<p>I have wondered this for a while now.
I strive to pursue a medical career and I am honestly a bright kid but I just don't try in school but I will fully this upcoming senior year. I am on the borderline of I do not know whether or not i'll be able to get accepted into a UC school (I live in CA). If I do not. In the later future if I still pursue a medical career, do medical schools looks down upon if you went to a state school per say for your first two years but then transferred to a UC and did excellent all four years? Or is your only hope being accepted into a four year university from the get go?</p>
<p>THe most important factors for Med school admissions will be 1) your MCAT scores, 2) overall academic performance (GPA) in your college, 3) academic performance in med school pre-req classes (Chem, Bio, etc.), 4) rec letters.</p>
<p>The actual college you attend is not as important as the above four factors. It’s important in that you should choose a college where you can achieve those top four.</p>
<p>What will impact your chances of admission significantly is your state of residence. Many state schools (which are significantly less expensive than the private schools) admit no, or very few, non-residents. As a resident of California, you will almost certainly be forced to apply out of state because California has very few ‘seats’ in their state schools relative to the number of applicants. They are a ‘net exporter’ of med schools students. Other states have many seats relative to the number of in-state applicants (most of the southern states, for example) so it’s a lot easier for their residents to get admitted to the state school(s).</p>
<p>Implication for you? If you have the choice, get your residency established in a state that does not admit applicants from out of state. That generally means living and working in that state for a few years after you graduate from college.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/1204053-do-medical-schools-take-into-consideration-prestige-your-undergrad.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/1204053-do-medical-schools-take-into-consideration-prestige-your-undergrad.html</a></p>
<p>Per a non-physician member of our state medical school’s admissions committee: the reputation of your undergraduate school does matter some, but not a lot(a couple of points as everything is added up). Far more important are GPA and MCAT.</p>
<p>BTW, California applicants are flooding Med. School applicant pool at every school in all state, both privates and publics and they also get accepted in disproportionate numbers including OOS publics. At many Med. Schools California beat the specific school’s own pre-meds, or come very close #2 in representation. I do not know the reasons, I do not know exact statistics, but the fact is very obvious. One reason comes to mind (and it could be completely wrong) is the fact that most of California applicants are Asian with superior applications.</p>
<p>The reason there are so many California applicants is because the sheer number of college students from California. It’s the same reason California students have the highest percentage at most private universities, including the Ivies.</p>
<p>I heard one reason why Californian applicants are flooding Med. School applicant pool everywhere is that, the number of slots available at many med schools in California have been controlled in the past several decades and many qualified California applicants have no place else to go except OOS. It is likely once they are OOS, many could not get back to California for their residency also.</p>
<p>Regarding “most of California applicants are Asian”, there may be two reasons: 1) There are many Asians in California. 2) Many Asians are still the first few generations. The fact that being in medicine does not require good connections as in many other fields (e.g., politics, entertainment, etc.) may appeal to this segment of population who are in general “not very connected” yet (as compared to, say, those who have been in this country for much more generations), so they have not tried to branch out to many other career paths yet (like Jewish population who break into all varieties of careers.) However, for a few years, it appears i-banking/consulting had some appeal to the Asian students too, if they happen to be in a “targeted” college.</p>
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<p>How does one determine the states that fall into this category?</p>
<p>NC has 4 med schools. 2 private Duke and Wake Forest and 2 public, ECU and UNC Chapel Hill. UNC system dictates no more than 18% can be OOS. However, ECU accepts no OOS students. </p>
<p>UNC gives priority to in-state and any in-state student that receives a secondary automatically receives an interview invite.</p>
<p>Kat</p>
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Texas is one of the “good” ones. Countless public ones (Well, I exaggerate it when I say “countless”.) And almost all of the public ones are Texas-sized and 90% of admitted students are in-state. Because we are Texans, we like everything that is as big as Texas :)</p>
<p>I agree that the state residency carries more weight than the college you go to. This is because the med schools are mostly funded by the residents of the state; so if your family does not pay into the coffer of the state, the residents of that state really resent that you “leach” on them. The state-level congressmen will make sure that this will not happen (or at least not a significant number of slots go to OOS applicants.) I think this is especially true for a typical med school whose purpose is to producing practicing doctors for the state it is in, rather than a research med school.</p>
<p>University of New Mexico only accepts NM state residents*. (99.2% instate) There is only one med school, but because NM is a low population state, the in-state acceptance rate is over 40%. </p>
<p>All state residents get a secondary and 95% of those whose complete the secondary get an interview.</p>
<p>*And enrolled members of Native American tribes whose reservations lie at least partially in NM. Residents of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are also eligible under WICHE rules.</p>
<p>To find out which states give the greatest advantage to in-state applicants, you can buy one of the many books of medical schools that provide the stats. I’ve got US News & World Reports book, Ultimate Guide to Medical Schools, on my desk and it lists, for every medical school in the country, total applicants, total interviewed, total accepted and total enrolled - and each category broken down by in-state and out-of-state. There are other books on that give the same info.</p>
<p>Since Cal is under discussion, lets look at the medical school at University of Cal at Davis:
There were 4,861 applicants for 105 spots. 1,080 applicants were from out of state of which 12 were admitted (and 4 attended) - these guys just didn’t do their homework or they wouldn’t have wasted their money by applying. And that means there were close to 3,800 in-state applicants for 101 spaces. (They offered 217 admission, by the way, for those 101 seats). The odds were much better for in-state applicants, but it was still a very long shot.</p>
<p>Now lets look at Alabama - Birmingham’s med school:</p>
<p>There were 2,055 applicants for 176 seats, but only 459 applicants from in-state. More than half were offered interviews, 174 were accepted and 157 ended up attending. Meanwhile the 1,396 OOS applicants were competing for a mere 19 seats (38 got offers by the way, but 19 went elsewhere, presumably.) </p>
<p>Clearly, it’s good to be an Alabama resident if you want to go to medical school. And it sucks to come from California. </p>
<p>And just to add some personal perspective, relative who graduate from USC with a 4.0 and a 36 on his MCAT got not one single offer of admission from a CA medical school. I don’t even think he got an interview, in fact. Happily, he got into a number of other schools, graduated at the top of his class and got his first choice for residency. But it wasn’t going to happen in CA - where it would have cost him half as much.</p>
<p>Thank you M’s Mom. I’ll look for a book.</p>
<p>^USN&WR has an online version you can purchase as well.</p>
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<p>And the other big reason is that three of the five public med schools are ranked in the top 15 nationally (and require top 15 stats for acceptance, not to mention fitting UC’s definition of ‘worthy’.). Thus, the average premed in California, which there are literally thousands, can realistically focus on just two instate public med schools-- Irvine and Davis – as well as the instate, but private USC. (Loma Linda has its own definition of ‘worthy’.)</p>
<p>WICHI used to make you a “state resident” of all WICHI states. I don’t know if that is still true as they now all have their own medical schools.</p>
<p>But to answer your question, unless you are going into academics/research, the undergrad school does not affect your med school (other than straight As at Stanford or U of Cal (B) weigh more than As at Cal State). What else you do matters.</p>
<p>^If you’re referring to WICHE (WUE), that applies to UG. </p>
<p>UDub has WWAMI for the PNW states that don’t have Med schools (WY, AK, MT & ID).</p>
<p>WICHE has the PSEP (Professional School Exchange Program) which is for WICHE states that don’t have certain professional schools. </p>
<p>UNM SOM also accepts applications from Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Alaska.</p>
<p>^Thanks for the correction WOW.</p>