To clarify, I mean if the huge amount and rigor of all the other core classes detract from science knowledge gained, thus causing more effort in self-studying for the MCAT at UChicago vs. students at other schools like Brown where the majority of their classes are science-based which leads them to have to study less for MCAT.
Pretty sure everyone studies a ton for the MCAT. It’s an arms race. But your science classes will cover the material at UChicago just as they will at Brown… Your problem won’t be that, it will be keeping your GPA up.
Despite the fact that UChicago is one of the closest “good” schools in the region and has a large number of students from the region, its name is missing from the UMichigan file. You can figure out the reason by yourself. Check out the average GPA and the number of courses you need to graduate for each school on your list. If your goal is to get into a med school, you need to choose a school to go to where you can achieve 1st standard deviation above mean standing with a reasonable graduation requirement so you can have time to do research and your medical related ECs. Can you tell me how many courses you need to graduate from UChicago? What about Brown? It is interesting that Brown is on UMichigan’s file. The problem is not MCAT. It is something else.
And for those that might be statistically-challenged, its important to note that Chicago is smaller than every college on that list other than MIT. So yeah, Berkeley is gonna have more admits. It’s xx times larger.
But yes, GPA is critical, as is MCAT.
@HydeSnark @nrtlax33 @bluebayou Thanks for the insight! Do you guys know (from peer anecdotal evidence) how hard it is to be a premed at uchicago and maintain a good gpa? I ask this because I know the UCIHP recently provided some quite optimistic stats about their med school enrollment rate (which was 79-88%), so I’m not sure if the advising does indeed make up for the harder classes, or if many of your pre-med friends are indeed having lots of trouble.
@nrtlax33 Also, how did you manage to find that Umichigan medical school admissions file that shows undergrad school admits? I’m curious to check out the file for other medical schools too to see if this pattern does indeed exist.
@aguo123 : Read http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21394370/#Comment_21394370
UChicago’s 11% medical school application rate is a bit lower than other schools. I am not an expert of Midwest med schools but UMichigan’s data should give you some idea. You have not looked up the number of courses you need to graduate from UChicago. Do your homework and you can figure out by yourself. Let me just say all those core courses are not helpful for your med school endeavor and a large number of students seem to have mental issues there.
Read https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/docs/ag-18.pdf
You need to follow the guidelines to receive a “committee letter” which means you have support from institution for your application. Many people can’t get committee letter because their GPA/MCAT is low or other reasons. Success rate only means how many of those who got committee letter are successful. The majority of freshman premed drop out before application time.
If you are still interested in UChicago, make sure you apply ED. UChicago admits more than 2/3 of its students from EDs.
@nrtlax33 - the Michigan numbers are pretty small potatoes though (as in, outside of the HYPS-level/UMich undergrad feeders, most of the “top” feeders contribute like, 2-3 students per year to Michigan Med), and, it doesn’t capture a few important facts:
1.) Chicago’s health advising office was revamped pretty recently (maybe 2015?) and so it doesn’t capture benefits stemming from this change;
2.) Unbelievable as it may seem, current Chicago classes now are noticeably larger than recent grad years. The classes of 2016 and 2017 were about 1500 students The classes of 2019 and 2020 are about 1600 students, and the classes of 2021 and 2022 are, by all accounts, around 1800 students. So, the class of 2022 will be about 20% larger than the Class of 2017. It stands to reason there will be more total number of med school apps from Chicago in a couple years than there have been in the past.
3.) Since Nondorf’s put his imprint on career advancement, we’ve seen more success across “traditional” metrics than ever before - so Chicago is now a bigger feeder into finance, law school, etc.
Top med schools are perhaps the toughest nut to crack, because it’s such a seller’s market, and there are so many top applicants out there. (Why take the 3.7/38 MCAT Chicago applicant when there are ten 3.9/38 MCAT Brown applicants banging on your door?) This being said, Chicago applicants tend to do very well on the MCAT (and avg. score of 33), and, as each class coming in is more “normalized” and savvy, I’d expect the numbers to go up.
Put another way, the data @nrtlax33 provides may, already be outdated, because they don’t capture what, say, Chicago’s Class of 2021 will be doing. (We’ve already seen this in the finance world - the Class of 2013 outcomes looked quite different than, say, the Class of 2017’s outcomes.)
