Hi, I was just recently accepted into the 7 year BS/DO program at Nova Southeastern and I was also accepted into UF. I’m not sure what is the best route. The program at Nova guarantees me a spot in their med school as long as I meet their requirements (3.3 gpa, 502 mcat score). I also have the choice to opt out of the program and apply to other medical school (MD or DO) if I have good enough grades. UF is however a good school also so I’m not sure what to do! I could use your guys is input, thanks for the help!
The requirements to get into the DO program look relatively easy. I’d go with the “almost” sure thing and head to Nova Southeastern.
Find out what the success rate is for students in the program. At UCF, only about 10 percent of students who enter their combined program end up matriculating to UCF’s med school. Most of these guaranteed BS/MD/DO programs at lower ranked schools don’t really really guarantee much at all, and the student is stuck at an institution they might not have chosen without the combined program in place.
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I’m going to start by saying up front that I’m not a huge fan of combined BS/DO or BS/MD programs. I think they pigeonhole students way too early. Almost every child under the age of 18 has wanted to be a doctor at some point in their lifetime; it’s one of the few professional roles we’re exposed to early on, and one of the few professional roles we know that makes lots of money while helping people and earning societal prestige. But few high school students are really aware of what the demands of medicine are like or the myriad of other careers available both in and outside of health and medicine. I’d be interested in some hardcore statistics on how many people who enter college pre-med in their freshman year actually end up applying to medical school in their senior year (and specifically, how many leave because of interests changing and not because they couldn’t keep up with the pre-med requirements).
Anyway, because of that I’m immediately biased against combined programs for the majority of students. It’s hard for me to set that aside, so take my advice with that grain of salt.
That said, UF is a great school - a better school than Nova Southeastern, I’d say. And as Zinhead mentioned, if a student changes their mind about med school or can’t get into the program (let’s say you get a 3.2), now they’re stuck at a college they wouldn’t have chosen otherwise. Where would you rather spend your undergrad years? Let’s say that neither school had a BS/DO program; where would you rather go without that? In other words, would you enjoy Nova Southeastern if you decided to leave the accelerated program?
@julliet -
This is a nearly impossible number to estimate, but based on the raw numbers, overall less than 10 percent of students who start out wanting to be a doctor make it to med school. The matriculation rate will vary widely from school to school, with some top schools drawing lots of potential pre-meds having a very high weedout rate.
In regards to combined programs, the schools that aggressively weed-out applicants tend to have much better success rates than those who don’t. For instance, Brown, Northwestern and CWRU seem to have very high matriculation rates for their combined programs, but these are very selective schools with very gifted students with an intense interview process before admission to the combined program.
Once you get below this level and matriculation from the combined program is based on achieving an MCAT score equal to the mid-point of the entering med school class, I don’t see much of an advantage unless the school is giving the student scholarship money for being part of the program.
The comments about the high likelihood of students who start out as pre-med and then give up make sense. But if that happens, there’s nothing I know of that would force a student who had been in Nova Southeastern’s BS/DO program to stay at the school.
It wouldn’t be impossible to estimate if we set out to measure it and had unlimited funds 
We could get a representative sample of college students across the nation and ask them between late May and early August what their career aspirations are, their major, and if they are in any pre-professional training programs (pre-med, pre-dental, pre-law, etc). Then survey them again at the end of every semester to see whether they’ve changed and what to.
But yeah, without asking it’s impossible to estimate.
Sure, but then you’d have to transfer. And students get offered their best financial aid freshman year. Plus there are all the social and psychological ramifications of transferring.