@nrtlax33 reads like someone who applied to UChicago for something, didn’t get in, and won’t let it go.
“Let’s just say that Brown’s students …are much happier than students from other schools.”
What is the basis of this statement?
@cared4321 : Thanks so much for sharing your daughter’s premed course schedule. One thing I am curious about is that UChicago asks premed to take many more prerequisite courses than other schools (https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/docs/ucis/ucihp/curricular-guidelines.pdf) –
3 quarters of biology with lab
3 quarters of general chemistry with lab
3 quarters of organic chemistry with lab
3 quarters of physics with lab
To compare apple with apple, I pull out Dartmouth’s premed requirement (http://www.dartmouth.edu/prehealth/preparation/preparing/prereqcourses.html)
Biology= 2 terms w/labs (although 3 is recommended for the MCAT preparation)
General Chemistry= 2 terms w/labs
Organic Chemistry= 2 terms w/labs
Are 3 quarters of organic chemistry ** required ** or it is just a recommendation? I am assuming that a quarter is 10 weeks like a term in Dartmouth.
My understanding is that people should not think too much about the reputation of the college they attend for premed, but more about how they do at the college you choose. If they go to a school known for grade deflation, it will definitely be harder to obtain a competitive GPA. However, managing that will be a strong indicator that they will find success as a medical student. People should not expect admissions committees to be impressed at the mere name of your school.
Folks, if you can’t contribute to help OP identify the better premed school, please don’t waste your time here and at the same time waste other people’s time reading it.
This “PRE-MED MYTHS: GETTING INTO MEDICAL SCHOOL”(https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/hotterthanhadelees/attachments/20081001/adb009a4/attachment.pdf) talk from Stanford has very valuable information in it. Although it is old, other than quoted data, all the concepts in it has not changed.
Also read http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/savvy-pre-med/2016/9/19/3-reasons-many-uc-pre-meds-regret-their-college-choice to see why it is not ideal to go the Berkeley for premed. Notice that Berkeley actually publishes its premed success rate every year.
I particularly like http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/2558928/#Comment_2558928 and http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/1122176-bluedevilmikes-ten-step-guide-to-picking-a-premed-school-p1.html
Accroding to the “Bluedevilmike’s Ten Step Guide to Picking a PreMed School”, step #1 is
However, this kid is smart enough to ask this question before applying. Just to confirm, we DID NOT BOTHER TO APPLY TO UCHICAGO thanks to extensive research beforehand. (did not apply to Columbia for the same reason) I particularly don’t like any school which silents its own students. I am sharing some of the reasons why you should not go to UChicago for premed or any major – #1 on the list is too much risk for mental issues. To be sure, many students are very successful there. You just need to know what you are getting yourself into beforehand.
@nrtlax33 This is interesting information regarding Dartmouth. Most schools recommend a full year of basic science courses for their undergrads to satisfy med school requirements. This translates into 2 semesters/terms for schools operating on a semester based system and 3 quarters/terms operating on a quarter based system. Similar to UChicago, Northwestern uses quarters and they too require the full year, ie 3 quarters of chem/organic chem/bio etc.
I totally agree with your statement that prospective applicants should not expect medical school admission committees to be impressed by the mere name of a school. Not every school is the right school for every applicant.
“I would think this is a negative indicator since UChicago students have to score higher than others at MCAT to compensate for their lower GPA”
This is difficult to interpret since we don’t have the mean MCAT score for all UChicago students. One interpretation is the one you make, another interpretation is that UChicago students simply have higher MCAT scores.
According to Brown Health Careers websitesite average science GPA for accepted Brown students is 3.69 while the national average is 3.64 for Fall 2017 with similar figures in previous years. Does this mean Brown students have to have higher GPA’s to get into medical school? Similar to UChicago but to a lesser extent, accepted Brown students have higher MCAT scores than national average (511 vs 510.4)
https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/advising/health-careers/medical-admission-data-snapshot
Just read some random articles such as http://post.browndailyherald.com/2018/03/15/the-new-generation/ you would have a better idea
Students at Brown can decide what is best for them and in contrast to schools like Harvard, Brown is a “University-College” (http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/brown-university/385841-the-brown-curriculum-and-university-college-explained-p1.html) with few graduate students (Wiki ballpark numbers: Undergraduates 6,580 (Fall 2017) Postgraduates 2,255 (Fall 2017) Other students 545 (medical))
If undergraduates are the focus of the campus with most of the resources from school, most of the attentions from the professors, they are more likely to be happy, not to mention the teaching quality is definitely exceeding our expectation. (we have expertise in orgo so we can see from class notes if the professor is good) If you pull up the number of grad students at Harvard, you will immediately notice the difference.
BTW, I think your questions on #45 have been answer on #32. Princeton average GPA was about 3.435 for 2016-2017. (https://thetab.com/us/princeton/2017/10/03/average-gpa-rises-3-435-two-years-grade-deflation-repeal-5393)
Read http://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2010/11/low-average-gpa-at-hopkins-suggests-grade-deflation-89024/ for GPA comparison. Notice that Princeton’s average GPA has gone up.
These are all good points and I am happy that your personal experience and that of many others is positive. However, there are many factors that determine the satisfaction and the happiness of college students and their parents/guardians. These may change from individual to individual and many can find happiness on campuses others don’t consider as happy places. It is hard to measure objectively.
