In looking at BS/MD programs you will sometimes see the phrase “apply out”. But what does that mean?
Applying out is the ability to apply to a medical school other than the medical school at which you have the guaranteed entrance without losing your guaranteed seat. For instance, if a student is accepted at the Rice/Baylor program, they have the right to consider medical schools other than Baylor when they are getting ready for medical school. Even if they do apply to other medical schools, they still have their seat at Baylor College of Medicine. The University of Alabama Birmingham and Mercer University both allow students to consider other medical schools.
Most medical schools do not allow students to do this without penalty. The penalty, not surprisingly, is that the student will lose their guaranteed seat at the medical school if they apply to another medical school. They can still apply to the medical school that they had the guaranteed seat at but they will no longer have any preference in admissions to that medical school.
The ability to apply out without penalty is nice to have if you find that the medical school at which you have the guarantee is not the best medical school for your needs. But, as a practical matter, since there are so few programs that allow a student to do this without penalty, the ability to do so doesn’t have a lot of impact.
Understanding the concept is important however, to make sure that the student is choosing the right BS/MD program to begin with. If you make an informed decision on where to apply for both the college and the medical school, you shouldn’t be running into the need to apply out.
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