<p>It takes work ethic to attend any med school. Why are you looking for prestige? Do you want to “tell off” the people who have put you down in life? </p>
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<p>And what we are telling you is that your RESIDENCY is what matters, not your med school. </p>
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<p>Why don’t you believe that a lot of parents on here either attended Ivies or sent their kids to them? </p>
<p>And do you not understand that if there are 20,000 applications for top schools, the “dent” that would be made by a CC parent convincing a kid not to apply to a top school isn’t going to make a bit of difference?</p>
<p>[[Most have tons and tons of services available to all range of students. Prestige does not equal better support. ]]</p>
<p>Starbright </p>
<p>–I should have elaborated. I agree that Prestige does not = support. My point is to evaluate the program & support. Pay close attention to the budget issues this cycle – in privates, publics Tier I, Tier IV – all of it. Position yourself to have internship or lab experience. </p>
<p>IME - Most of those who have made it out of the mentality of my hometown did it because they were able to find mentors and light the path.</p>
<p>Colleges are not commodities. If you want to be very prepared for med/law school as well being an educated person, it matters very much where you go to undergrad. There is more to this than just what school is cheapest.</p>
<p>“Colleges are not commodities. If you want to be very prepared for med/law school as well being an educated person, it matters very much where you go to undergrad. There is more to this than just what school is cheapest.”</p>
<p>That is a superficial statement, anyways, forget this section.
I found my piece of advice on this board as well</p>
<p>From the MIT pre-med data you can clearly see that it does matter where you do your under-graduation.</p>
<p>ACCEPTANCE RATE: 2008<br>
National Acceptance Rate 46%
Total MIT Undergraduate Applicants 82%
-Prehealth Advising Service User* 86%
-Acceptance Rate for 3.0 GPA<strong>or higher 87%
-Acceptance Rate for 3.3 GPA</strong> or higher 95%</p>
<p>I can only speak to law, but LSAT and GPA matter most, not where you get your undergrad degree. Since LSAT scores do correlate to SAT scores, it follows that students from highly ranked schools had good SAT scores and will likely do well on the LSAT. However, if your scores are high and you choose, for financial reasons, to go to a lesser ranked school, there is no reason to think you won’t be competitive. Law school admissions don’t care what your major is either - with a few exceptions. </p>
<p>I admit that I am a med school snob. When I choose a doctor, I factor in where they went to med school. I also look at the residency. Maybe that’s because I’m surrounded by JHU doctors and I’m brainwashed.</p>
<p>^You’d have to compare people who went to MIT for undergrad to people who went to other schools, and then control for high school grades/ECs/SATS. If you’re a good student, you’ll be fine most places for med school.</p>
<p>And schools that have high acceptance rates typically have committees that prevent people that probably won’t get in from applying in the first place. </p>
<p>YOU determine whether YOU get into med school. Not your college, for the most part.</p>
<p>It would be better to go to the really good school and still get the high GPA but if that’s not really possible then go for the high GPA. About half the Harvard Law School 1L class comes from Harvard undergrad. Another quarter from Yale.</p>
<p>Btw I’d want a lawyer that’s smart, underestimated, machiavellian, and downright shrewd. That describes me pretty well I think.</p>
<p>^ Nowhere near half of Harvard’s 1L class comes from Harvard, or a quarter from Yale. I think the actual numbers are somewhere upthread. About a third come from HYPS and Penn combined, and another third come from the next 20 or so colleges. Only about 25 more institutions send as many as two students/year to Harvard on average. So, if you’re going for the high GPA at a non-elite college, it had better be a really, really high GPA.</p>
<p>Right, but your LSAT probably isn’t affected by where you went to college. </p>
<p>The question was whether it mattered if you went to an expensive, prestigious college, or went to, say, a secondary in-state public. Everyone seems to agree that for medical school it may matter a lot if you want to go to Harvard or Hopkins, but that there’s no reason to need to go to Harvard or Hopkins unless you want to be in academic medicine. On the law school side, everyone pretty much agrees that it DOES matter where you go to law school, but there isn’t any clear agreement on the fundamental question asked.</p>
<p>My argument is that it looks like it does matter, and that it’s easier to be one of the top 100 law school candidates from Harvard or Yale than to be THE very best candidate (maybe the very best candidate in a several-year period) from Directional State U.</p>
<p>The stats I have (from 2008) show an admittance rate for Yale grads of 22% to Yale LS, and 32% to Harvard LS, which is substantially better than those two schools overall acceptance rate of 6.8 and 12.6 respectively. Stanford accepted only 8.7 overall, but Yale grads were accepted at a rate of 45%, and so on. I do believe that where you go to undergrad matters quite a bit for law school, but I do acknowledge that if you had the stats to get into Harvard or Yale you probably end up with good grades in college and high LSAT scores – making you a better candidate for law school.</p>
