<p>I am having a tough time making a decision between a few schools, and I was hoping the people here would be able to provide some insight. My main decision factors right now are to go to Washington University in St.Louis and be 80k in debt (just from undergrad), USC no debt but pay for med school on own, UVA (accepted into Echols Program) 30k and pay for med school, or else go to NEOUCOM and graduate from undergrad and medical school completely debt free. While being debt free would be very beneficial, I was wondering if the opportunity and name prestige that I lose would be worth the trade off. Any opinions?</p>
<p>Which of these are you in the MD/BS programs for? Just NEOUCOM?</p>
<p>Yes. I wasn’t that interested in bs/md programs, so I only applied to NEOUCOM and a few really competitive ones that I did not get into. However, now that I look at my financial aid packages, and realize how expensive medical school will be, it seems to be a better option.</p>
<p>General consensus is that bs/md programs are unnecessary.</p>
<p>You should do a search in the pre-med topics forum, where it’s been discussed often.</p>
<p>I’d go with the USC option</p>
<p>I don’t like BS/MD programs because I think that the guaranteed admission is pretty worthless.</p>
<p>However, if it gives a kid a chance to graduate without paying a dime in tuition, that’s worth… well, quite precisely, it can be worth something like $400,000.</p>
<p>We’d have to know more about your career plans to answer wisely. And, unfortunately, that would probably require <em>you</em> knowing more about your career plans than is reasonable to expect of an 18 year old.</p>
<p>So with that in mind, I’d probably pick UVa or USC unless you come from a pretty wealthy family. But it depends a lot on variables that we don’t know (and probably can’t know): how wealthy is your family; what kind of career do you want; etc.</p>
<p>Thank you everyone! The advice was really good - but I decided that since the reason I was going to NEOUCOM was because of the money that’s saved, that I would go to University of Pittsburgh (where I got full tuition), hopefully work and get into a better medical school than NEOUCOM and then use my parents’ money for medical school. Is getting into a medical school really as difficult as they say?</p>