<p>Ok, so 4.19~4.23 gpa weighted, 3.7~3.8 unweighted, top 25%, NHS, Volunteering etc..
I want to become an oncologist.
1. Is it possible if I go to a undergraduate university like: Texas A&M, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon, or UT Austin/Dallas? Does it matter much if I go to A&M vs. Carnegie Mellon for undergraduate? How much do med. schools care about undergraduate university? Does the person that go to Stanford/Yale have a huge advantage over me? Out of the 4, which one would be the best for me to go to with a major in Bio and then take the MCAT?</p>
<ol>
<li>Are there any other universities you suggest i look at?
Thanks!</li>
</ol>
<p>If you are from texas, then you need to know the the texas med schools are accepting students from all their universities…even the UT satellites.</p>
<p>the fact that you want to be an oncologist is irrelevant. </p>
<p>med schools dont care where you went to undergrad. my son went to bama, applied to 6 med schools, got accepted to 3…and got merit scholarships from all 3. </p>
<p>what mom said. med schools care about GPA, recommendations, MCATs, and research experience, in something like that order. Where you won the GPA doesn’t matter much in almost all cases. In almost every case, don’t take on a lot of u/g debt (unless m&d are swimming in texas tea) because med school will soak you in debt.</p>
<p>First of all, don’t major in biology just bc you think you need to. Your GPA, mcat, and ECs will matter more than the prestige of your school. While you may get some leeway by going to a higher ranked school, it is not clear that it provides a significant advantage.</p>
<p>A more prestigious/rigorous school is worth a few tenths of a point in GPA as I understand it, which translates into an extra B or two in your pre-med courses. For example, a Top 25 graduate with a 3.5 GPA would be seen as the same as a 3.7 GPA out of Big State U, given everything else the same. This may vary from med school to med school, but undergrad institutions have reputations just like HS do. Do Stanford/Yale graduates have an advantage over A&M? - of course, but it’s not that big, see above. Even Stanford/Yale graduates are going to have to have impressive GPAs, and even they aren’t going to be getting in with 3.0s.</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, I was talking to a med school professor the other day who said that admissions keeps things VERY close to the chest, there is no secret formula, but a few things are known. A low MCAT score may keep you from even getting looked at, as they can fill the class with higher MCAT scores, which is the safer option, rather than digging for diamonds in the rough. They are trying to change this, but the volume of applications makes it difficult, so filters are sometimes used. Also, the interview is HIGHLY important - even a high scoring candidate will be rejected if they are seen as unable to connect with patients and fellow physicians. And if you can’t articulate why you want to be a doctor, you’re toast.</p>
<p>If a GPA bonus for specific undergraduate schools exists and is as large as 0.2, that is actually quite significant, given how narrow at the top the acceptable GPA range is for many medical schools.</p>
<p>It definitely exists. I know plenty of people who went to top 10 undergrads and came back to their home state with below average GPAs (3.2-3.5) and average MCATs - they got into the state public med schools. Another factor is that there aren’t many applicants from the top schools applying there.</p>
<p>I’d want to see more details from official sources before factoring this information into my college application decisions. Are we saying that students at certain colleges get bonus points just for attending those colleges? Or, are we saying that some med schools systematically adjust the applicant’s GPA to account for variations in course difficulty at some colleges? Would a sociology major at Yale get a bump over a ChemE major at Illinois with the same GPA and scores?</p>
<p>The conventional wisdom on CC is that med schools care much more about your GPA and MCAT scores than about where you went to college, per se. As far as I can tell, there is not enough public information to determine whether various med schools adjust applicants’ GPAs to account for different grading standards, and if so, exactly how they do it. </p>
<p>One thing to look at is what people are getting in the classes. Just because a school is ranked higher, doesn’t mean that the students will get bad GPAs due to grade inflation. None of your schools are known for giving good GPAs and I would go as far as to say that they have a weed-out culture. It’s not automatic to say that better school = worse GPA. If you won’t be successful in a 400 person class, then you’ll actually get a worse GPA at a lower ranked “easier” school.</p>
<p>Not much at-all, if any.
Well…except for states like Texas, North Dakota, and other states that only admit Instate Candidates, however that still does not affect you if you are a resident of that state, but attended college out of state…you still get a far chance.</p>
<p>That being said, what matters is your GPA and your MCAT scores.
A 3.5 gpa and a 40 on mcat from a small public(no-name) state college, makes you just as competitive as a 3.5 and a 40 from someone from Harvard. The MCAT is quite a factor in med-school admission than some people might agree - it is the only level ground that they can use to filter best candidates other that GPA. It shows you are just as good as the Harvard guy if not better with all things being equal.</p>
<pre><code>Other things that might help tip the scale includes: research experiences especially if you are going to apply for the MD/PHD track, voluntary experience, recommendations, leadership skills, shadowing etc.
