Yeshiva has historically enjoyed relative success placing its students in top graduate school programs, particularly in the fields of medicine and law. This past year, however, a significant number of graduating seniors faced disappointment, failing to gain acceptance into the graduate programs of their choice. Not all students were affected, of course, but many have begun to question whether Yeshiva is losing its "edge" in securing admission for its students in the nation's most prestigious graduate institutions.

A great deal of the responsibility of guiding students through the application process rests upon the shoulders of Yeshiva's academic advisors. Dr. Stefan Bosworth serves as Yeshiva's advisor for students seeking admission to medical school, and he assists students through the arduous process of preparing applications, recommendation letters, and personal essays.

With regard to law school advisement, however, the situation remains a bit murky. While, technically, Director of Academic Advisement Nada Glick is the official pre-law advisor, many students are still seeking the counsel of Yeshiva's Rabbi Michael Hecht, who was a dean in Yeshiva College and the pre-law advisor there until two years ago.

Hecht, who is now dean of Yeshiva's Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy, commented on the exceptional aptitude of last year's pre-law students. Pointing towards statistics, he showed that one third of Yeshiva law school applicants which includes undergraduates in Yeshiva College, Stern College for Women, and Sy Syms School of Business scored in the ninety-fifth percentile or above on the LSAT's. Furthermore, Yeshiva displayed an impressive ninety-six percent acceptance rate among its applicants to at least one American Bar Association approved school. Among these applicants, three were accepted to Harvard, one to Yale former Commentator Editor-in-Chief Jason Cyrulnik and five to Columbia, some of the most prestigious law schools in the country. Twenty-seven applicants earned acceptance to Yeshiva's Cardozo Law School, which has gained in national rankings in recent years, particularly in the area of intellectual property, in which Cardoza ranks fifth nationally.

Despite the successes, however, Hecht did comment that it is becoming more and more difficult to gain acceptance to the top ten law schools in the country. Some of this difficulty, he said, can be attributed to the demise of many of the Dot-Com companies, whose newly unemployed workers have turned to law as an alternative profession. Although Hecht did mention that Yeshiva graduates are normally very successful at getting jobs at law firms, he did say that "there will be terribly fierce competition this coming year" for law school graduates nationwide.

Yeshiva's pre-med students proved somewhat less successful than those of previous years. Bosworth noted that, historically, approximately eighty-five percent of applicants receive admission to at least one medical school. But although this particular trend applied equally to last year's seniors, there were a number of signs that last year's students did not fare as well as they would have liked.

First, whereas Yeshiva students did gain acceptance to such top-tier schools as Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and New York University, only ten students were accepted into Yeshiva's Albert Einstein School of Medicine, a top-fifty institution that has traditionally accepted many more Yeshiva students. In addition, while in past years Yeshiva has generally managed to place one or two of its students into Harvard University considered by many the nation's elite medical school no one from the class of '01 gained acceptance there.

One student who gained admission to Einstein as well as other Ivy League medical schools complained that Einstein had been particularly unaccommodating. When he sought to defer enrollment for a year to study in Yeshiva's Gruss Kollel in Israel, Einstein flatly refused his request, throwing into doubt his plans for the next few years.

Many pre-med students felt that they had not received sufficient academic advisement. One former pre-med student noted that some of the best advice that he received throughout his career in Yeshiva was from "previous pre-med students who had already experienced the rigorous process of applying to medical schools."

Raymond Sultan, last year's Yeshiva College valedictorian and President of the Yeshiva Science Society, Sigma Delta Rho, found the application process itself to be unnecessarily complicated and the selection process somewhat arbitrary. Sultan, who was accepted to NYU Medical School, remarked that after the long, grueling application process, in the end, many students relied on personal connections to get into certain schools. But, overall, Sultan did seem satisfied. "As hard as it is during the process, you look back at it and it's all over," he said.

David Krieger, the student speaker at Commencement 2001, was accepted to an MD/PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. The MD/PhD program is more research oriented than the standard MD program, and the pre-requisites for gaining acceptance are more demanding; to qualify, students must maintain a very high GPA and involve themselves in a substantial array of extracurricular activity. Furthermore, while the MD program involves four years of study, the MD/PhD program usually lasts at least seven years. Perhaps because of the significant time commitment, only a handful of Yeshiva graduates are currently enrolled in any such type of joint program.