Medical school admission requirements are not absolutely universal; most of the time, the similarities in requirements are a result of medical school being at least a somewhat uniform experience. But you can prepare yourself through your undergraduate career for fulfilling this basic block of medical school requirements which most schools share. These requirements generally include one year’s worth of biology, physics in a lab setting, inorganic and organic chemistry in labs, calculus, and English. Beyond that, most medical school admission requirements will include a minimum GPA and MCAT score necessary to get in, although the actual numbers may vary; generally speaking, a GPA above 3.5 is likely to satisfy most medical school admission requirements.

It is very rare for someone without a Bachelor’s Degree to get into medical school, so that, too, might be considered one of the generalized medical school requirements, though there are exceptions. There are actually likely to be exceptions to every given requirement; for instance, if the rest of your application is absolutely stellar, then it’s possible that the admissions committee might ignore the fact that your 3.4 GPA doesn’t quite satisfy their 3.5 GPA medical school requirement. Nevertheless, it is much better to attempt to satisfy as many of their possible requirements as possible.

There are many other ways of boosting your chances of admission to medical school, though none of them are necessarily medical school admission requirements. If you do research during the summer, for instance, during undergraduate school, then you can grow a strong portfolio of work that will show off your intelligence and passion for science. This is likely to impress many admissions committees; if nothing else, it certainly cannot hurt your chances. Volunteer service can fulfill a similar function, though it can backfire a bit if it is done clearly as little more than a resume pad.

As an example, Harvard University’s medical school requirements include that the applicant have the above mentioned coursework, with expository writing in place of English. But applicants are also recommended to have “at least 16 hours in literature, languages, the arts, humanities, and the social sciences and become familiar with computers.” Harvard’s minimum GPA and MCAT scores are likely to be rather high, as well, though there are likely to be more allowances made with regard to those scores, than with regard to missing some of these courses.

Regardless of where you want to go, or even if you don’t know where you want to go, the best strategy for getting into medical school is to do the best possible work you can, all throughout your schooling career. Do what you enjoy most, and as long as that gives you the basis you need in the sciences, then you will most likely satisfy the basic medical school admission requirements for any school to which you apply.

Other specialties might be important for areas of the country without many doctors, or with many individuals who need the services of that specialty. OB/GYNs, for instance, are likely to be very desired in low-income areas. Filling such a position after the grueling work of med school can easily make you feel like it was all worth it, however, as you aid so many people in so many ways.

Sometimes, the decision is of what to specialize in is going to be a matter of money versus a desire to help people. A cardiologist, for instance, is much more likely to help more people, saving lives, while a plastic surgeon or dermatologist is much more likely to make money. This isn’t to say that a plastic surgeon or a dermatologist never does satisfying, helpful work; but in general, a cardiologist will have a much more pivotal role in directly helping people than the other two specialists might. This is something to think about in med school, as you move towards gaining your specialty, not least because you’re likely to come out with so much debt. It may be a matter of some necessity that you move towards a specialty that will allow you to pay your med school bills. But, there are still ample specialties that will pay plenty while still offering rewarding work. As previously mentioned, the increasing age of the boomer generation will very much heighten demand for certain specialties, such that you will be able to help people, and likely can make plenty of money doing it, as well.

In the end, though, despite any monetary issues linked to choosing your specialty, it seems that perhaps the most important factor should be your own happiness. A recent study called “Specialty Selection and Relative Job Satisfaction of Family Physicians and Medical Specialists in Austria,“ by Wolfgang Spiegel et al., showed that specialists who worked in their desired specialty had significantly higher job satisfaction than those who did not. Interestingly, this was not true of family physicians. But as far as specialists go, the bottom line is that you should be considering a specialty that will make you happy, a specialty that you think you would enjoy. After all, if you are not doing something you love, then all that hard work during med school means far less.

Enter www.college-admission-essay.com. This website is filled with information on colleges and graduate universities, but perhaps most importantly, it avoids the ranking system and objective measurements so classically attached to the search for the best medical schools, or the best law schools, or the best colleges. Instead, the website provides a resource with perhaps the most amount of honesty and information that you could expect, in order to help you decide what the best medical schools, etc., are, for you. The Penn Group College Guide takes statements and quotes directly from the students at a given university, college, or medical school, and the puts them up for you to examine. While it still likely won’t be enough information for you to make a final decision without having actually visited the place and found some things out for yourself, personally, it is absolutely a large assist.

