Hello! I am a current high school senior trying to choose between these three schools for Pre-med. I plan on double majoring in Neuroscience or Biology and Psychology
I am wondering which of these schools is the best for pre-med in terms of quality of education, resources, and opportunities.
NYU is offering me a 45k scholarship and admission into their Presidential Honor Scholars program for CAS. (71k COA)
Emory is offering me a 47k scholarship. (64k COA)
Boston College is offering me a 50k scholarship and admission into the Honors Program of CAS. (65k COA)
Money is an issue however I am willing to take out some loans to attend college. My parents and I can probably put up around 10-12k maximum and I will cover the rest with loans/work-study.
I know there are differences in their campus style and social vibe etc but that matters much less to me than the standard of education and resources available.
@Goldfish76 I don’t really know about the other two schools. All I’ve heard about NYU is that the introductory and intermediate science courses are very large…With exception of physics 141/142 (if you don’t want to take “real physics” and just follow the other pre-healths), this isn’t the case at Emory. The introductory courses are much smaller than at peer institutions. Usually sections at peer institutions range from 150-250 students, whereas at Emory 75-120 is more common. This does biology some justice as you get more experimentation among instructors. For example, Emory is one of the few top 25 or so universities where a decent amount of the biology sections actually employ case study assignments in and out of class. Needless to say, this is good for MCAT (passage based-equivalent to a case study). And since you are an NBB major, much of that curriculum, especially the non-core (elective) courses are moving toward a more active learning/case based style of teaching that mostly focuses on analyzing data and experiments in context of the material as opposed to memorization of it. Not to mention, many of the NBB electives are just awesome! They offer things like a course/seminar in neurodegenerative diseases, drug development, and in the upcoming fall a course just on axon regeneration will be offered. Sometimes a neurobiochemistry course is offered, a neurophysiology lab course is offered every so often.
Just some really good options. In addition, if you were NBB at Emory, you can pretty much dabble in anthropology, biology, psychology, and even chemistry (via chembio molecular modelling) and get credits towards your electives. It is extremely interdisciplinary. Chemistry is taught very well at Emory (at intro level) and so is organic chemistry (though if you choose a really good instructor, it will be far more rigorous than at most peer institutions…and I’ve actually compared many of them side by side. The two most beloved instructors’ standards more so resemble of what you expect to see at HYPSM or something). If you came to Emory and took biology first (without chem) you may experience what the chemistry curriculum overhaul will be and if implemented correctly, it could be quite good (they plan to reframe the intro and foundation courses so that they cover material in context of modern applications of chemistry). This could make the sequence more challenging if they implement it properly, but again, it is honestly better for you as you want the material to be contextualized. You will retain it better and things like MCAT passages will not scare you because you are simply used to being challenged by applications of the material (something the two best ochem instructors do very well, and many of the biology and NBB instructors do well too) instead of content in a vacuum. Though there are naturally some struggles getting faculty to buy into curricular innovations, I would say Emory has done a very good job in comparison to many similarly ranked peers. The efforts to do science education well are actually quite aggressive on main and at Oxford. We are one of the schools that has a Center for Science Education…it has had an effect. Emory could be a cool place to come if you’re into science/pre-med. We have a lot going on there. I am sure that all schools will be well-resourced if not merely due to the cities they are in.
Thank you for the very informative reply! I sincerely appreciate it and am currently leaning towards Emory! Are you a student or alumnus of Emory?
Also, you mentioned that the class quality depends on the instructor you get, does Emory have a system where students can choose the instructor or do we only get to choose the class? Also, which instructors specifically do you believe to be best for the Pre-Med and NBB core courses? Thanks again!
NBB: Dr. Frenzle (NBB 301 for spring, neurodegenerative disease), Dr. Rosche (Neurobiochem, freshman seminars and some others as she pleases), and some others (maybe Dr. Nemenman if you wander to the computational/quantitative side) kind of lead teaching innovation in the dept. NBB also has some seminar team taught courses like drug development where they flat out have different speakers come in in such a way that balances the business and scientific perspective (note that Emory can easily have a class like this because we’re really big in pharma and also have an awesome pharmacology graduate program). There is also the very well known clinical practicum course where you actually meet patients and give case presentations on them.
Pre-med outside of NBB: Beck (biol 247-ecology, but mainly 240, organismal form and function if pre-med. A course taught superiorly to the human physiology course), Spell (biol 141/142), Abreu (biol 141/142), Eisen(several cool IDS courses, cell biology in the spring, sometimes epigenetics), Gerardo (evolutionary biology), Orloff(cancer biology), Antia(immunology), Crouse for human genetics (dry, but tests and teaches more in a way that emphasizes data analysis, which is better than Dr. Deal who keeps his class more at the level of biol 142, and is thus kind of a waste of time), Mulford/Weaver/McGill (general chemistry top 3, slight edge to Mulford/McGill), Weinschenk/Soria (ochem), any chemistry instructor for biochemistry (this is basically saying that the biochemistry offered by the biology department is inferior, especially since Escobar teaches it now) and biochem 2 when offered (in chemistry dept., Dr. Weinert will teach it. I pray she gets tenure because she’s a really good teacher. One of the few people to ever teach any sort of biochemistry course with a more problem based/case based method. Rigorous course, but really good and focuses on scientific thinking and research).
In general: You want to take the instructors that make you a) do data analysis/problem sets/case studies and b) write exams that go far beyond rote memorization. You can easily tell who these folks are because they are kind of polarizing as they are often known as good lecturers, but turn off many because they do challenge, so you’ll get a mixture of praise and fear from some of these people.
I don’t know if I could quantify that, but I would say that Dr. Eisen and Soria come to mind and encourage students to adopt similar ways of thoughts about science and life. Dr. Soria, for example, to encourage creativity and open-endedness (it’s why he usually approaches teaching from a problem solving point of view as opposed to simply a “present content”. He usually will do examples and discuss strategy in detail), will have an answer key for exams and assignments composed of the proposals of students and often you will see several proposals for one question. He intentionally writes some questions that can be “seen” differently by different students, but yet those insights still be viable. Dr. Eisen looks at science and everything from an interdisciplinary lens and also has very unconventional/non-linear thought processes. There are of course many neat people in the social sciences and humanities. Dr. Yokoyama and Nemanmen come to mind in the sciences. However, it is no surprise that the most
I’m an NBB alum from Emory College (class of 2012) and I am currently pursuing my PhD in Neuroscience at UCSF. If you have any particular questions I’m happy to address them.
I am very interested in the link between biology and behavior, hence my interest in NBB. However, I am starting to wonder whether Psychology may not be the better route to go, with a double in Biology or Physics and Astronomy(although I plan on attending Med School, I find astrophysics fascinating and look forward to exploring it on campus). So, my question is, for someone like me who wants to learn for the sake of learning first(and med school admissions second) which major would allow me to better understand the link between how we act/behave and biology. I’m more interested in social psychology than the structure of the brain but I can see how the latter may help in understanding the former.
