apply in med school admissions

Read on for practical advice to help you focus your applications and increase your chances of acceptance – while keeping the process manageable and meaningful.

Show Notes

And I’d like to welcome Dr. Gordon to the podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Hi Valerie, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Thank you so much. To begin, for listeners that are new, rather than have me read your bio to you, could you let new listeners and returning listeners know a little bit about your work experience and background?

I guess I’m old enough now that I’ve had a varied history. I started out as a computer programmer at Purdue University. Then I graduated with a biochemistry degree from Harvard. And then I got a PhD in developmental neuroscience from Caltech. And subsequently, I did postdocs in London and San Francisco.

And I’ve been at the University of Arizona College of Medicine for some time, and I’m now retired. At the College of Medicine, I was a neuroscientist, as well as getting into teaching problem solving. And so I taught both scientific problem solving as well as clinical problem solving. 

And then I’ve been working at Accepted for ten years, maybe 11. And so I really enjoy it. I find it’s allowed me to continue teaching. And a lot of essay writing and development, I think, is a form of problem solving. So I enjoy that aspect too.

Great. So I have a follow-up question. Was it always your desire to work at a school of medicine?

No. I think because I became a neuroscientist, a lot of the neuroscience research is done in med schools. And then, it wasn’t until I’d been there about ten years that I got involved in the teaching of med students. And I found, I love med students. Man, they’re great students.

You know, they’re so dedicated. They’re sharp. They don’t want simple responses. They’ll tell you right up front, it’s like, don’t tell me it was a good answer. I want to know what was wrong with it so I can get better. And now, you know, I’m working with future med students and they’re just the same. It’s great.

That’s great. Okay, so today’s topic is relevant to all of the experiences that you’ve had at the School of Medicine and the work that you do as an admissions consultant at Accepted. And the question at hand is how many medical schools should a med school applicant apply to? We hear this often from applicants. So is there a magic number?

I’d say I hear it from every applicant. And there’s sort of a magic number. I usually advise 20 to 30. There are a number of people who apply to more, apply to 60 plus med schools. And I think that there’s an assumption that’s incorrect when they apply to so many schools.

The assumption is you have a 5% chance of getting into any one med school. So if you apply to 60, let’s say you apply to 100, right? Then your chance of getting into at least one is 99.5%. Well, the fallacy there is that they’re not all independent. If you’re not qualified for one med school, you’re not qualified for all the others. So your chance really isn’t 5%. The other aspect of it, which I know all of us consultants talk about, is that the fit is what’s the most important. I can read somebody’s secondaries to different schools and I can almost predict which schools they’re gonna get the interviews at because that’s where they establish the fit. It could be that your state school is the school where you fit the best and that’s where you want to go.

So apply early decision, just apply to one school. Your chances are gonna be far and away the highest there.  In general, I say 20 to 30, just because there’s only so much time to write secondaries. And if you apply to 60, you’re just not gonna do a good job on any of them. You really need to focus, do your research, really.

If the school has a good admissions website, you can drill down on it. If not, then there are other resources, sometimes student blogs on the web. There are different ways to find out more information about the school. And you want to leverage that and show how it’s not only a good fit for you, it’s the fit, right? That’s what you want the admissions reader to be thinking in their heads, like, oh, know, Susan’s gonna be perfect here. It’s really not so much the numbers as the fit is what you want to be thinking about. The other part of this that I run into is that I’ll have clients who say, oh yeah, 20 to the 30 is exactly what I was thinking, but my parents want me 

to apply to 65 schools. And so, you know, and I explained to them what the logic is. And I also offered to talk to the parents. Your kid is going to have a better chance. I’ve been doing this for a while.

And I guess I forgot to mention in my bio, yeah, I was chair of the admissions committee for the med school at the University of Arizona for two years, as well as being on the committee for another two years. And I’ve also done a lot of interviewing of real applicants and stuff. And I’ve seen this so many times with clients. It’s like, yeah, you focus, do those 20 to 30 schools, do them really well, and your chances are going to be pretty reasonable.

That’s an important piece. And the, you know, this concept of fit is something we do a lot in our work. and we use certain resources. use the MSAR from the double AAMC. We use our years of professional knowledge and it’s something that we talk about in terms of school choice guidance. Right. And it goes beyond cumulative GPA, BCPM GPA, and MCAT scores. 

So when you are talking to your clients and pre-med students about this concept of fit, what else goes into that conversation to really help your clients hone down those to 30 schools to make sure they are a good fit?

So I’ll give an example. I get a lot of engineering students who are applying to med school. And I love engineers. When I’ve taught them in small group classes in med school, I found them to be just excellent diagnosticians. There’s something about engineering that really provides an excellent background in laying out a problem, lay it out at the big, big level, try to break it down into pieces, what are all the other possibilities, could I be wrong, asking all the right questions. 

So I love engineers for med school. On the other hand, most admissions officers don’t. There’s this bias that they’ve got their plastic pen protector pocket in their shirt and that they have no people skills. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

What that means is that as an engineer applying to med school, you need to figure out how to present yourself and you need to figure out those schools to which you’d be a good fit. Do you want to incorporate engineering as part of your future career? If you do, then there are some excellent schools that have special programs for engineers or who like engineers, Texas A&M, Johns Hopkins, Carl, Illinois. So there are a bunch of schools where you should be putting your attention and then look at it. And what I usually find is, oh, the students look at the schools and it’s like, yeah, this is the place for me. And they write really good essays as a result that fit this school and as a result they get interviews and then hopefully they actually get accepted and have a great med school career. But it works for other backgrounds as well. So one issue is do you want to do research? Is research a significant part of your background and your future career?

