Medical School Radar: Tufts University School of Medicine

Alright, so I'm actually really biased for this one because it's my dream school. However, it really is a great school, and here's why.

Tufts is located in Boston, MA, just a hop and skip away from Harvard and MIT. While these guys appreciate research (they offer M.D./PhD programs), they are more patient care-based. In fact, some of your exams as a medical student involve being filmed working with an actor playing as a patient. They evaluate what questions you ask, what order you ask the questions in, and how you deal with personality differences. And get this: the filming takes place in an actual hospital room with all the knick-knacks that come with hospital rooms, just to make the experience as real as physically possible. Super cool!

One of the most unique things about this school though, is their interviewers. They're notorious for asking very weird, creative, and sometimes impossible questions, just to see how you think. An example I snagged from a current med student from there was "describe the color purple to me as if I was a blind person from birth".

WHAAAAAAT. I wish I had asked him his response.

To speak from personal experience about this place, I took a thorough tour of them when I was a junior in high school. I got to speak with medical students going there, an admissions board personnel, and they let us play with cadavers!

I'm being completely serious. I played with a human brain. It was great.

Anyway, my impression of the place was amazing from the beginning. The medical students themselves were really laid back, and you could tell they really loved it there. The medical student that toured me kept giving random fun facts about the human body whenever he smelled or saw something. Then he taught us how to take blood pressure and analyze reflexes just for giggles. I could definitely see myself going here.

Some stats:

Average accepted GPA: 3.67
Average science GPA: 3.61
Average MCAT: 32.6
54.5% female, 45.5% male

Interested in them? Check them out at their official website at http://medicine.tufts.edu

Hope y'all's weekend was fantastic! If you have any questions you want me to try to answer or research you'd like to see, go ahead and comment, or email me!