RX for Success: Xavier Ranks Among the Top Producers of Black Students Accepted by Medical School: Even on the sixth anniversary of the hurricane that buckled the Crescent City in 2005, left much of Xavier University of New Orleans under water and its faculty and students scattered by the rushing winds, Dr. JW Carmichael didn’t expect to be talking that morning about Katrina. For him it was a horrific storm that nearly drowned a hundred dreams as his students prepared their applications for medical school.
But on Katrina’s anniversary, Carmichael and his team of two pre-med advisors were off and running, readying this year’s 359 new pre-med majors for where they planned to land in the year 2015 — medical school — and inching Xavier’s juniors and seniors closer to taking and acing the penultimate exam of their undergraduate career — the Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT.