<p>Hello everyone, I am from so cal and I am trying to decide between pre-med at Northwestern, Berkeley and USC. I got the regents scholarship at Berkeley and got a full tuition scholarship at USC. I received awesome financial aid from northwestern. Now it's coming down to a matter of choosing. Anyone pre-med who has been through these schools. Which ones should I choose? Please Help. Thanks.</p>
<p>I cannot speak directly about USC or UCB, but from personal experience at NU I’d say that there is almost NO cut-throat atmosphere among pre-meds. Indirectly, I’ve heard from two friends at Berkeley (one pre-med and one chemistry major who took all pre-med courses) that they’ve had bad experiences in lab with people not being helpful/courteous and on occasion deliberately trying to make them mess up. It’s completely hearsay and, even if true, may only reflect select students and personalities.</p>
<p>My advice is to determine which school will best suit your learning style (in terms of competitiveness and collaboration) and set you up for good grades, because if you’re set on med school then you need to focus on the school where you will be most successful academically. If I were you, I’d probably just go for the money because I don’t think any of the three options would set you up for failure and graduating college with little to no debt is huge considering the astronomical cost of medical school.</p>
<p>Oh ok. Thanks a lot! Being at NU, do you know what the acceptance rate into medical schools are for students there? So, the competition is manageable. How is O-chem at NU? I have heard it’s quite challenging, perhaps more than schools with similar caliber.</p>
<p>The university reports something like 84% acceptance rate (i.e. 84% of all students who apply to medical school from NU get at least one acceptance); this number, however, is inflated due to the fact that many people are discouraged from pursuing medicine or encouraged to apply after graduating when they will not factor into the data. </p>
<p>(From personal experience, I met with the pre-med advisors once right when I began the process of transferring into pre-med from a completely unrelated field, and they said it was unlikely I would receive acceptance. I then got all As in the rest of my pre-med courses, finished my degree early and scored in the top percentile for the MCAT. No wonder they’re encouraging me to apply now rather than in another year.)</p>
<p>As for Orgo (no one calls it o-chem at NU), it requires a lot of memorization and in-depth understanding of mechanisms and reactions and draws on your ability to synthesize the vast collection of information covered through the course. As a chemistry major I know how much the Chem department values offering the most challenging Orgo class in the country and they consistently strive to achieve that goal. They also no longer accept transfer credit for Orgo, even from Harvard, which had been the lone exception for years. How difficult the Orgo sequence is truly depends on the student and his/her ideal method of learning/studying, but it certainly is a course where your grade is a direct reflection of your effort. It’s not an easy A (or even an easy B), but at least you don’t get screwed over in the end.</p>