May 19, 2011

The College of Medicine’s Class of 2015 is the first to have more students who did their undergraduate work at Florida State than at the University of Florida. This new 120-member class also has four Florida A&M University graduates, which is welcome news.

 While the national trend continues to be toward an increase in the number of female students, this is the second consecutive year that the Florida State College of Medicine has had a predominantly male first-year class.

Those are a few characteristics that the admissions staff noticed before the class arrived May 31 to begin orientation and a summer semester of anatomy class and other discoveries.

Dana Urrutia, admissions coordinator, noted that this class produced the most applications ever but also required fewer actual interviews than expected. She explained why that’s an encouraging sign: “It means that we are becoming a first choice for more applicants. They are hearing lots of good things about us and are wanting to come here. So we are not having to offer as many acceptances to have 120 students show up.”

Here is a closer look at some of the characteristics of those accepted into the Class of 2015:

• Forty-three of them graduated from Florida State, compared with 31 from UF. “This is huge,” Urrutia said. “By far, UF had always been our largest number of undergrads, and then slowly FSU was catching up.” Part of the reason is the increasing effectiveness of the various pipeline programs that help young students prepare for pre-med and medical school at Florida State. Urrutia said the biggest difference this year might be the Honors Medical Scholars Program. Through that program, undergrads can become eligible for early admission upon completion of pre-med requirements, making it possible in some cases to graduate with both B.S. and M.D. degrees in seven years.

• Sixty-seven students, roughly 56 percent, are male. (Last year, 71 males were accepted.) In most previous years, women outnumbered men.

• There were nearly 4,000 applications for this class, including about 2,200 completed applications. (Out-of-state students typically account for most incomplete applications.) “My first year here, we had about 1,500 total applications,” Urrutia said. “Over the past three years we’re up to 4,000. So that has just been pretty amazing.”

• Four students are coming from FAMU. “When we get qualified FAMU applicants, EVERYBODY wants them,” Urrutia said. “So we’re very excited about that.”

• The admissions team interviewed about 340 prospective students. “Normally we conduct about 420,” Urrutia said, but they were extremely pleased with the students they accepted.

• The racial/cultural diversity is pretty typical for the College of Medicine: 70 white, 24 Asian/Pacific Islander, 20 Hispanic, 11 black/African-American. (The numbers don’t add up to 120 because students may count themselves in more than one category.)

• Thirty-one students are from the Florida Panhandle, roughly the same as the past three years.

• Only seven members of the class are from counties classified as rural. That number would have been higher, Urrutia said, but five applicants deferred to next year’s class for various reasons. “There is never a huge number of applicants from the rural counties of Florida,” she said, “fewer than 20 every year.”

The Bridge class, which until now has been capped at 10, has expanded to 13 students.

One more number helps to underscore how vital it is to make sure the medical school chooses just the right students: Urrutia estimated that as many as 65 faculty, staff and fourth-year students are involved in the admissions process.