This is what I was going for. I won’t see the 370k immediately, but because residency is a constant, I’ll gain an extra year of work (or an extra year of retirement) in the long term.
I agree that residency money isn’t great but if that’s what it takes, I’ll do it. However, interest accumulation means I’ll have to take college tuition more seriously right now.
That is exactly the point: debt repayment is an important factor in the overall evaluation of your options. It can shape your young - and even middle- adult life profoundly.
Just to put it in perspective, 300K a year as a doctor is no longer the norm. As medicine is continuing to change and may physicians, esp young physicians, go into hospital based practices, salaries are much less. Debt reduction is definitely something to consider.
There are so many factors to weigh in deciding whether you want to take the guaranteed med school route or go for MIT/Columbia. My comments are coming as a parent whose kid had been interested in something else, then in college switched over to premed and is friends with a lot of kids in her school’s guaranteed med school program.
How do you know you want to be a doctor and won’t discover something that might suit you better? If you do the 7 year program, you will miss being exposed to a lot of other things during your undergraduate years.
Sorry, I hit send by mistake. Will post more soon.
If you KNOW you want to become a doctor, then the fact that you have a guaranteed seat should carry a heavy weight. AMCAS is the medical school equivalent of College Board and besides being the clearing house for med school application, they publish a lot of data. One of their tables (A-23), publishes a grid that shows how many kids with a certain MCAT & GPA get into med school in any given year. The highest combination is over a 3.79 GPA and over a 94th percentile on the MCAT, and even with those stats, 16% of those applicants did not get into any medical school in a particular year. You might be tempted to say “oh but I went to MIT/Columbia” so I have a better chance. While that might be true to some extent, it won’t weigh as heavily as you think it might.
Years: Not only does the GW program shave a year off of your journey, but there is a good chance it shaves off a second year too, as many successful medical school applicants have taken at least one gap year and sometimes two. Going back to the high stat kids above, I suspect if many of them take a gap year and concentrate on the other portions of their application (shadowing/clinical experience/volunteer/research), that they will get in the following year or two, but this all adds years.
Depending on GW’s program requirements, having a guaranteed seat (yes, you still have to keep up your GPA) will save you a TON of time if you don’t have to study for the MCAT. You can invest that time in expanding your mind, whether in medicine or elsewhere. Again, depending on their requirements, it will save you a ton of time in volunteerwork/shadowing/research/leadership positions etc that would otherwise be required to have a competitive med school application. I would urge you to do those things anyway, since it expands your knowledge and your humanity, but I think it’s different when this is self-driven rather than driven by a looming application. I think it would also free you up to devote more of your time to one particular thing if you’ve found something of particular interest to you.
On the other hand, if you perform extraordinarily well during your undergraduate years, by being committed to GW, you might be foregoing the ability to go to another medical school that would either give you more financial aid/scholarships or just have less tuition like your in-state school, or be more prestigious if you are going for a ultra-competitive residency program.
Good luck with your choices.
Or ever, since many specialties (including the more common ones) pay significantly less than that.
Because the higher pay specialties are very competitive to get into (and in competition with other medical students who have already passed the highly competitive college student gate that is medical school admission), any financial planning for medical school and physician career should be based on the pay levels of the common lower pay specialties.
I heard that 95% of GW Medical School students get into their top 3 residency choices.
Welcome to CC, @Stuart_Pisler! Can you tell us what your source is?
My daughter reached the interview stage for GW BA/MD this year too. They gave all the interviewees a Zoom presentation about the program, essentially to sell the program to the students, and that’s where they said this statistic. I was quite impressed actually, as they had a very charismatic doctor and alum of the program speak for almost 45 minutes!
For a person who want to be a doctor, I think the best choice is BA/MD for the reasons outlined above by others. But I did want to point something out about residency match. Just as we’ve discussed (on other threads) that some undergraduate institutions manage their pre-med outcomes by actively discouraging poor students to apply to med school (and also through weed-out courses etc.), it is possible for med schools to manage residency outcomes through the same type of thing (steering specific students towards or away from certain residency choices and programs). There is self-selection as well (don’t bother with derm unless you’re AOA, etc). So as impressive as “top 3 matches” sounds, I’d guess that most or at least many American med schools are at that same statistic. But again, GWU is the choice I’d recommend for OP. Good luck (and if you choose GW, that’s “good luck future doctor!) Re: maintaining a 3.6 there, if that’s going to be a problem then honestly Columbia and MIT will not have been successful routes to med school IMO.
Should that be surprising if medical students applying for residencies are advised on what residency choices are realistic for them, so that they do not get shut out (because medical schools presumably do not want any of their students to be shut out of residencies)? I.e. it could be similar to how colleges with pre-med committees get very high medical school admission rates by steering weaker applicants toward more realistic paths than medical school for them.
It almost certainly does not mean that any GWU medical student who wants orthopedics, plastic surgery, or cardiology has a 95% chance of getting one of them.
I’d say go for the BS/MD, if medicine is what you want to do. You have a guaranteed path to medical school…and more importantly, low debt. Med school is tough to get into, and it’s atrociously expensive. If you have large amounts of undergrad debt, it can seriously jeopardize your career options later. An ivy league education really doesn’t help you that much. In fact, it can hurt your GPA, because of the potential over-rigorous education. Believe me, when you start “adulting” you’re going to have plenty to stress you out. If you can take the stress out of getting into medical school, you’re going to be a lot happier starting out.