The April 30 final decision deadline for students accepted to the M.D. and M.D./Ph.D. programs for Emory University School of Medicine to accept their seats completed an application process that has been extensive for many Emory pre-medical students. Unlike the undergraduate application timeline, which usually lasts around six months, the medical school application cycle lasts a full year, with their commitment of enrollment into the school due by July 1.
Sabina Iqbal (23C), a pre-medical student who was recently accepted into medical school, noted that the lengthy wait time took its toll on her mental health.
“With [one school], I submitted my [application] in May, I submitted their secondary application in June, and then I got my interview invite late September, and then I didn’t hear back until March,” Iqbal said. “When you're in limbo like that, it really makes you second-guess yourself, because you just don’t know, like, ‘What did they think of me?’”
According to Director of Pre-Health Advising Kim Molee, the acceptance rate for Emory pre-medical students has increased from 51.80% in 2018 to 54.13% in 2022, meaning over half of pre-medical students at Emory were accepted into a medical school over the past five years. The national acceptance rate has increased from 42.84% to 43.41% during the same time span.
However, Ira Schwartz, director of admissions for Emory School of Medicine, noted the high competitiveness of this application cycle for the upcoming class.
“We got 12,884 applications, and we have 138 first-year spots,” Schwartz said. “That’s extraordinary, it’s crazy. About one-fifth of all the applicants to all the medical schools in America apply to Emory.”
According to Schwartz, limiting the number of seats is a requirement to obtain accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which recognizes medical education programs that meet “established standards.” Schwartz noted that to remain one of the 158 accredited medical schools in the nation, Emory is licensed to take only 138 students.
“We could not arbitrarily say, ‘We’re going to add 50 more people to our class next year,’” Schwartz said. “That’s not to try to [keep] the number of doctors graduating fewer, it has to do with the quality of clinical education, which should be excellent.”
Iqbal noted that, because of this limitation, even if students present a nearly flawless submission, they could still not gain admittance.
The University’s Pre-Health Advising Program boasts a 77% medical school acceptance rate for those who have a GPA of 3.7 or higher, have an MCAT score of 510 or higher and submit before July, compared to the 56.8% national average.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, from 2020-2023 even students with a GPA above 3.79 and an MCAT score greater than 517 — those in the 95th percentile and above — have a 83.2% acceptance rate, meaning that 16.8% of them do not obtain admission into any medical school at all. Iqbal noted that this uncertainty of acceptance, even with near-perfect statistics, can take its toll on pre-medical students during the application process.
“It’s stressful because it’s not a perfect system where you could have a perfect application and still not get into any schools because there’s just more qualified people than there are spots,” Iqbal said.
Competition, a “systemic issue”
According to information from Molee, around 600 students out of the around 1,400 in the first-year class enter Emory on the pre-medical track, meaning that around 43% of Emory’s incoming class begin as pre-medical students.
By the time the application season starts in junior year, that number is closer to 20%.
According to Rushay Amarath-Madav (17Ox, 18C), a fourth-year student at the Medical College of Georgia and incoming resident at Emory School of Medicine, the disproportionately high number of pre-medical students at Emory can pressure applicants to conform to the applicant mold they feel medical schools would want, instead of pursuing their passions. These applicants end up seeking out activities such as research, only because they think it will look good on their resumes.
“And a lot of times, the only thing we can do with our limited knowledge is go and shadow a principal investigator in the lab, and get kind of clinical research experience that way,” Amarath-Madav said. “Then you have it on your CV, and it looks impressive. But are you really that passionate about it?”
Molee noted that the pre-health department is aware of and trying to mitigate this anxiety.
“We just see a high level of stress around the pre-health population, and we want to mitigate the stress and help students see all the different variety of timelines that work for them based on their personal traits, their strengths, their decision making process, their maturity,” Molee said. “It’s very nuanced. It’s not a very structured, formulaic thing.”
Amarath-Madav said that pre-medical students attempt to conform through their choices of major, extracurriculars and whether or not they take a gap year.
Despite the conventional belief that students with STEM degrees will have an advantage at medical school, according to Molee, 134 out of 257 matriculants in 2021 applied as science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors. However, this number decreased to only 97 out of 235 matriculants in 2022.
