Testing: MCAT, GRE

Read this first.

I only found two MD/PhD programs to require the GRE when I applied——Penn’s in Health Care Management & Economics and UChicago’s MeSH. I took the GRE in March so that I could dedicate the following months solely to working on essays. I aimed to score in the range for a PhD-only applicant and scored a 170Q, which is standard for economics graduate programs.

I attribute my success with MD/PhD applications in part to a high MCAT score. Training a social science (more generally, nontraditional) MD/PhD is “costly” to programs——there are often more unforeseen kinks in the training pathway to work out, the graduate department and MSTP may be less well-acquainted with each other, and social science PhDs are vastly different from the basic science PhD departments MSTPs usually partner with. Given this, my take is that dual-degree applicants in the social sciences and other “nontraditional” disciplines need to demonstrate mastery of the basic science content covered on the MCAT as to convince programs that they are worth the considerable effort necessary to accept and train a non-basic science MD/PhD.

Some schools will also require a version of the PhD SOP (statement of purpose) to be submitted with your application. There are copious resources available on this subject that I won’t get into, but I found Ben Davies’s site particularly helpful for all things graduate application-related.