ALLOPATHIC MEDICINE 

The medical profession offers attractive and prestigious careers.  Entrance to the profession requires completion of medical school (which typically takes four years beyond undergraduate work) plus three to seven years of residency; limits on the numbers of students admitted foster competition for enrollment.  Although good grades alone will not guarantee admission to medical school, poor ones will certainly preclude it.  Students who are truly motivated toward a career in medicine seek to achieve; they energize their study habits into actual performance, and direct their energies toward desired outcomes to succeed in attaining their goals.  Such students do not merely talk about their career - they work to achieve it.  Seventy percent of United States medical schools have 2000 or more applicants per year; the average number of applications submitted per applicant is eleven.  In 2005, 17,004 individuals matriculated at U.S. medical schools, out of 17,978 accepted from a total applicant pool of 37,364. 

              There are 126 medical schools in the United States.  About 50% of current medical students are women.  Numbers of graduates from racial and ethnic minorities have been nearly stable in recent years.  The Census Bureau currently estimates the percentage of underrepresented minorities in the nation's population to be 19.4%, yet only about 8% of all current medical students are from underrepresented minorities and only 2.5% of the nation's M.D.'s are black.

              Costs for attending medical school range widely; one year's tuition and fees for an out-of-state student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine is $73,641 but in-state residents seeking an M.D. from the East Carolina University School of Medicine paid only $7,668 in 2005.  For the 2005 graduating medical class, the average educational indebtedness for those in debt (82% of the class) was approximately $120,000.  Due to state regulations and funding patterns, applicants are most likely to be admitted to medical schools in their state of residence. In 2005, 63% of first year medical students entered schools within their own state of residence.  The vast majority of medical schools in the United States report a nonresident entrant to applicant rate below 5%; at some schools, the rate is less than 1%.

             Like all professions, the practice of medicine will change in the future, yet opportunities for physicians to serve the needs of society will be great.  A surplus of personnel in some medical specialties is real, yet some areas (family medicine, pediatrics, geriatrics, psychiatry, rehabilitation medicine, public health and emergency medicine) show continued need for practitioners.  The geographic distribution of physicians is also relevant; rural areas and inner cities are underserved.   The average salary of employed physicians is leveling off and may be decreasing but incomes of physicians remain in the upper decile of all incomes in the United States, with a median annual income of $156,000 for all physicians.

 There are obvious differences in location, size, cost, facilities, philosophy, curricular design, faculty, and residency placement of the medical schools in the United States.  The competitive candidate must be inquisitive enough to investigate the differences.  A good place to start your explorations is the book "Medical School Admission Requirements", which is updated annually by the Association of American Medical Colleges, Section for Publication Orders, 2450 N Street NW, Washington, DC 20037; phone 202-828-0416; homepage http://www.aamc.org.  The cost is $25.00 plus $ 8 shipping, and it is well worth the investment.  The first ten chapters are particularly valuable to prospective medical students.  

The homepage for the AAMC contains a large amount of information of interest to pre-medical students.  

Other organizations whose homepages may be of value to you are the following: American Academy of Family Physicians, http://www.aafp.org

the American Medical Association, http://www.ama-assn.org

American College of Sports Medicine, http://www.acsm.org

the American Medical Student Association, http://www.amsa.org

Pfizer Medical Humanities Initiative, http://www.positiveprofiles.com

Rural Medical Education, http://www.unmc.edu/Community/ruralmeded