</code></pre>
<p>So if you are pre-med, and have a full-ride from a no-name school vs taking student loans to go to a brand name school… you might want to reconsider that, and instead save the loans for med school. </p>
<p>In all go to the most affordable and best FIT, major in something you are great at as long as you A’s your pre-med requirements as-well, and study hard and excel on the MCAT. Then just fit in the rest (research, volunteering, shadowing, recommendation) as you go along by the end of your junior year, and apply.</p>
<p>That’s not compelling evidence that a bump exists without knowing the states in question. For some states, entering med school is much easier than others. My feeling is that how much of a bump (if any) could vary school by school. The elite private med schools seem to take their students mostly from elite private undergrads. However, one guy who was at a public med school in IN noted that his med school took the vast majority of students from their 2 big publics (and neither IU or PU have huge amounts of pre-meds).</p>
<p>To OP:
My feeling is that it’s best to avoid those elite privates that curve science classes and top publics (which are crawling with pre-meds). Where are you in-state? Find out if CMU curves science classes.</p>
<p>Anecdotal evidence does not a trend make, and I am unwilling to believe that top undergrad school graduates are not applying to their home state’s medical colleges. Particularly because I work with students, many pre-med, at a top undergrad institution and they are applying EVERYWHERE, knowing how competitive it is to get into med school.</p>
<p>I am also not willing to believe this:</p>
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</p>
<p>For a few reasons. First of all, a 0.2 difference is huge. Second of all, many top 25 colleges are known for grade inflation - to the point that professors will openly admit it. I’d imagine that it would vary by med school and person - for example, X Med School might accept Georgia Tech grads with slightly lower GPAs because they know that top grades are tough to get there, while Y Med School may do no such thing, etc. I am skeptical of across-the-board claims.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, everyone’s opinion here is based on anecdotal evidence. If there is an objective third party that tracks this, feel free to provide the link.</p>
<p>That’s the problem - there is no objective source. The med schools don’t talk about it and the undergrad schools like to advertise their success at putting people in med schools, but we can’t verify their data. If you’re looking for a magic formula, it is safe to say there isn’t one - med school admissions are a very complicated business and we can just about guarantee that there are no “formula” med school admissions. You need to pick your undergrad school and take your chances.</p>
<p>As for my assertion that the elite schools get a bit of a break in GPA, that is anecdotal and may not be true, but it is what I heard from several of the pre-med advisors in the last year at several of the Top 20 LACs. Their claim is they achieve their very high success rates (80%+) with students at a 3.5 GPA and above, unknown MCAT. That GPA is lower than the national average - so make of it what you will. Maybe they’re manipulating their applicant pool, maybe they do other data massaging, who knows? But when you figure it takes around an ACT/IQ equivalent of 27 to achieve an MD and most of the elite schools have average ACTs of 29+, it makes sense they could achieve those high admission rate numbers. Whether those students could have also achieved med school admission at a “lesser” school is an experiment that’s almost impossible to run. But we do know that Harvard Medical School accepts more than just Ivy undergrads and not every Harvard undergrad who wants to go to med school gets in, so obviously it depends on each individual student’s combination of circumstances</p>
<p>Finally, here is an anecdote that makes me think that the idea that the elites get a break on GPA may be true - just from a logical standpoint. Two known “grind” schools are Davidson and Johns Hopkins. Davidson has a reputation that almost no one graduates with a 4.0 - it’s practically unheard of. JHU is full of highly competitive cut-throat pre-meds. Both are full of high ACT/SAT students, neither has a reputation for grade inflation, yet both have very high med school admission rates. We don’t know what their MCATs are, which could clearly make up for some shortfall in GPA, but clearly a deflated GPA does not hurt the students from either of these schools. Is it the med school committees who adjust the GPAs coming from these schools or do the students make it up some other way by having incredible MCATs? Or are med school admissions so complex that you can’t just say that A+B=Admission, but the school you go to might be part of the mix? Unknowable - but I’d be willing to bet that graduating from Davidson or JHU is at least a small plus in their favor.</p>
<p>Basically, you get one shot at this, and trying to look for an edge by going to a school less than ideal for your circumstances is an exercise in futility. Go to the best school you like that you can comfortably afford given your circumstances, major in something you are passionate about, and do your best while there is about the best advice anyone can give. If you have to worry about massive debt, major in something you hate but “looks good”, are at a school beneath you because you think it makes you look like a big fish in a small pond, are at a school you hate because it’s “prestigious”, or think you can pull a 40 MCAT while partying all week on your way to a 3.1 in your pre-meds, those are all recipes for disaster. Yes, it’s a complicated balancing act, but thousands of successful med school applicants manage to have done it every year. As long as you are concentrating on getting into A med school, not THE med school (insert Ivy med here), you’ll probably succeed if you are pursuing medicine for the right reasons and listen to your pre-med advisors who know way more than anyone on CC does.</p>
<p>Without knowing the MCATs of those kids at those highly select LACs or JHU or Davidson, it’s hard to tell if those schools give an edge (if any) in medical school admissions. I do know that at elite privates who have a lot of kids applying to med school, if your GPA is below average, they actively discourage you from applying to American med schools and/or steer you to non-American ones.</p>
<p>You need to define below average. Below average what? National GPA? The school’s GPA? </p>
<p>The schools I talked to explicitly stated that they don’t discourage or refuse to work with anyone - they might tell them their chances are low, but they also claimed they don’t withhold letter of recommendation or refuse to work with anyone - but med school applications aren’t cheap, so you probably aren’t going to be firing off 15 of them either and the cost alone probably discourages the low chancers. I think for most students, at some point, it becomes obvious they aren’t going to make it or they lose interest and they self-deselect the pre-med track.</p>
<p><<<<
A more prestigious/rigorous school is worth a few tenths of a point in GPA as I understand it,
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<p>this is not true…not at all. no evidence of such. </p>
<p>if anything, if everything is equal and there is only one more spot is left, a nudge MIIGHT go to the student from a more prestigious school. but that isnt a gpa bump…and certainly NOT a few tenths. and that scenario would be the exception.</p>
<p>People may want to believe that a prestigious school will make a noticeable difference, but the med school app process is somewhat counter-intuitive. med schools dont care about double majors or harder majors.</p>
<p>I did say “discourage”, not “impede”. Telling someone that their chances are low and that their best shot is at non-American med schools would count as discouragement.</p>
<p>As for “below average”, it didn’t seem like a distinction was made between “national average” and “school average” in the examples (granted, few) I knew of.</p>