<p>But c’mon - I can open up the phone book and find a bazillion lawyers. I certainly don’t believe they all went to hot-shot schools.</p>
<p>It depends on the end game desired. The assumption made on this board is that everyone who wants to be “in law” wants to be a managing partner at a Cravath, everyone who wants to be “in medicine” wants to be running a department at Mass General, and everyone who wants to be “in business” wants to be running a hedge fund or in IB in Manhattan. But plenty of people who want to be lawyer, doctors or businesspeople are fine just being in-house counsel, working for themselves / small firm, setting up their shingle and being an everyday doctor, or working in corporate America in a managerial position. The assumptions on CC are that law, medicine and business are so completely cutthroat and that only the brilliant need apply and honestly, I just don’t see that.</p>
<p>If you want a good in house counsel job these days, you had better have Cravath or something comparable on your resume. Those jobs are more sought after than the most prestigious law firm jobs. </p>
<p>I agree with BurnThis that it is the stats that matter, not so much where you take those stats. It just so happens that the best stats often end up at certain schools.</p>
<p>Yes, there are a bazillion lawyers. And it’s true, most didn’t go to hot-shot law schools. But IMO, the world doesn’t need more lawyers. It DOES need more GOOD lawyers (and that doesn’t necessarily mean more Ivy-trained lawyers). And the world needs more good doctors. Well, maybe even fair-to-middling doctors, but that’s another discussion.</p>
<p>That’s why I think the discussion on this thread ought to be about what it takes to be a good doctor or a good lawyer—which is not the same as getting into the most prestigious law school or medical school. Some of the best doctors and lawyers don’t have the fanciest educational pedigrees. And some people with the fanciest educational pedigrees are not among the best in their profession. But other things being equal, a strong undergraduate education is going to give you a huge leg up on getting the most out of your law school or medical school education and making yourself the best professional you can be. Going to a very strong law school or medical school can also contribute a lot, but again, it’s not just the school, it’s how well prepared you are to make the most of whatever school you attend, and how diligent and focused and effective you are in acquiring the knowledge and skills you’ll need to excel in your profession. </p>
<p>That doesn’t necessarily mean being managing partner at Cravath or running a department at Mass General. It does mean being a consummate professional, exercising sound, knowledgeable professional judgment and exercising high level professional skills on behalf of your clients or patients. IMO a sound undergraduate education is an essential foundational step in the process of making yourself that kind of professional. </p>
<p>If you can get that kind of education at your state flagship at a more affordable price, then by all means go for it. As the product of a top state flagship, I firmly believe I got an outstanding undergraduate education, comparable in every way (except price) to the graduates of the Ivies and elite LACs who were later my grad school classmates. My D, currently applying to a slew of highly selective LACs, occasionally mentions a possible interest in law down the road; that’s fine, and I’m confident that she’ll get a sound undergraduate education at any of the schools she’s applying to, and position herself well to be an outstanding lawyer if that’s what she decides to do. But I’d never say it “doesn’t matter” where you do your undergraduate studies. Some schools, public and private, may not offer those same opportunities.</p>
<p>Going back to the OP question, it makes no difference what your major is if you want to be a physician! I was a math major. You’ll distinguish yourself from other applicants if you major in what you love and do well, as opposed to choosing a science or Pre-Med major.</p>
<p>Fine, but there’s still a major difference between law and medicine in this regard. The difference between Generic Local Medical School and Harvard Medical School in terms of one’s professional opportunities is much less than the difference between Generic Local Law School and Harvard Law School. For one, only a handful of law schools are successful in placing graduates on a national basis. If you go anywhere else, you are more or less committed to working in the local (or state) market, unless you are prepared to go out on your own (very hard for a brand new lawyer – remember doctors have a residency under their belts before they would try that), at least until you build a practice of your own. Second, there are important levels of the profession to which your access is much greater if you have gone to a top law school – large corporate firms, federal judicial clerkships, jobs in the Department of Justice and other Washington-based jobs, law school faculty. Graduates from secondary law schools can get some of those jobs, but only if they were at the tippy top of their classes. (For years, my old law firm would hire practically anyone from Harvard or Yale, anyone from the top half of the class at Penn, anyone from the top 5% at Temple or Villanova, and the #1 or #2 person only from Rutgers-Camden. One of our very best hires ever was from Rutgers-Camden, but he had been an extraordinary student there.)</p>