If it’s not, you probably should not be applying to research-heavy schools like Case or  Duke, Stanford. These are schools where research is part of the curriculum. It might even be like there’s an entire semester where you’re supposed to be doing research. If that’s not for you, first of all, the school’s going to recognize that. They’re not going to want to take you.

And you shouldn’t be wasting your time on it. It’s you know, that’s not a happy fit. So

And I often talk to students who have certainly some research in their background, but maybe their application is very heavy in volunteer experience and working with particular marginalized populations. And they really should be looking for schools that emphasize that particular aspect in their mission statement and maybe have pop-up clinics and really kind of value that in training their future physicians so they know that they are a match and a fit. So they can put their past experiences to their future as a medical student. 

So my next question brings forth your experience as a former chair of an admissions committee. When applicants were not a right fit for your particular program, can you give some examples regarding what pieces of their application didn’t feel like a right fit? And how did that conversation come about maybe in a discussion amongst your adcom?

So the University of Arizona has a particular mission. They have programs that support that mission. So for instance, there’s this wonderful program called Commitment to Underserved Peoples. There’s that. There’s also a border health program. There’s a rural health program. They’re basically looking for future doctors who are going to support either marginalized or, we will use the word marginalized because even rural health, it’s marginalized because of the distance, access to care. And so they’re looking for candidates who already have enough experience that they can trust that this will be this really is something that they really want to do with their lives and that they will actually go out and help support this mission after they graduate from the University of Arizona. So that’s important to really understand the mission. Schools have their mission statement. It’s always, you know, research, teaching, and service. But you need to find out what the real mission is, and you can do that by in part, drilling down into the admissions website for the school, but also looking at what kinds of activities, extracurricular activities are available for the students? And it’s like, oh, are these the sorts of things that you like to do? I’ll give another example of a school that really stands out, which is Tulane. So they’re very big on community medicine. I think they have something like 20 student outreach clinics.

And they really understand what it means to serve a community in addition to the individual members of that community. And if that’s what you’re looking for, then that’s just like an excellent school.

Great examples. One more question as it relates to how many medical schools should a student apply to? When we think about high school students applying to undergraduate programs, a lot of high school guidance counselors, maybe some consultants. I’m not sure because I don’t do that particular work, subscribe to this concept of applying to a few reach schools, a big bulk of schools that are right here in the middle that feel attainable, and then a few schools down here that feel like sure things. Does that concept apply when it comes to students applying to medical schools?

Well, I guess the question that people should be asking themselves is whether they know anybody who got into a reach school. Or was it just out of reach? In which case, why bother? A lot of clients come to me and they say, yeah, I’m not going to bother with reach schools. I want to spend my effort where it’s going to count.

And I tend to agree with that. And I think safety schools are a good idea because there really is no safety school. It’s just hard to get into med school. But if it helps you to apply to what you consider to be lower ranked med schools, then do it. It’s a safety school, but if it’s a good fit for you, try it out.

And you may actually end up loving it. I’ve had multiple clients who went to what they thought was their safety school for an interview and then they’re like, oh, this is my top choice. So yeah, be open to it. But I’d say resist that urge to only apply or to put a third of your applications into those reach schools. And what I find is that a lot of the pressure is coming from parents. So I’ll talk to the parent and the parent will say, well, I want my child to get into a top 20 med school. Can you do that for me? Can you guarantee it for me? And it’s like, no, I can’t guarantee it.

Right.

You should be happy that your child gets into a good med school, has a good career, and that they’re happy there as well. I didn’t mention that before, but I think that’s the other side of fit. Med school is really hard. If you don’t fit where you end up in med school, you’re going to be miserable, and then you’re going to be miserable for the rest of your career. It’s much better to go to someplace where you’re going to be happy.

Right.

And that’s the place where you fit, where they’re going to support your interests. And then you’re going to take that joy in your job through your residency and then in your future career. And I think that’s more important than anything. So it fits on both sides.

I absolutely agree. And to go back to the concept of safety medical schools, I mirror your statement that I don’t know if there really are any safety medical schools because it’s medical school and it’s hard and it’s competitive and it might feel like a safety, but it may not be in reality. So again, go back to that concept of fit for sure.

Final question I have for you is really just a way for people to get to know you a little bit more. Here at Accepted you are known as Flash as your nickname. Your last name is Gordon. And I just was wondering if you could tell everybody, how did you get this nickname Flash?

It goes back to the beginning of this interview. I was a computer programmer at Purdue way back when we used punch cards and had line printer outputs. So you’d submit your job and there’d be a job card at the beginning. And typically it would be like five characters, five numbers, right? And then you’d go and you’d pick up your output in a box that you know, was at a number range that corresponded to that. But if you were a systems programmer like I was, then, you got your own special box with your name on it. And so, like my job card had G-O-R-D-N on it. So was five letters, because that’s all it accepted, because this is the old days of computers. And my office mate at the time was Ward Cunningham, who went on to invent the Wiki.

He didn’t like that my job card didn’t spell out my name. So he snuck in and replaced G-O-R-D-N with F-L-A-S-H. And then my printout came out and I went looking for it, you know, and I’m in the G box and it’s like, hey, I can’t find my printout. I know I submitted my job. Here are the cards, you know. Everybody started laughing. Try under F.

So it stuck. It stuck. And then when email came along, then that was my natural email. And then it started, you know, especially my med students wanted to, started calling me Flash and then it really stuck.

And it seems like it’s stuck with you here at Accepted.

Well, thank you very much for joining us today. I think you have helped to answer the question, how many med schools should an applicant!

Related Resources

• Medical School Selectivity Index, a free tool
• Medical School Secondary Essay Tips
• Schedule a free consultation with Dr. Gordon

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