<p>Getting 4.0 in subjects one excels is great, but to do that across the board is more difficult. D1 got killed in an art history course where most art history majors breezed through, but most of them probably couldn’t pass Calc I.</p>
<p>This is the problem I have with GPA floors for certain post-graduate enterprises. You have some people taking certain courses (languages and such), and getting their GPA hit for it. Meanwhile, you have people in the same major with inflated GPA’s reaping benefits.</p>
<p>For the purposes of med school admissions, you really have to be good at everything. That’s just the nature of admissions when you have some med schools receiving 15,000 applications for 120 spots. You need to take science courses and excel. Yet, med schools still want to see you take social sciences and humanities courses and excel. You have to show responsibility by holding down a job and still show altruism through volunteer work. You have to show ability in the sciences via lab research but still be interesting enough to play intramural sports or a musical instrument. You have to write well and interview well. Being a jack of all trades and doing everything well is pretty much requisite for med school. You don’t have the excuse of saying, “well I wasn’t an art history major and that’s why I didn’t do well in that class.”</p>
<p>If D1 was going to be pre-med or pre-law, she wouldn’t have taken a 300 level art history course to fulfil her A&S requiremens, she would have taken an easier course to keep up her GPA. There are many ways of getting high GPA at Cornell.</p>
<p>There is. That’s why 30-40% of our resident physicians in internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, etc. graduated from a foreign medical school. There are ample residency spots but not enough medical school spots. The American Medical Association has worked hard to limit the number of medical spots in order to restrict the supply of physicians with the ultimate goal of keeping salaries where they are.</p>
<p>I don’t think Cornell is trying to make a statement about osteopathy lol</p>
<p>Rather, I think it has to do with the ease of obtaining data. Osteopathic med schools use an entirely different application system from the one allopathic med schools use.</p>
<p>Secondly, I think Cornell tries to restrict its data so it can be useful to the most number of students. Notice that Cornell’s data is very specific: only allopathic med schools, only college senior applicants, only non-URM’s. The majority of Cornell’s applicants are non-URM, senior applicants to allopathic med schools. It doesn’t matter if a 3.4/29 applicant got into an osteopathic med school or if a URM with 3.2/30 got into an allopathic med school because most of Cornell’s applicants aren’t applying to osteopathic schools and aren’t URM’s. These are confounding factors that can lead you to make incorrect conclusions.</p>
<p>How much do regular doctors make nowadays? I did a bit of math on my own of how much I pay my doctors, I have to say, it’s not much. I just don’t see why anyone would want to be a doctor if it’s just about money.</p>
<p>It’s probably not a good idea to become a doctor for the money. But, at the same time, the pay isn’t bad. A lot of the lower paying specialties (internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, family med) are largely populated by graduates of foreign medical schools. The smartest US medical students are applying to fields with high pay and less hours: the ROAD specialties (radiology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology, dermatology). I’m currently applying to radiology myself. With the expansion of medical imaging (PET scans, MRI’s, CT’s, etc.), radiology has become an integral part of how medicine is practiced today. The pay is great (typically in the 350k range, more if you are in private practice) and the hours are excellent. It’s not hard to see why radiologists are paid more than an internal medicine doc. For a routine 15 minute visit, your internal medicine doc may only be able to bill $50-75. Meanwhile, the cost of a chest x-ray is roughly $150. It takes an experienced attending radiologist roughly 15 seconds (I timed it) to read a chest x-ray. It’s not uncommon for a radiologist to read 75-100 chest x-rays in one morning. Obviously, not all of the $150 charge goes to the radiologist, but you can see why there is a different in income.</p>
<p>Based on anecdotes, though, the competition (or simply abundance of intelligent students) tends to be in engineering or sciences (bio, chem, physics – in the A&S college)</p>
<p>I figured that would be the case, but now I’m scared about the ridiculous curves I will suffer as an aspiring Computer Science/Math double-major.</p>
<p>You’re going to find those math geniuses at every top school you could go to, though! It’s a tough major to take on, but you’ve decided you want to do it! What better than to pursue it at a school with highly intelligent peers who can help you become even smarter? And plus, we don’t know til we’re there. And I doubt this problem only exists at Cornell… I guess it’s just a hazard of going to such a good school.</p>
<p>Nahh. I’m class of '15, but I am not interested at all in pursuing any sort of math major. I’m okay at math, but I definitely don’t want to make a career out of it. But you know what that means… I’m not a credible source to come to for opinions about how hard classes will be. It just makes sense in my mind that if you want to get a degree from a school that’s well-known for their math programs, you’re going to have some geniuses in there who want the same thing.</p>