@ccdad99 : You are exactly right. Each person’s college experience is purely dependent on each individual. I happen to be able to estimate that at least 40% premeds at Brown fail to seek/get committee letter each year based on the number of students taking Orgo. (they move on early) Not everyone who goes to Brown can be a successful premed. Did you notice that Brown average SAT score for incoming students is a bit lower than some other schools? Take it as a good indicator. (less competition for premed) Unless you are a true genius, don’t even try to go to Berkeley for premed. (if you have read the article I shared earlier, you would have known the reason.)
On the matter of happiness, there is an interesting statistic in the New York Times article of March 29th (cited in the lengthy thread at http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/2071561-some-interesting-stats-p1.html ). The statistics in that piece measured the differential in marriage rates for students at various colleges ten years after graduation, with special reference to family wealth. Brown’s overall figure was 47 percent (as against Chicago’s 46 percent), so there was very little difference between them overall. The big differences were (a) the spread between their respective highest quintiles and lowest quintiles (48/34 for Brown and 47/45 for Chicago) and (b) the absolute percentages for the lowest quintiles (45 as against 34). Chicago was almost unique among all schools in the narrowness of its spread, and its lowest quintile had one of the very highest absolute percentages among all schools. Brown had one of the highest spreads and one of the very lowest percentages for its lowest quintile kids. The writer of the piece did not single out either Brown or Chicago but did interpret the generally large spreads at the Ivy League institutions (but not at Chicago) as evidence that lower wealth kids were not as happy at those schools.
So perhaps @nrtlax33 's proposition should be reformulated: wealthy kids are happy ones; almost all the kids at Brown are wealthy; therefore almost all Brown kids are happy. As a corollary, if you’re not wealthy, you might not be so happy. In that case steer clear of Brown. Come to Chicago, where the poor kids are happy - that is, if hard work doesn’t send them off their rockers.
Everyone (including me) thought my kids would like Brown, but they detected a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in the kids they knew who went there and the kids they met when they visited. Not that they weren’t smart – one of their Brown friends had the top grades is his class at a very demanding private school and was a Presidential Scholar nominee, who chose Brown over Stanford, and walked out of it into an obscenely high-paid job at a top consulting firm. He loved Brown. But he was utterly contemptuous of academic study.
Neither of my kids applied to Brown. They were very happy at the University of Chicago. (I’ll admit, though – One went in thinking he wanted to go to med school, and didn’t make it past Organic Chemistry. But he found lots of other things that interested and engaged him more.)
You know I popped open this thread to see how well UChicago prepares one for an MCAT. I read the entire thing and it is one poster telling everyone how superior Brown is to UChicago. Seems like we need a moderator or something to step in.
It also reads like someone has an ax to grind with UChicago. Much the way most NFL fans have an issue with the New England Patriots.
On topic, I think you’ll find LSAT and MSAT and similar course performance has more to do with the raw material than it does the Undergrad education. Did a UChicago student get a great result because they were fed the right information the right way, or does UChicago only accept students that would have done well on the test, regardless of which university they attended. I tend to be a believer in the second statement.
@BrianBoiler To be fair, the OP did mention Brown in the original post.
It would be nice;however, if current or past premeds at UChicago could offer their views more relevant to the topic. I also agree that kids with high standardized test scores to begin with generally tend to do better than average on standardized tests later on no matter where they go to college.
I know it’s unfair and utterly unprobative of anything, but it still seems piquant in light of the foregoing assertion about the state of happiness at Brown to point out that there’s a most convincing novelistic depiction of mental illness in a book (“The Marriage Plot”, by Jeffrey Eugenides) written by a Brown graduate depicting Brown undergrads and set on the Brown campus. Q.E.D.
Unfortunately, both UChicago and Brown have 57% of full pay students and according to http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/2091006-socioeconomic-diversity-stats-by-pell-grant-p1.html , UChicago only has 11% of students receiving Pell grants while Brown has 16%. Any explanation :-/ 
I am not even talking about a large sum of UChicago’s financial aid budget has been used on merit aid to attract those less than 1/3 of students who are admitted at RD. Please stop spreading false information.
You’re missing the point, @nrtlax33 . It’s not about quantum of poor students but about quality of their experience - as measured by those stats, which you have not addressed.
You really don’t need to look far to find information. Check out comments on https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/threads/premed-undergrad-brown-vs-uchicago-vs-duke-vs-others.1251347/ (notice that the comments were written by a successful applicant from UChicago)
Here is the comments from the Moderator
I thought UChicago had the lowest median parental income among its peers and lowest share of students form top fifth… Has this changed considerably since these NYT studies were published?
and Read https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of-chicago
@nrtlax33 - the UChicago poster on the student doctor message board even acknowledged - it may be changing for the better there.
It’s difficult to assess how the school will be in the future, but all signs point to Chicago being more “pre-law/med/business/anything” friendly now than EVER before. In a few years, its environment for these “pre-med/law/etc.” types will probably be more welcoming.
What are your thoughts on the improving nature of the (dare I say it) pre-professional atmosphere at Chicago? Was it better to be pre-med there in 2008 or 2018?