Caltech vs UCLA for premed?

College Search & Selection
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<p>If anyone has advice, comments, or experience with the premed program at Caltech vs UCLA, I'd greatly appreciate if you could share! Tough choice between two good schools. Caltech may keep students so busy with classes and grades that they may not have time for community service type activities and UCLA may be so big that you are always playing the numbers game in classes, or outside-of-class opportunities. What are your thoughts?</p>

2

<p>premeds at Caltech are very stressed out from what I here. There is a very tough core (quantum mechanics is required), and grading is not easy. Since grades are essential for med school, UCLA might be the better option if you know that is what you want to do.</p>

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<p>You should ask this on the Caltech section of this website. I can say that Harvey Mudders have fairly consistently advised against Mudd for premed for exactly the same reasons as Senior0991 posted above about Caltech.</p>

<p>In the Caltech section you will find an almost identical question discussed:</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/california-institute-technology/693390-pre-med-question.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/california-institute-technology/693390-pre-med-question.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Brown University offers the best track to medical school… prestigious and ave. gpa of 3.55</p>

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<p>I’d say UCLA, for the reasons Senior 0991 has mentioned.</p>

5

<p>It depends entirely on you and what you want to do. If you’re smart enough to hack it, Caltech will give you the name and the research to get you into the top med schools in the country, especially for MD/PhD stuff. However, that’s assuming you want to be a doctor for the research aspects of it. If not, then UCLA would be a much better choice by default. I’d like to point out though, the avg. GPA at Caltech is about a 3.2-3.3, and bio courses tend to give out a lot more A’s than most other courses. It’s still difficult to get that A though, since everyone here is really smart.</p>

<p>I certainly agree with what’s been said though. UCLA is a very good school, and if you got into Caltech, then you have the potential to do incredibly well at UCLA. UCLA is definitely a safer bet, and you wouldn’t have to take all that extra math and physics.</p>