<p>Title says it all. At a large private or state university, say a place like UT-Austin or UC San Diego, approximately what percentage of undergrads enter as pre-med? And also, what percentage are still on the pre-med track as seniors?</p>
<p>Don’t know UCSD or UT-A’s figures, but the number I’ve heard bandied about is 1/4 to 1/3of all freshmen are “pre med”. (Some schools are even higher. At one my Ds’ school, 40% of freshmen are pre-meds.)</p>
<p>The fall out rate is also quite high: 50-75% or more never apply to med school for a variety of reasons. The typical fall out rate I’ve heard is that nationally 2/3rds of freshman pre-meds never apply to medical school.</p>
<p>Having just graduated, I will tell you that the number that make it, apply and matriculate drops dramatically from day 1. I’d estimate that ~75% have different plans post graduation now.</p>
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<p>are you including pre-dental, pre-optometric, etc.?</p>
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<p>That’s crazy. Is it just because it’s so hard? Also, less than 50% of APPLICANTS get accepted.</p>
<p>oh, and by the way, War Chant, do you go to UCLA?</p>
<p>“Pre med” is a generic term that refers to all pre professional health careers. (Medicine, dentistry, optometry, podiatry.) However, it’s pretty uncommon for a freshman student to self-identify as pre-dent, pre-opto, etc. Mostly they all want to be doctors–and they’ll figure out what kind later.</p>
<p>The high fall out rate has less to with GPA and the hard courses required and more to do with the fact that most US high schools do a crappy job with career education. </p>
<p>Most college freshmen are are basically familiar with only about 5-6 careers: medicine, law, business, education/teaching, whatever their parents did for a living and possibly engineering (they’ve heard of it but usually have no idea what an engineer actually does). So when pressed, nearly all college freshmen pick one from that list. As their exposure to other careers possibilities increases, their interests change and broaden to encompass many other career paths.</p>
<p>Another reason is that the road to med school is filled with many, many hoops to jump thru. A good many students get tired of jumping and want a career track that is bit more straight-forward.</p>
<p>Also many freshmen have this idealized vision of what a doctor does, so when they are exposed to the decidedly less-glamorous reality of it (thru jumping hoops like hospital volunteering and physician shadowing), they decide it’s not lifestyle/career they’re really interested in</p>
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<p>off topic, but what does an engineer actually do after college? For example, a mechanical, electrical, or chemical engineer.</p>
<p>^^You’ll get better answers if you ask this in the parents forum. There are a number of practicing engineers who post there.</p>
<p>FWIW, I’m in career I had never even heard of in high school–or college–for that matter.</p>
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DS once said the road to get into the law school is much more straightforward: Having the standard test score and the GPA, you are all set for most law schools. Getting into a medicine career demands much more than the “school” stuff. Maybe even the personal charisma is also one of the requirements as there is an interview part. (An CCer even said the “look” might be a factor especially during the residency application cycle! After all, I wpould imagine that the real-world experiences in the medicine seems to be passed from mentors to a trainee, unlike in a school’s setting where the professors are more obliged to teach their students in a more formal setting: classroom lectures and tests. In a mentor-trainee setting, you even do not know how to give the grades in an objective way.) At least a premed does not need to be good at poker game (as it is rumored), and be good at answering “tricky questions” as those aspiring i-bankers do.</p>