<p>Hello Dear Parents,
Please, I have been accepted as a sophomore transfer on full funding at : University of Pennsylvania, PA; Cornell University, NY ;Tufts University, MA and waitlisted at Brown University, RI My EFC was 0 so I dont need to pay ANYTHING.. ,
At Cornell, I will be majoring in Human Biology, Health and Society; at UPennBiological Basis of Behavior (Neuroscience) and at TuftsCognitive and Brain Sciences.</p>
<p>Please feel free to comment and help me decide based on : 1.Best premed program, 2. Small class sizes(personalized attention students receive) 3. Level of difficulty of grading (easiness to get a strong GPA for Medical School application) and 4.location/weather ..Thanks in advance :)</p>
<p>Congrats on having such a terrific decision to make! I don’t know the answers to your questions but they are all great schools. Best of luck to you!</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Can’t go wrong with any of them for pre-med.</p></li>
<li><p>Tufts has an edge here. </p></li>
<li><p>They’re all going to be quite tough…though Cornell has a rep of being particularly tough from what I’ve heard. </p></li>
<li><p>Winters will be particularly cold in Ithaca from what my cousin/friends who are Cornell alums recounted. Winters in Tufts will also be quite cold as it’s near Boston. While UPenn is further south…not sure the winters will be dramatically better judging by what I’ve heard from friends who grew up around Philly. Also…Philly and Boston summers tend to be very humid…especially Philly. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Cornell’s in a rural college town. Tufts is located in a suburban college town with easy public transit access to Boston. UPenn is located in Philly’s West side…very urban and has a reputation for being unsafe a night…especially among friends who grew up in the upper-middle class suburbs.</p>
<p>Wow–these do sound like great options! I went to Cornell NY Hospital School of Nursing back in the 70s. It doesn’t exist anymore but was an excellent program and lots of those nurses went on to med school. I went on to PhD in Psych. They were training us to be leaders in our profession and when I have googled ex classmates, they all have been. Fun to see. But this was a NYC program, connected with the med school.</p>
<p>Having said what I just said, if I were entering the field now, I’d be going for brain research, PET scans etc. Fascinating. But everyone is different and I get the feeling you could get wherever you need to go with any of these programs.</p>
<p>Cobrat is right on. I cannot address program strength or ease for premed, if you stay on that course. why not seek info on lecture size, shadowing programs for med schools, and research possibilities.</p>
<p>In terms of location, tufts is near Davis square, my son’s favorite area of Cambridge. I suspect you would have a preference for more rural Cornell vs city penn.</p>
<p>Why are you transferring? Maybe understanding what you don’t like about your current school will help you answer. </p>
<p>Cornell medical school is in NYCity, not in Ithaca. This impacts access. </p>
<p>Go for quality of life. Once you are in medical school it doesn’t matter where you are to a large extent. While you are in college it does. Find the place with the best housing for sophomore transfer students, where the lifestyle suits you best. </p>
<p>And look at statistics for med school admissions. They may not be as equal as assumed.</p>
<p>If you are aggressive, determined, flexible you will get opportunities everywhere. No one is going to hand you anything at any school…especially schools where a significant % of students are premed.</p>
<p>As long as this is an open primary election, I would like to cast my vote for Penn. Great school in a great location. Can’t say anything negative about Cornell or Tufts, but Penn is better.</p>
<p>yes, really… where did you spend your freshman year? You must have an exceptional record to get accepted as a soph transfer to these schools!</p>
<p>@NJres… I went to a historically black college(HBCU) in Nashville,TN…I just worked really hard and perused all the opportunities there even as a freshman…</p>
<p>There is not a bad one in the bunch, and the money is right, so you can safely choose on city/weather/travel time from home/fill-in-criteria-here.</p>
<p>I’d vote for Cornell even though the winters are dark and snowy, because of the breadth of opportunities in the biological and human sciences. None of the others on your list is a Land Grant institution that has powerhouse colleges of agriculture and human ecology in addition to a college of arts and sciences. This can make a real difference.</p>
<p>Penn and Tufts are the easier of the two to get to from out of town served by nearby major transportation hubs. Penn is the only one with a medical school integrated into its undergraduate campus which opens up more clinically relevant research opportunities and shadowing experiences. Tuft’s medical school should be reachable by subway without huge difficulty yet I don’t know often this is done by undergraduates. Cornell and Penn are the most different in locale with the latter being somewhat rural and Penn being urban with major streets coursing through campus. Most upperclassmen do live in rental homes off campus there so you are going to be living in West Philly which is a far cry from Ithaca. Cornell is and feels much bigger than Penn which in turn feels much bigger than Tufts as you walk around the campus. If you have not visited already, a plane ticket into boston and out of philly connected by an Amtrak ticket or a flight makes those two campuses easy to visit by public transportation.</p>
<p>Tufts feels small in part because most of its professional schools aren’t near the main campus except the Fletcher School which has a big impact. If you have any interest in international applications of public health I think Tufts might have the edge, otherwise I think you can choose by location, size, perceptions about the make up of the student body and prepare to be happy wherever you end up.</p>
<p>There’s a substantial number of transfers at Cornell – more than at many other highly selective colleges – and Cornell makes an effort to be welcoming to them. It might be a friendlier situation than being one of the few transfers at a college where practically everyone started as a freshman.</p>
<p>If you are African-American, Philadelphia is a vibrant city with a substantial educated African-American middle class that holds a great deal of political power. The mayor is an African-American Wharton graduate. There are many African-Americans in the medical community. (There is also a huge African-American underclass as well. If you go to Penn – which is what I would do in your shoes – one of the things you will have to deal with is a certain level of fear of black men. Probably at Tufts, too, but a little less so, and much less in Ithaca.)</p>
<p>Penn is cheek-by-jowl with two major teaching hospitals (HUP and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia), and a 10-minute trolley ride from several others. There is major medical research on campus and adjacent to it, and the area is the national pharma research hub. From that standpoint, it is much better than Cornell, and a little better than Tufts. And, unlike Tufts, it is the big-dog local institution, another point in its favor.</p>
<p>Cornell, by the way, is magnificent. You really don’t have any bad choices. Any of them will take you where you want to go, and give you the opportunities you want.</p>
<p>folks, the OP is an international, which not complicates med school admissions significantly, but also means that ‘prestige’ is a large factor. It also means that travel should be factored in, i.e., direct access to an international airport. </p>
I would like to cast my vote for Penn. Great school in a great location. Can’t say anything negative about Cornell or Tufts, but Penn is better.</p>