We’re quickly getting to the point where, for any “traditional” sought-after outcome (like finance, consulting, law school, med school, even tech jobs for a school w/no engineering), Chicago will be, or already is, similarly situated to its (non-HYPS) peers.
@bluebayou I’m not a fan of some of @nrtlax33 's analysis, at least the parts that essentially constitute unsupported invective. But you can’t honestly say of the Michigan data that “every college on that list other than MIT is larger” than Chicago. During the period in question, Chicago’s graduating class size ranged from 1,300 to 1,500. That made it a little larger than Dartmouth, Yale, and Princeton (as well as MIT), about the same size as Columbia and Hopkins, and not so much smaller than Duke, Brown, Harvard, and Stanford. Of the private colleges on the list, only Penn, Cornell, and Northwestern were meaningfully bigger than Chicago, and even there one would have to make some adjustments to account for students enrolled in schools unlikely to generate medical school applications. The size differences compared to Harvard, Stanford, and Duke wouldn’t come close to explaining the difference in average annual admission offers over 5 years (no higher than 4 for Chicago, 28, 16, and 10, respectively, for HSD). It’s a legitimate question why Michigan Med School makes so few offers to Chicago students, fewer than it makes to any of the colleges Chicago would consider peers.
That said, my daughter-in-law was a pre-med at Chicago, liked it fine, and did not feel that “all those core courses are not helpful for your med school endeavor.” My kids’ experience at Chicago was not that “a large number of students seem to have mental issues there,” at least not out of line with the reports from peer institutions, at all of which students seem to feel stress, lots of it self-inflicted.
In fact, this is the most updated data which incorporates the new MCAT. Anyone who is still talking about MCAT 33 is totally outdated.
Read https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/factstablea23.pdf before choosing a premed school.
The biggest problems of pursing premed at UChicago are
(1) Too many course needed to graduate – course credit for a minimum of 42 quarter courses at UChicago. (Brown 30 courses … read http://features.columbiaspectator.com/news/2016/04/14/are-columbia-students-the-most-stressed-in-the-ivy-league/)
(2) Relatively low GPA. If you are among the geniuses, not problem. Otherwise, think twice.
(3) Too many students are focusing on a few majors. Read https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2016/5/17/breakdown-of-undergraduates-by-major/ If the majority of its students are majoring in Economics, the campus culture is unlikely to be friendly to premed.
(4) Too many Asian (UChicago 23%, Brown 14%). If you can’t compete with Asians for those “A”, you have better go elsewhere. (If you would like to compete with Asian geniuses, go to Berkeley.)
(5) Too stressful. Well, medical schools are stressful enough and doctors have the highest suicide rate. Do you want to take it easy with your premed journey? It looks like UChicago’s mental health appointments are in very high demand. You might not be able to get an appointment if you need one.
Read https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/4/10/mental-health-and-the-ucpd-shooting/ and https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2017/5/25/secrets/ and https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/7/3/academic-leave-left-dark/
Let’s just say there are better places to do premed. If you have to go to UChicago to do premed, I wish you the best of lucks.
@nrtlax33 - your post is puzzling and strange (especially the assertion of “too many Asians” at Chicago), but, one note, the avg Chicago MCAT score is a 513.8, which correlates to about a 33 on the old scale.
https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/uchicago-careers-in/health-professions/pre-health-faqs
(Sorry, I should’ve mentioned I was using the old scale in my above post.)
A 513.8 is about the 91st percentile on the score scale - that’s very good.
11% figure for the percentage of med school applicants from Chicago assumes a class size of mid 1600s. As stated above by other posters, class sizes have grown over the years. If you use 1400 as the size of UChicago class of 2017, the figure is more like 13%, which puts it in close range of its Ivy League peers with Harvard at the top (17.5%) and Princeton at the bottom (12.2%), the rest somewhere in between.
@Cue7 : Here is the data related to Asian comments – https://www.aamc.org/download/321456/data/factstablea2-6.pdf
UChicago has 72 Asian applicants out of 183. (39.3%)
Brown has 78 Asian applicants out of 232. (33.6%)
Medical school admissions is just like college admissions, each race is competing for the slots allocated for them. It is the GPA which is the problem. Why? If there are enough high stats kids who crowd out those A grades, people who got enough B would have to quit premed.
