I’ve heard from many other people on this website that if you take many premed courses at a community college instead of at a 4 year institution, medical schools don’t look at you as much. Does it really matter to them where you take those pre med classes?
Yes, it does. Adcomms–rightly or wrongly–view CC classes as less competitive than classes offered at a 4 year college. They want grades from a 4 year institution if at all possible so they can see how you compare with applicants who attended 4 years colleges. Apples-to-apples.
Possible exception: if you are a near 4.0 GPA student who has already completed a bachelor’s degree, then some schools–specifically osteopathic schools–are more forgiving in their attitudes toward CC coursework. Particularly if your CC grades are reinforced by a strong MCAT score.
You may be interested in the question in #73 and reply in #74 in the following thread.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21552803/#Comment_21552803
@ucbalumnus
@WayOutWestMom
Thanks, would you say that spending your first 2 years at another, less competitive 4 yr institution is better than going to a CC? Would that help my application? For example, if I went to USF(San Francisco) for two years then switched over to UCB
I don’t understand your logic behind it. U San Francisco will get you into a med school if you do well in it, med school don’t care which school you graduated from as long as you have a high gpa and high Mcat.
OTOH, if you did well in u San Francisco but after you transfer you did not do well in Ucb then you will not be able to get into med school.
USF has sufficient rigor if you want to go to med school. Attending UCB won’t give you any significant boost in med school admissions. (UCSF doesn’t preferentially admit UCB undergrads. In fact UCSF doesn’t even give in-state preference in admissions.) Plus as @artloversplus mentions, if your grades & GPA drop post-transfer --that will damage your med school prospects. A downward grade trend is almost always lethal for med school admission.
Transferring institutions between junior & senior years means you’ll need to delay your med school application until after graduation. Adcomms will want to see 2 years worth of grades from your new institution. Plus you’ll need time to develop relationships with your profs at your new school to get the LORs you’ll need to support a med school application.
If you start at a four year school, choose an affordable one that you are willing to graduate from.
If you start at a community college to save money or some such, plan your pre-med path carefully so that you will have some BCPM courses at the four year school. If your major is something like biology or chemistry, that will happen automatically, so not a lot of additional planning is needed besides making sure that you include additional pre-med courses like biochemistry, statistics, psychology, and sociology among your electives. If your major is something else, you may have to plan carefully and take calculus, physics, and general chemistry at community college before transfer, and biology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, and statistics after transfer to ensure having enough BCPM course work at the four year school.
Obviously, in all cases, you need to get all or almost all A grades at all colleges to get past the medical schools’ initial GPA screens before your application gets read.
That would be a silly move, and likely impossible anyway. Why would you leave a fine, respected university like USF for Berkeley???
While at USF, you’ll get to know your profs, get research opps, etc. Why ruin that an transfer to a big school where no one will know you??? Besides, UCB takes very few non-CC transfers.
Woof, east coast bias for me. I didn’t realize USF was in the USNWR top 200 (its 110) so yeah, i wouldn’t recommend going to USF with the intention of transferring out.
FWIW, transferring to UCB from a 4-year university is going to be extremely difficult if not impossible depending on major. It will be impossible with a bio major or any in the college of letters and sciences.
(That is UCB specific scenario, but I don’t want to derail the thread…)
So really, it’s either going to community college then transferring or sticking to a 4-year institution if you’re hoping for medical school.
Somebody who truly wants med school would be foolish to go CC to UCB rather than 4 years at a school like USF.
While attending a 4 year school to graduation is generally preferable for pre-med purposes compared to transferring, University of San Francisco is not a particularly good choice for many, due to being expensive with not-very-good financial aid (i.e. more debt or less money after undergraduate, not a good thing going into expensive medical school).
@mom2collegekids No they wouldn’t, you need to consider other factors like cost and location to choose your school
What are your constraints for cost and location? It is not like USF or CC->UCB are likely to be your only two realistic college options.
USF was the suggest school of the OP. It could be a CSU, a Cal Poly, St Mary’s, Redlands, or many others that have a lower cost or generous merit.
The point is that going to a 4 year is preferable than a 2+2. That said, avoiding big debt is also very important.
@ucbalumnus I live in the Bay Area, and I have to stay here, so any college around here. Also, something around 20k or less after grants is the cost I can afford.
So you cannot attend an out-of-area college that costs $20k or less after grants and scholarships? Does your financial aid situation suggest that the colleges you are interested in will produce an affordable net price (try the net price calculator on each college’s web site)?
It does not seem to be very likely that USF will be less expensive than UCB, SFSU, CSUEB, or SJSU.
@artloversplus take a look at these stats and tell me that top schools aren’t preferred.
University of Michigan Medical School 2018 Entering Class Profile
Institutions with highest numbers of students
U-M 47
Stanford 5 each
Columbia, UC-Berkeley, UM-Dearborn 4 each
Duke, Grand Valley St, Northwestern, U Chicago, Wayne State, Yale 3 each
After you eliminate the preference for UM applicants, the usual suspects (top colleges) appear way over represented, and this is just one top public med school, take a look at top private med schools and you’ll find even more preference for top undergrad schools.
What are your stats?
Why must you stay in the Bay Area?? What about med school??? Do you realize that you’ll probably have to go OOS for med school???
Have your parents told you that they will only give you $20k per year?
Have you had your parents run the NPC for schools like UC Berkeley to see what your net costs would be??
Also look at St Mary’s College of Calif. They give generous merit scholarships.
It is not necessarily a preference per se, but just that the most selective undergraduate schools have a higher concentration of students who can get top end GPA and MCAT scores, because they have already selected their own students for the ability to get top end GPA and SAT/ACT scores.
But this prestige war is not really that relevant to the OP’s situation.