Is it true that some medical schools reserve a portion of their new admissions for people who commit to military duty?

I’m not sure that the armed forces can dictate to medical schools that way, but a decent resource would be this message board.

It may be a policy among certain medical schools to do this, but you would still have to meet admissions requirements for that school. You would not be admitted on the basis of being in the military alone. My neighbor is an ob/gyn and went through medical school with the Army. She’s doing 4 years of her 8 year commitment at the nearby base, and will then rotate elsewhere.

It’s apparently quite common for the military to pay for medical school in exchange for a commitment for a certain length of military service. This may be what your friend is thinking of.

Medical schools take top students—not necessarily from the top schools, if the student can establish that he is a top student otherwise. A friend of mine has a degree from UMass-Amherst—a respectable university, but not one of the top-tier Ivy Leagues—and he was accepted to medical school at Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago. It probably helped that he had a 4.0 undergraduate average and had spent time working as a paramedic in New York City, with glowing recommendations from his preceptors and coworkers.

As far as my medical school goes, they don’t openly admit to giving preference to anyone committed to military service. However, I know that the dean of admissions has a good relationship with the HPSP recruiters and works very openly with them. The admissions committee is also open about their preference for prospective students who desires to do “self-less” medicine, i.e. serving under served populations, which being in the military may qualify as.