<p>My D got into all these schools (plus others) and she intends to go to medical school after college. We are having a hard time to decide which school to enroll. She got full scholarship at University of Maryland (college park). We have to pay full price everywhere else, which is 50k plus each year. We can manage to pay for college but would have no money left to pay for medical school. </p>
<p>We understand Maryland is ranked below all other schools she got in. She is also interested in biomedical engineering/bioengineering. JHU probably has the best biomedical engineering program. But it has reputation of cutthroat culture and it does not seem to have vibrant college campus atmosphere when we visited it. I would like her to have overall good college experience (both academic and personal development) and also be well prepared for getting into good medical schools. She is also an amateur artist interested in digital art and visual art. So art program offering at the school as well as having some time to pursue it would also be a consideration. </p>
<p>We visited Maryland several times (we live nearby) and she seems like the school. Some of the concerns we have are the peer group and research opportunity. Would more competitive schools give you more motivated peer group than less competitive schools? Are there more research opportunities at the more competitive schools than at the less competitive schools?</p>
<p>People at this board seem very knowledgeable and some of you may have gone through this process before. Your input and advice would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>One of my younger friends turned down Cornell for UC Berkeley. Here’s the letter I wrote her after her decision was made:</p>
<p>
Hi *****,</p>
<p>The reality is that finances are a tough compromise, and I am sure your family appreciates the choice that you’ve made. I know how hard it can be to ask you to make a grown-up decision at age 17 (18?), and it sounds to me like you’ve been as responsible as you could have been. </p>
<p>Here’s hoping everything works out! One way or the other, the goal is to pour yourself so thoroughly into something that you leave no room for regrets.</p>
<p>A few tips on making the most of UC Berkeley:Don’t calibrate your expectations based on other Berkeley students . You will have to be smarter and harder-working than most of the kids around you. I remember that during MCAT season, I had one friend at Duke and one friend at UCB. They both scored a 31 on the MCAT. My Berkeley friend celebrated by throwing a party, and all of his friends were very jealous of him. My Duke friend immediately began studying for a retake and his friends all sympathized with his troubles. You will have to hold yourself to a higher standard than Berkeley undergrads hold themselves to.Get to know your professors. Make an effort. This is difficult, because you have to straddle the line between brown-nosing and passivity, but the vast majority of Berkeley kids will err on the side of passivity. Avoiding brown-nosing does not mean sitting back and being quiet; it means being genuinely excited rather than faking it. Remember – you have to be a racehorse, running for its own sake, not a pack mule.Branch out and find a diverse group of folks. You have to be careful to cultivate a balanced worldview. You will learn from the people around you, if they are different enough; you will reinforce your own tendencies if they are too similar. Berkeley is bigger, but that just means it’s easier to find a “critical mass” of students who are very similar to you – especially because it draws from the local population. Avoid the habit of falling in with a similar group of kids.Ask for lots of advice from students at other schools – particularly private schools like Duke and Penn. I was applying at the same time as one of my good friends who was a UCB undergrad, and he basically did whatever I did. He didn’t have any pre-med advising, but he saw that I did. Following my lead meant that he was, by extension, getting similar advising to me. He ended up at Yale Med. The Internet can help you here, too. I avoid studentdoctor.net because the people there are hyperneurotic and extremely rude, but collegeconfidential.com is a useful resource.Grades are very important, but they are not the most important thing. Good grades alone will not get you into medical school; mediocre grades alone don’t get you rejected. I have a C+ in organic chemistry, the most important premed class, and a 3.6 science average, but I got into 4 of the top 10 medical schools (rejected by 3). MCAT scores, leadership potential, intellectual capacity, and – above all – an excellent application will matter much more, in the end. I know too many students who pour their lives into their grades and then botch the simple fact of getting your application in during June. If they had removed 0.5% of the effort they put into their grades and moved it into the application, they’d be MUCH MUCH stronger. As a general rule, your “schoolwork” is an inefficient place to allot your energy, provided you’re doing acceptably.Take lots of different courses. Many students like to stick in their comfort zones, and Berkeley is one of those schools that encourages you to do so. Fight the inertia. Make sure to load up on courses which make you write. A lot. Lots and lots of writing. Take a cool language, like Arabic or Russian. Study geopolitics, history, and current events. Go to football games (and yes, that’s a valuable learning experience). Do as many courses with independent research as you can. Maybe an art class or two; I used photography, for example. Naturally many of these will lead back into medicine. When I took a photography class, I did a photodocumentary on a cancer patient in the hospital. When I took a game theory class, I did my project on health insurance. But the point is you’re exercising all the different parts of your brain.</p>
<p>Always,
</p>
<p>
The main point here is that if you go to a program like LSU, you will have to be one of the dozen or so most driven students in your entire university. You will have to be studying when everybody else thinks it’s ridiculous. You will have to have an MCAT score relatively high enough that it is embarrassing and will make you want to hide it from your friends, even your well-meaning ones.</p>
<p>If you are at a top school, your friends will be similarly talented and driven. They will help encourage you to perform at your best, and if anything they will express disapproval if they see you slacking off. This was very important for me, and it is very important for most people. Maybe you’re the exception.</p>
<p>Can you do this? I certainly could not have: the ostracization would simply have been too high. It would have made undergrad miserable. Most people cannot. But maybe you are the exception, since obviously some exceptions do exist.
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<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/839006-undergrad-really-important.html[/url] ”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/839006-undergrad-really-important.html</a></p> ;