<p>um for medicine it should have been jhu, duke, or ucsd... but since none of them are on ur list i would say berkeley... but please note that going to a PRIVATE school does have advantages... and berkeley would be my pick... but ALSO note that med schools look at GPA... so if berkeley is too competitive for you ( which it is for me) go to UCLA. DONT FORGET grade deflation at berkeley!</p>
<p>Is cost an important consideration? If so, then your 3 UCs are excellent options. If not, then the better placement rates and higher average GPAs of Northwestern and CMU would be tempting indeed.</p>
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um for medicine it should have been jhu, duke, or ucsd... but since none of them are on ur list i would say berkeley... but please note that going to a PRIVATE school does have advantages... and berkeley would be my pick... but ALSO note that med schools look at GPA... so if berkeley is too competitive for you ( which it is for me) go to UCLA. DONT FORGET grade deflation at berkeley!
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<p>Pre-med at UCLA is pretty competitive as well. I'm not sure how UCLA got this reputation of being better for pre-meds. Actually UCLA and UCSD grads consistently get into med schools at rates lower than that of Berkeley grads:</p>
<p>UCLA and UCSD's admission rates are both very close to the national average at around 50%, while Berkeley's admission rate is clearly higher than the national average, in the low 60%s.</p>
<p>Classes at Berkeley are probably a little tougher though. Northwestern might be a good school to go to if what Sam Lee says it's true although I'm too lazy to look up its med school admission rates now.</p>
<p>The problem with asking this type of question in the general forum is that you get a bunch of rumors and generalizations from students that have no truth behind them, especially since most people who post have no experience and no true background knowledge except from the hearsays that they managed to pickup somewhere along the way.</p>
<p>The types of people you want to target are actual individuals that actually attend the school you're interested in (like vicissitude for Cal) and actually have personal experiences as oppose to just blantant rumors. Even then, unless those students are transfers, these people only have experiences of their own colleges and hearsays from friends about other colleges, so I would take their comparisons with a grain of salt. </p>
<p>vicissitude, you need to look at more than just the percentages, and of course the data is going to be skewed depending on who responds to whoever gathers the statistics (and its generally those who don't get in anywhere that won't respond to the surveys, so in general, the datas presented tend to be higher than the actual data). UCLA has a lot more applicants, so if you look at actual number of acceptees, by number they are higher than those of Cal. If you roughly adjust Cal's data to normalize the two according to total national applicants (basically multiply by about 3), then you'll see that by the numbers, UCLA sends more students into medical schools. </p>
<p>I think if you truly want to boost your chances at medical schools, my personal bias is that you should have attended the elite privates whose placements are in the 70%+ (ie the Harvards, Stanfords, etc), but of course there are flaws in this logic, with one of the glaring one being the quality of students that make up the student body to begin with, as well as a ton of other factors.</p>
<p>"UCLA has a lot more applicants, so if you look at actual number of acceptees, by number they are higher than those of Cal."</p>
<p>But Cal still has a higher percentage. We're looking at ratios, not just raw numbers. Of course UCLA is going to have more applicants -- it has more med students. But you have to look at the ratio of applicants to accepted, where Cal has the advantage.</p>
<p>In 2005, Cal only sent off 84 students to med school, out of the 136 it had. If it had had the 706 that UCLA had that year, it would've sent off 436 instead -- 62%. You can't blame Cal for having fewer med students (that's like blaming Stanford for having a smaller student body when it sends fewer students to grad school).</p>
<p>have any of you guys taken AP Stats? Both Cal and UCLA's undergrad size is nearly equal, 23,500 and 24,000, respectively. Do you really believe that there are four-five times as many premeds at UCLA than at Cal? If so, why? How? Why would UCLA admit so many, or Cal so few? (This just defies logic.)</p>
<p>Averages are meaningless, unless you know how the denominator is calculated. If you look at Hopkins' med admit average it is extremely high. Why? Bcos Hopkins does not support kids who they do not think will get in -- they discourage those kids from applying. The simple fact is that at Hopkins, many, many Frosh matriculants are premed until the first or second C in Chem. All of a sudden they become humanities majors. I would submit that it is a similar situation at Cal -- it has the most competitive kids in the nation for a public college.</p>
<p>The number one criteria for med admission is gpa. Why attend a school that is the most competitive public in the nation? Better to go to grade-inflated Stanford or Harvard where the masses graduate with honors.</p>
<p>The reason why the publics, even the prestigious ones, have significantly lower placement rate than top privates is the often lack of premed advising/support at the public schools. Med school admission is much more than grade and GPA. I am not an expert on this. But bluedevilmike has written numerous posts on this. Those interested can search his posts.</p>
<p>sorry sam, but the reason the UCs have lower placement rates into anything is that they accept 33% extremely poor kids who are unprepared for Uni classes.</p>
<p>Regarding academics, allowing for individual differences in students, I think the four are fairly comparable. Northwestern is somewhat unique in its lack of Teaching Assistants for lower division, undergraduate classes (reminds me of Princeton). I have said in previous posts that I think Northwestern’s Campus is stunning and I personally would enjoy the proximity of Evanston/Chicago (reminds me of Palo Alto/San Francisco?). Finally, being a big fan of LACs in general, I think the attention to undergraduate education may set NU and Carnegie Mellon ahead of the other two because they focus on undergraduate education. (Note: similar comments posted previously on another thread)</p>
<p>No, it's not as simple as that. Go do some research; pull out Berkeley premed GPA/admit% table against some other privates. I know Cornell has one. You will see Berkeley students on average need higher GPA/MCAT to get into med school. Or put it in another way, with about the same GPA/MCAT, the students at Cornell have noticeably higher admit rate than Berkeley.</p>
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In 2005, Cal only sent off 84 students to med school, out of the 136 it had. If it had had the 706 that UCLA had that year, it would've sent off 436 instead -- 62%. You can't blame Cal for having fewer med students (that's like blaming Stanford for having a smaller student body when it sends fewer students to grad school).
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<p>1) I hope you don't seriously think Cal only had 136 med school applicant (which is significantly small for this public university)
2) I hope you're not serious about your logical deduction that you should just multiply one school's percentage with another school's total number of applicants- just stop and think for a moment</p>
<p>And Sam, of course there's more to applications than just GPA although GPA makes a significant impact, but on the whole IMO, the explanation bluebayou is a greater reason for why the majority of public school numbers are so low.</p>
<p>For one, the stats that are collected by Berkeley are terrible. They are not random at all, meaning that they have selection bias. They are obviously not homoskedastic in any way. In other words, as an OLS estimator of admission rates, they are complete crud.</p>
<p>The Berkeley stats don't tell us anything either way. That's why they suck.</p>
<p>Berkeley's rate is indeed likely over-reported. It seems unlikely they have such small number of premeds. I wouldn't be surprised if its rate is similar to UCSD/UCLA's.</p>