<p>A friend of mine, a senior at Berkeley, does research in Randy Schekman's lab, which deals with membrane assembly and transport, along with vesicle transport in the cell. As you may know, he was awarded the nobel prize this year in physiology and medicine for his research in cell membrane/vesicle transport.</p>
<p>My friend, who also took a macromolecular synthesis class with him, has a letter of recommendation written by him, along with one publication that has my friend's and Dr. Schekman's name on it.</p>
<p>Do you think med schools really value the nobel laureate status? It's just he brags about it all the time that he has a shoe in and has no worries about not getting accepted :/</p>
<p>It sounds like it has the potential to be a phenomenal letter that is definitely going to be better than your average LOR (this is of course assuming that Schekman has high praise for him, a lukewarm letter from a nobel laureate means nothing) but it is far from a “shoo in.”
A) it’s only a LOR
B) Schekman is not a physician - it still wouldn’t be a shoo in, but it would be closer to one if your friend were applying to PhD or MD/PhD programs</p>
<p>Agree with IWBB - it helps MD/PhD apps more than MD apps assuming the letter is really good. </p>
<p>I went on a college visit trip in summer of 2010 when our Yale science tour guide who happened to be going onto MD/PhD at Columbia was doing her very last tour. She was bragging about how she sent off a recommendation from her chemistry prof in late 2009 for her apps and 2 weeks later he won the Nobel prize.</p>
<p>Does it matter to you whether he gets in or not? If his 10 x GPA +MCAT add up to be 73 or more, he will get into many places. If they happen to be 65, then he will have a hard time getting in anywhere as a California resident and the rec won’t help.</p>
<p>texaspg, If the professor you referred to is the professor who I think he is, he is a professor in the MB&B (roughly speaking, biochemistry) department. His wife was also a biochemistry professor who taught the two semesters version of biochemistry course which is the required course for MB&B majors. (Somehow only one semester of P-Chem is required by some “mathematically-challenged” MB&B majors who are premeds - which could mean many premeds in the MB&B who are more into building up “balanced” premed ECs rather than more intensive training on the academics which are more appropriate for PhD or MD/PhD bound students.) I think the husband who won the Nobel prize really did not teach UG classes at that time.</p>
<p>According to some reviews by the students who had taken her class, how a student performs in the test has more to do with how much exposure to the research the student has had. If the student has not had the right amount of experience in the research lab prior to the class, he or she would have a hard time in “remedying it” by just studying hard from the textbook. This is why it is important to have more exposure to sciences or research early in college or even before college, especially if the students are motivated in taking classes from a “high power” professor in a research university.</p>
<p>It was rumored by the students at that time that the wife would eventually receive a Nobel Prize too, considering the caliber of her research. But how would these students who are on the lowest rank of the research ladder know it?! There are tons of post-docs in these high power research lab. You could imagine what kind of “research task” would likely be done by these lowly undergraduate students.</p>
<p>There is a possibility that I do not remember it correctly though.</p>
<p>I believe it was Thomas Seitz. The girl had a multi lettered major combining several sciences and had finished a masters in 4 years and did a lot of research in the chemistry labs. I suspect the class attended or not had nothing to do with the rec since it was based on being in the lab.</p>
<p>It is him. And his wife, also quite a distinguished researcher as I heard, taught the two-semester version of biochemistry at that time.</p>
<p>I had the impression that there were a dozen or so students from DS’s major (maybe excluding those MB&B majors? Not sure here.) who completed BS/MS in 4 years. Students do this also because it is easier for them to be nominated as a PBK member, as its criterion is based on the total number of straight As. So the students load up more courses in order to increase the chance of getting more As in 4 years. (Or even in 3 years.)</p>
<p>At such a school, there are always a certain percentage of students who are constantly trying to get ahead, like being competitive high school students all over again (thus, very little time left for dating in college and later regret it in med school? LOL.)</p>
<p>Something kind of funny happened during the past holiday. Out of blue, DS asked us what HIS GPA and science GPA were when he graduated. It were as if we would know his stats better than him. (Indeed he is right because this helicopter parent remembers this better than him.) Another mystery is why he would ask such an irrelevant question NOW. Maybe somebody that is “important” to him (definitely not one of his classmates) recently asked him this and he could not answer it. Something fishy here.</p>
<p>I think this girl was even more impressive in terms of loading up. She spent first year taking classes with the intention of majoring in engineering (family of engineers - dad and brothers) and was not planning on medicine at all. So she claimed she got both degrees in 3 years since she wasted freshman year following some other dream. :D</p>
<p>If you were a really good helicopter parent, you would have told him how his LizzyM numbers for the current school compared with his actuals. :p</p>
<p>texaspg, Regarding your last paragraph, I dare not go anywhere near that.
I have been accused of being a helicopter parent (by him) already. We as parents did not talk to him about GPA unless he brought up the subject. (However, he did not mind giving us his password to his school’s account as an UG so we knew but we did not talk about it.) I think he does not know what LizzyM score is.</p>