Schwartz noted that a genuine pursuit of academic passions can sometimes be more compelling to medical school admissions teams, which look for students who participated in a variety of activities, something Iqbal prioritized in her undergraduate career at Emory.
“The one thing I stuck to is, ‘I’m not going to do anything that I don’t want to do just because it would look good,’” Iqbal said. “Life is too short. And I feel like when I put together my application, I genuinely loved every single activity and extracurricular and things that I did, and so that was the most helpful.”
The recent rise in gap years among successful medical school applicants has also led to a surge in the popularity of gap years applicants. Schwartz said that more than 90% of current Emory Medical School first-year students have taken “one or more” years between their undergraduate education and medical school.
“We think that's good because the decision to be a doctor should be carefully thought about for a long period of time,” Schwartz said. “It’s good to go out of your life after college to figure out if this is what you want to do.”
Molee wrote that the gap year trend has led to more diversity and maturity in the application pool, which benefits and enriches the medical community.
Of the University students who received a medical school acceptance in 2022, 60.5% of them took at least one gap year, according to the American Medical College Application Service. However, Amarath-Madav argued that the rise in the number of applicants who have taken gap years can cause calculating applicants to take a gap year simply to increase their chances of admission.
“A lot of people end up doing XYZ things that they think are going to look impressive, but are maybe not necessarily what they’re passionate about,” Amarath-Madav said. “They try to take any opportunity that’s available, because the demand is so high for a position, because everyone’s taking this gap year.”
Additionally, Schwartz said that he fears undergraduate applicants stand to lose the fundamental premise of the liberal arts experience when they focus only on acceptance into medical school and not on broadening their mind. Amarath-Madav echoed this fear.
“I do think that traditional pre-med students in liberal arts schools don’t get the full picture when it comes to a liberal arts experience — I really don’t think we do — because we have way too much to accomplish in two and a half, three years,” Amarath-Madav said. “It logically doesn't make sense that you would be able to fill your brain with all of this information to get you to med school, and also expose yourself to, say, the arts and the humanities in a way that’s actually going to truly give you a full liberal arts experience.”
However, Amarath-Madav also noted he considered majoring in business and psychology before ultimately choosing biology, and that his undergraduate experience was different from that of the typical pre-medical student. During his time at Oxford College, he said there was an institutional emphasis on getting students “hyper-exposed to different fields of study.”
“I remember at the time thinking, this was a real drag, and I wish I didn’t have to take it, because I wish I could just get all my prerequisites out of the way for pre-med, and just move on, instead of stressing about taking a [political science course],” Amarath-Madav said. “But I look back, and I’m really glad I took them.”
Iqbal noted that the complicated and time-consuming nature of the medical school application process made the competition among applicants so intense that she felt as if she could not share her accomplishments or failures with some of her closest friends.
“There’s good intentions behind that because, obviously, people get stressed out if you haven’t received any interview invites, and it’s December, and someone is talking about the five interviews they’ve had — you’re gonna feel like dog water,” Iqbal said. “So people don’t really talk about it. But it also creates this weird aura around it where you feel you have to be super clandestine with everything you do, and you can’t share your achievements with your friends.”
Amarath-Madhav echoed Iqbal’s concerns, calling the competitiveness a “systemic issue.”
“We have a lot of medical school seats available, but we have even more pre-med applicants,” Amarath-Madhav said. “We have a lot of medical students, but we have far fewer residency spots. So this bottleneck, it transcends from the very top of the system, from the end of your training, all the way down to undergrad. And that breeds some serious toxic competitiveness.”
Molee said that the Pre-Health Advising department has taken these concerns into account and is actively trying to alleviate them.
“We designed our peer mentor program to show students that there’s a shared experience of being pre-health at Emory,” Molee said.
Amarth-Madav, who was accepted into a residency at Emory, noted how, even after he was accepted into medical school, he felt like he was constantly overcoming “hurdles” to becoming a doctor.
“I don’t think [applying to medical school] was stressful on account of anything that Emory did to change the environment, but it was just stressful because of how many hoops to jump through,” Amarath-Madhav said. “But in a weird way, it just kind of prepared us for how many hoops we had to jump through in medical school, if I’m being honest.”
