Hi everyone!
I was recently accepted to the honors program at UMD. I’m having trouble deciding on which learning community I want to join. I definitely am a science person so I will most likely not be considering the humanities program. I am considering ILS, Gemstone and University Honors at the moment.
I’ve heard that ILS is a lot of premed which I am not sure about since I am currently planning on focusing on research and neuroscience. I have also heard negative things about gemstone so I am unsure about everything.
Please help!!!
Maybe don’t “choose” University Honors if you are thinking of the others…if you choose one of the others, don’t like it and drop it, you will automatically default to University Honors anyway, so why not try out one of the other two?
ILS is 2 years. Gemstone is 4. I think a lot depends on your curriculum. Take a look at your 4 year plan and in particular years 3 and 4…Will you want to do research with other students (gemstone) or other types of research?
Hi @soccergirl54321 Congrats on getting into Honors!
My advice is do what most interests you. That’s why you have these choices, so that you can explore what appeals to you the most. My daughter is currently a sophomore in ILS. When she chose the program she had NO IDEA what she wanted to do, she just knew that she really enjoyed her AP Bio class in high school and the description of ILS sounded very interesting to her.
According to my daughter, in her ILS cohort there are a lot of people interested in pre-med, but there are definitely people who are into doing research exclusively or md/phd. I know it seems like every time ILS is mentioned on College Confidential the word pre-med is used, but there really are students in the program who are on different tracks. I hope that helps.