For instance, what the rankings of the US News report don’t tell you about Harvard Medical School is that “The tuition is very high, and the financial aid is very low,” as well as “There is no on campus graduate housing, and Boston is a very expensive city in terms of real estate,” and “Things do tend to become very competitive among the students.” The report from the Penn Group College Guide also goes into those qualities of Harvard University that are excellent, giving you a balanced picture of this and other top medical schools. The absence of marketing hype and the presence of more direct, honest, personal statements about the school is infinitely more valuable than the “objective” numbers of the US News rankings, which can be manipulated via criteria selection in order to ensure which schools will always come out as the best medical schools.

If you, or someone you know, are looking to find the best medical schools for you, then the best possible solution is obviously to visit yourself. Walk around, get a feel for the place, talk to people. But in lieu of that, the Penn Group College Guide can give you some good, strong information, directly from the people to whom it most matters. With the help of this Guide, you’ll be able to find the best medical schools, or any other type of school, for you.

Any ranking system inherently requires a focus on certain chosen factors. Sometimes, it seems pretty easy to pick out which factors to rank; obviously, when ranking the fastest cars that have come out this year, you just rank their top speeds. But a ranking system is complicated by the search for the “best” of anything. In order to eliminate as much of the subjectivity as possible, the medical school ranking system of US News is based on numeric figures. Yet it is still pretty clear that these numeric figures not only fail to capture what may be a completely non-objectified level of quality at the medical school in question, but they also represent a focus on certain traits which will inherently wind up favoring certain schools over others in the medical school rankings.

US News splits its list into “Research” and “Primary Care,” and then offers additional information on the best schools in certain specialties like pediatrics. The theory there is that the medical school rankings for research schools will focus on informing students of which schools are the best for medical research, while the primary care medical school rankings will inform students which schools will help them to become the best clinicians possible. Interestingly enough, some of the best known names in the country, such as Harvard University, were at the top of the “Research” list, but not the “Primary Care” list. It wasn’t far down, but it still wasn’t in the top ten. The medical school rankings for research focused on such factors as research activity, both in the total and average activity per faculty member arenas, as well as on selectivity of students and mean MCAT scores. The primary care medical school rankings instead examined the percentage of MD or DO graduates who enter primary-care residencies, again along with the selectivity and the mean MCAT scores. There are other factors included; research had 8, primary care had 7. But these factors, for all that they present interesting information, don’t necessarily tell you much about what kind of doctors they are creating.

For instance, the increased selectivity of some schools, coupled with a high mean MCAT score, implies a very intelligent set of students would be at that school. But there’s no way to actually know that the school is creating a strong set of future doctors. Similarly, the primary care rankings are difficult to actually correlate to doctors’ quality; just because doctors are entering the field of primary care, does not mean that they are good doctors. These medical school rankings, while still useful and interesting, are not as definitive as they might seem at first glance. The simple fact that there are two different lists points out how hard it would be to truly have a single list to say that there is a “best” medical school, and it seems that even two lists may not be enough to do the variation of schools much justice.

As it stands right now, there are two primary hurdles to attending medical school. One hurdle is acceptance; most medical school applicants are not accepted, and therefore do not even get the opportunity to attempt to be doctors. This seems both problematic and advantageous; problematic because it prevents some students who might be able to make perfectly functional and successful doctors from every following that path, yet advantageous because it ensures that doctors only come from the highest possible quality of pre-med student, thus ensuring that doctors themselves will be of higher quality. This particular element of medical school is further complicated by the fact that often, the individuals determining medical students’ admission are other doctors. The more students they accept, the more competition they will later have, and the less doctors in general will be able to charge for their services. While this is a very mercenary assessment of the logic behind medical school’s exclusivity, it likely holds at least some truth to it.

The second hurdle to medical school attendance is simply the cost. There are financial aid institutions to help students without much money, coupled with the ability of students to get loans for medical school, which they will likely be able to pay off later, once they are earning money as doctors. But even so, most medical school students graduate with a hundred thousand dollars, or more, of debt. Even before reaching that point, most medical school students will have attended an undergraduate college or university, and earned a Bachelor’s degree; for those without much money, that would put them even more into debt, or make them even more reliant on financial aid.

The issue is not a simple one to solve, not at all, considering the American Medical Association and the amount of power it wields over medical schools, as well as the simple fact that doctors should not be forced under government control any more than any other private business should be. But for the second problem at least, government funding for would-be attendees of medical school would help tremendously. This would have to be a large amount of money, devoted to the students in return for their promise that they would eventually become doctors in America, but it could easily help to surmount any issues of potential doctors missing out because they could not afford the costs. The first issue, which is the exclusivity of medical school, is more problematic, and no obvious solution presents itself. But these are important problems which need to be considered, analyzed, and solved, one way or another. Having more skilled doctors is never a bad thing.