[cmccuist]

Fint, my daughter is in her fourth year of med school right now so I will just pass on what she told me about her application process.

1) As long as you're "competitive" with your MCAT score, not placing at the top is not a deal breaker.

2) The extra-curriculars are very important. My daughter was a lifeguard, taught swimming all through high school and college, taught CPR classes and volunteered at the local hospital.

3) Your daughter's GPA is great, but her major is not so great. Engineering and Bio-chem are near the top for desired majors. Biology for some reason is not as desirable. Not sure why. But the minor in chemistry with that GPA is really going to help.

4) The bad news is most schools are required to set aside a certain number of spots for residents of that state. For instance, my daughter was accepted to UT-Houston. There were 215 spots (with 4,000 applicants) and they were required to offer spots to 200 TX residents. If your daughter lives in Nevada she absolutely should apply to UNR med school. The out of state applicants will be very strong, but they are required to accept a set number of Nevada residents (or whatever state she lives in).

5) When she goes for the interview, she needs to be very clear to the interviewers that being a doctor is all she ever wanted to do and all she ever will want to do. There can't be any grey area there. My brother in law tanked his interviews. He actually told the interviewers at several universities that he was also thinking about becoming an actor! They made that decision for him. And this is a guy who had a 4.0, great MCAT, extra-curriculars, the whole package. He eventually got in. He went back and became an EMT for a year and that put him over the hump.

6) She needs to have an answer for the interviewers to the question of what will she do if she doesn't get in. The best answer is that she will find work in the medical community and apply again. For some reason, they don't want to hear that you'll go back to school for more degrees. Not sure about that, but working as an EMT or in a research lab will score points. My daughter's ex-boyfriend got in that way (working in a lab that did experiments on monkeys - great fun) when he was rejected the first time.

Good luck!! It looks like you did a tremendous job raising up that young lady!