I don’t think you ‘get in’ to any major or program at HC until after freshman year.
Do you know if you prefer large school or small, @mg29409?
HC is clearly guiding weaker premeds out of the program to get to their 90% med school acceptance rate. The question is, how SURE are you that you can get into med school? If you kill it at HC, you are sure to get in, if you do well at BC you are likely to get in. You can do well at BC (not stellar, just ‘normal’ premed grades of 3.5 and good MCATs) and still have a decent chance at med school, but you will probably have to do better than that to stay in the HC premed program. So, do you think you will KILL it in college, or just do well?
Ugg, pre-med committees and their damn letters…The bottom line is this:
The goals of any premed committee are in one direction, the goals of any particular pre-med student are in another. Sometimes those goals align, and if they do, fantastic. Everyone’s happy. Other times, those goals are off-kilter, or even worse, diametrically opposed.
The thing is, if you’re a good enough student to have earned that stellar committee letter that they’ll be so happy to write in your favor, then you probably had pretty good odds to get regardless at some other school without a committee. You would have had 3 or 4 LOR’s from faculty members who really knew you and could speak to your talents which would have carried just as much weight. And in that case, what’s the point of having a committee?
If you’re in the group of students where maybe everyone is NOT pulling in the same direction…well, sucks for you doesn’t it. Time to start researching Teach for America positions.
Ultimately I don’t think it’s fair to students, by this time grown adults, to deny them the opportunity to decide their next steps. If the end result is still the same - they didn’t get accepted to med school, why can’t the true gatekeepers (med school adcoms) make that decision? While such a committee surely knows the tendencies of the nearby med schools, they simply can’t know the nuance which exists at all the other schools. Do they know about WICHE or WWAMI out west, or the geographic quotas in Arkansas, both of which create vastly different acceptance environments for students? Let the med schools deal with handling the rejections.
If your dream school is an amazing fit and covers all of your major and minor criteria for choosing a school, by all means go. I’m absolutely not saying to avoid schools with committees, but they should not be viewed as an attractive quality or something that benefits anyone other than the school.
@suzyQ7 Sorry for the delayed reply. Yes, I called, and they basically said that students don’t major in anything until their sophomore year, and that such a program doesn’t really exist or affect anything… They told me people are guaranteed to be in their pre-med courses regardless, so I really don’t understand. I don’t think I will “kill” it incollege, mainly because of how difficult some classes truly are (organic chem is a monster.)
I prefer a smaller school, but seeing as BC isn’t that much larger, I don’t know if it will make too much of a difference.
@Bigredmed Thanks for your reply. Was thinking the exact same thing, which is why I think I will stray away from HC for the time being. If the committee is that controlling and demeaning, I don’t want to take a chance on ruining my entire future if my stats aren’t up to par. They shouldn’t deny me the opportunity to apply where I want to, and like you said, it is so they uphold their high med school acceptance rate.
I went to all three of them this March. Holy Cross was my favorite followed by BU and then BC. I thought I would like BC but it came across as quite the party school and that isn’t my type of thing.