@aguo 123
As a practicing physician, I can comment that there is a lot more to medicine than science knowledge like empathy, humility, self discipline etc. Immersing yourself in different disciplines is the key to acquiring these qualities during your undergraduate years. There are many fine institutions where one can accomplish this. Chicago is one of them.
30 courses over 8 semesters gives you 3.75 course per semester. 42 courses over 12 quarters 3.5 courses per quarter. Assuming a year long course (2 semesters at Brown or 3 quarters at UChicago) covers the similar amount of material, it seems that at any given time students at both institutions have to carry similar number of courses.
My daughter graduated last year, applied in the 2016-17 cycle, and enrolled in a Top 5 med school. As a parent, I’m very grateful to the Chicago education. The UCIHP is amazing. I haven’t heard of any her premed friends got denied of the Committee Letter. The on-site med school and hospital are huge advantages to premeds. She emailed a Pritzker doc for research opportunities, got a reply next day, and started research in the first summer. She can walk to the med school and hospital after class, and she got multiple publications and abstracts by the time of application.
She and another Chicago kid interviewed at Michigan on the same day, and both got in. I know at least another kid got in Michigan. Given the total Chicago applicants are much less than peer schools, I think the percentage accepted to Michigan is in the same ballpark as peers.
@nrtlax33 just has an issue with UChicago, but loves Brown for his own reasons. Its part of that UChicago Derangement syndrome.
@CU123 : If you could share your wisdom with the community, people won’t waste their time reading your comments. I am sure many premeds from UChicago are successful. But people need to make their judgment based on facts and individual circumstances. Are you afraid of reading about the facts? Sweeping problems under the carpet is not my style. If you have statistics you can share which can enhance my knowledge on premed, it would be highly appreciated. @cared4321 : Congratulation to your daughter. Can you share your knowledge regarding the number of students who were in organic chemistry course in UChicago? How often is the course offered? How about the grading? Can you share your daughter’s premed courses schedule? All those information are very helpful at calculating one’s chance of being a successful premed.
@nrtlax33 you should probably spend more time in the Brown section, it will help your overall outlook on life when you have somewhere to reflect positively on things.
In any case its probably better for someone who has attended, has a child attending, or is attending UChicago to answer the question.
@JHS has a good inquiry: “It’s a legitimate question why Michigan Med School makes so few offers to Chicago students, fewer than it makes to any of the colleges Chicago would consider peers.”
But, up until super-recently (like maybe the past year or two), was this really that difficult a question to answer? Leaving aside the tippy-tops (like Harvard) for a moment, a look at Michigan’s stats provides a good answer. Of accepted students, the average gpa was 3.82, and the avg. MCAT was a 35 (on the old scale, or a 517 on the new scale).
Chicago historically had a considerably smaller pool of students applying to med school than its peers (for a variety of reasons), and, of that pool, how many do you think were walking around with a 3.75+ overall GPA and a 35+ MCAT score? The total universe of Chicago students with these numbers (and, on top of that, other qualities like the ability to interview well) is probably small - smaller than the universe at Duke, Wash U, etc.
Further, a bunch of top feeder schools have much larger pre-med cultures than Chicago. A whopping 396 Duke U grads applied to med school in 2017-18, 376 from Wash U, even 205 from small Rice U (only about 950 students a class at Rice). At Brown, Penn, etc., med school was noticeably more popular than at Chicago, at least until recently.
So, Chicago had a smaller universe of applicants, and, given the school’s rigor and, again until recently, less of a pre-med incubator environment, a smaller number of top-GPA/MCAT candidates. It’s no surprise, then, that the output was at a lower level.
The real test, though, will be to see what the numbers look like with larger classes (1800+) AND more openness about pre-professional paths. Nondorf already talks excitedly about Chicago students going on to be lawyers and bankers and doctors - he’s certainly infused more pre-professionalism into the school.
Your guess is as good as mine @JHS - how do you think the Class of 2021 or 2022 will do on the med school applications front? I’d be surprised if Chicago didn’t inch their way up - maybe, say, going from 3-4 offers from Michigan a year to 6 or 7 (which would make them a top 10 feeder to Michigan).