Stephen C. Frederico

I sat on a medical school admissions committee for several cycles. I have read the files, sat in the room, and listened to the discussion shift the moment a reviewer says "wait, go back to page four." Certain things do that. Not all of them are fatal. Some are entirely fixable if you catch them early enough. But every one of them is worth understanding before you submit, because by the time you are sitting across from an interviewer, it is usually too late to fix anything. Here is what...

Every year, families come to me with the same starting point: a spreadsheet of 40 or 50 BS/MD programs pulled from a Google search, with no real sense of how to narrow it down. That's understandable. On paper, every BS/MD program promises the same thing: a bachelor's degree, a seat in medical school, and a shortcut around the traditional premed gauntlet. In practice, these programs differ from one another in ways that matter far more than most applicants realize before they commit years of...

You have earned something most applicants never do. A seat at a top undergraduate institution and an acceptance into a BS/MD program. Both are legitimate achievements. Both represent years of disciplined work. And now you have to choose between them, usually by May 1st, at 17 or 18 years old, with imperfect information and real pressure from every direction. Most families approach this decision emotionally. They gravitate toward the BS/MD because the guarantee feels comforting, or toward the...