Hey everyone!
I’m looking into schools such as USC and UCLA (I would LOVE to go to UCLA but am OOS so it probably won’t happen) but regardless, I know they both have med schools. If I were to attend, let’s say, USC for undergrad as a biology student following a premed track, would I have a more likely shot of getting into Keck School of Medicine (USC)? Or does it not affect your chances at all? Thanks for all the help!
It varies depending on the school, but for most med schools, attending the undergrad conveys very little, if any, advantage. At some medical schools, attending the undergrad can actually disadvantage you for admission to the med school.
Here’s Keck’s Class of 2019 profile
http://www.keck.usc.edu/education/md-program/admissions/
It appears that attending USC offers no advantage whatsoever in gaining an admission to Keck.
Since Keck has its own bs/md program, so they probably could not take too many from its own none bs/md UG graduates.
As WOWM said, the number of UG graduate can advance to its own med school varies greatly from school to school. I can only point out that UChicago Med School actually did take disproportionate of their own UG school graduates, by actual counting, in the graduating class of 2014, UChicago med school took in 10% of their class from their own, the largest group of student body from the same school. They also have a program which pre-advance very few third year UG students to the med school without going through the open application process.
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I’m looking into schools such as USC and UCLA (I would LOVE to go to UCLA but am OOS
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If you’re OOS and premed, don’t go to a Calif undergrad. It’s just a big negative, with no advantages. You’d very likely regret it. There are way too many premeds in Calif undergrads and the competition and weeding is brutal. Don’t go there if you’re serious about going to med school.
What is your home state? What other schools are you considering?
@artloversplus I thought Keck got rid of the bs/md program? If they haven’t, could you send me a link to the site, I’d like to look into it 
@mom2collegekids I’m a New Yorker, looking at BC, BU, Northeastern, Harvard (if I’m really lucky), and Stony Brook and Hofstra as in state safeties. I would really love to go to Cali for at least medical school, so maybe I’ll just continue to look into schools in the northeast and worry about Cali when the time comes to apply for medical school (of course, if I still want to be a doctor)
Perhaps Keck did get rid of their bs/md now, but for class of 2019 med school they still have it.
California is probably the worst place to be a pre-med or to try to go to medical school. It has a huge population of med school applicants and too few seats to accommodate them. (UCLA alone graduates more med school applicants each year than there are med school seats in the entire state.) California is the largest exporter of med school applicants in the US.
Additionally, CA med schools are either very highly ranked or a mission-driven–both things making them much tougher admits (especially for OOSers) than most med schools.
Only 14% of CA residents matriculate in-state; 23% matriculate at OOS med schools and 63% receive no acceptances at all. Only Washington state has a lower rate of instate matriculation than CA. (And WA only has a single med school which must accommodate all the WWAMI states.)
@WayOutWestMom that’s very upsetting, I really love LA and hoped that I would be able to spend at least 4 of my 8 years of school there. But it seems like it wouldn’t even be a smart idea to attend USC/UCLA for undergrad because they don’t have a great turnout for both in-state and OOS med school admissions
If you want to be a pre-med, go to the undergrad that offers you the best financial deal. Prestige of undergrad plays only a tiny role in getting admitted to med school. It’s really all about what you do and what you accomplish–not where you went. Medical school is expensive and you want to minimize undergrad debt as much as you can.
For med school–the hard part is getting any acceptance. (And frankly your odds of gaining an instate med school acceptance in NY are much better than in CA.)
If after med school & residency, you still want to live in LA, I’m sure you can find a job there. You could even try to match into a CA residency (but those slots are wildly popular among Californios who want to return home so there is tons of competition for them. Also consider that because residents get paid lackey wages–i.e. your high school teacher makes more than a medical resident–LA is a tough place to afford.)
More generally, pretty much everywhere in CA especially coastal from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and Bay area is expensive especially on a resident’s salary. Some residencies do offer stipends to help defray living costs, but it’s not a lot.
With how tough it is to get into medical school these days it would be a good idea to apply to at least a few bs/mad programs if you are sure about becoming a doctor.
@WayOutWestMom @Jugulator20 I’m a New Yorker and, if California didn’t work out for me, I would want to return home to New York for my residency. Yet again an expensive spot; I can’t seem to win lol. Would you say that cost of living would be higher in NY or CA?
cost of living
That depends, if you are talking about Manhattan or Hampton, that is expensive. But Kingston is very affordable. Likewise, not every where in CA is expensive, even in the Bay Area, Most part of the Solano, Santa Cruz and Contra Costa counties are very affordable, you just don’t start buying houses in Palo Alto or on the 5th Ave Manhattan right out of the school. I had a tenant who is an ER doctor, making good money, but since he had a student loan over 500K, he had to rent the apartment from me.
Getting a residency is vastly more complicated than saying “I want to live CA” or “I want to live in NYC.” It just doesn’t work that way.
You really don’t have the final say about where you’ll end up for residency–a computer program does. Take it or leave it. Seriously. I am not kidding in the least about this. (And if you don’t take it–that’s it. Game over. You may have a MD but you’ll never practice medicine.)
OK, the Match process is more complicated than that and the newly graduated doctors do have some input, but there are no guarantees you’ll get what you want. You may want to return to NYC for residency, but it’s very possible that you won’t. You could end up Sioux City, ND or Lewiston, ME or Carbondale, IL or Tucson, AZ (My older daughter really wanted to stay in the Rocky Mountain region or the West for residency. Care to guess where’s she’s doing her residency? New England. In a high COL area too.)
Yep, as a young doctor in training, you have less control over your life than you might imagine.
And, tbh, right now you are so far away from needing to worry about the COL of where you’ll do your residency training, it’s not even something you should be worrying or thinking about. Concentrate on getting into college first.
I understand what you’re saying, but NYC is probably a bad example. It probably wouldn’t be much of a problem to only apply to programs that are all accessible by MTA.