<p>If I go to University of Washington and undergrad in biology, will I have a better chance of being accepted to there top of the notch med school, since I will have already spent 4 years there.</p>
<p>The general answer is that going to a particular undergrad will only advantage you for admission to the college’s med school in 2 small ways:</p>
<p>1) the adcomm is more familiar with your LOR writers since they’ve likely seen LORs from these people before</p>
<p>2) the adcomm is more familiar with the grading scales used by various instructors</p>
<p>So if you are a strong applicant anyway, attending UDub for undergrad might give you a small boost.</p>
<p>(Of course, this assumes that you’re a resident of a WWAMI state. If you’re OOS, it won’t help your chances at all.)</p>
<p>I don’t know this for a fact but I have to believe some schools show preference to their undergrads. Take the 2012 U-M class profile below:</p>
<p>Institutions with highest numbers of students</p>
<pre><code>University of Michigan: 61
Yale: 6
Harvard, UC-Berkeley, U of Notre Dame: 5 each
Hope, Stanford, U of N Carolina: 4 each
Calvin, Centl MI, Pomona, UMaryland, UMichigan-Dearborn, Wayne State: 3 each
</code></pre>
<p>I find it hard to believe that the significant number of U-M students were that much better than all the applicants from all the other top schools that applied. If the school was a lower ranked MS maybe, but it is considered a top 10 school.</p>
<p>^ Regional preference
plus in-state love
plus U-M being THE top university in MI
plus almost every premed who applies from U-M will apply to this med school
= many students from U-M.</p>
<p>Hmm… What is the class size for the med school at University of Michigan and what is the percentage for 61 students? About 120 to 140 per class? (too lazy to look it up from US N&R or MSAR.)</p>
<p>Edit: U-M med school has 652 students for the whole med school.</p>
<p>Just one data point for you: I chose the same university for med school and undergrad, and 45% of my med school class did the same. Of those, most of them had graduated from undergrad within the past 3 years; I can only think of less than a handful of students who graduated from undergrad >5yr ago</p>
<p>while I agree that there is probably some “home school bias” the data you provided don’t really support it. How many UofM students apply to UofM compared to Harvard, Yale, Stanford etc?</p>
<p>As mcat2 points out, especially when you’re talking about a state school, regional preferences and such will play a much larger role.</p>
<p>I don’t think attending or not attending UW for undergrad is going to make much difference to UWSOM admissions. Attend the best school for you, the school where you can shine, then apply. There are students in UWSOM who attended univeriities across the nation, but they are almost all WWAMI residents. If you are a WWAMI resident then go & do what is best for you. A very few OOS applicants get in.</p>
<p>Many med schools do give a preference to students from their UG and have admitted so when asked on “doctor days” or equivalent. We haven’t attended ALL of them to know if it’s universally true, but it’s been true where we have gone.</p>
<p>The U-M students make up just under 35% of the class. I don’t buy the instate bias. Where are the MSU students if that’s the case? Also, Michigan has one of the lowest instate percentages of all the public universities in the US. Assuming every student applied to the medical school (highly unlikely) the acceptance rate would be close to 8% (their overall acceptance is just under 3.3%).</p>