HYP, which school is best for Pre-med?

<p>My son got into HYPSM, he prefer HYP for pre-med. Which school have the highest rate to get into top 10 med schools? Any statistics from previous 3 yrs? How many Harvard undergrad student can get into Harvard med school each yr?</p>

<p>Wow! Congratulations to your son! Thats quiet an accomplishment. </p>

<p>And a very good question. As a prospective premed/HYPD hopeful… I’ve been speculating that for a while. From what I’ve heard, its best to go where he feels he will be able to perform HIS best/where HE wants to go. Because a good gpa is a Necessity for premed students. Maybe an actual med student could help you out more. But I was at Harvard this summer & met a Harvard undergrad who got into Harvard med. He said a majority of his class was Harvard undergrads. And some from other top tier schools. </p>

<p>Also, I’m a junior in high school. Do you have any suggestions for a junior looking into those schools? (:</p>

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</p>

<p>That’s false…</p>

<p>this thread is ironic…</p>

<p>the OP is asking for help but wisdom908, who is supposed to be helping, is instead asking the OP for help as well. LOL</p>

<p>wisdom908, thank you for the input. </p>

<p>I am 1st gen immigrant, I don’t know how to advice you, but I could roughly list my S stat for your reference:
SAT 2250, ACT 35,
SAT2: Bio 800, chem 780, his 800, math 800, chinese 800
EC: Drum major, one club president, one sports team captain, debate team captain, volunteer >400 hrs, Siemens award, previous 2 summer did research in local university
Essay: Strong (spend more time to polish your essay, it’s very important)
Rec: 2 from school teacher, didn’t preview, don’t know what did they say.</p>

<p>Accepted: HYPSM (Yale SCEA), Brown PLME, WUSTL, Rice with trustee ($22500) and Century scholarship, Duke (likely letter), UCB/UCSD/UCLA(with regent scholarship)
Rejection: No
Waitlist: No</p>

<p>What was the kicker?</p>

<p>you will find success rates by Princeton students applyng to Med Schools here:</p>

<p>[FAQ</a> -*Office of the Dean of the College](<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/odoc/faculty/grading/faq/]FAQ”>Grading at Princeton | Office of the Dean of the College)</p>

<p>This is a shameful question for the OP to ask. She ought to be horribly embarrassed by her actions, and she ought never to do anything like this again.</p>

<p>The OP’s son is clearly someone extraordinary. Not because of his “stats”. There are plenty of people with resumes like that who don’t get into any of the hyperselective colleges to which he applied, much less all of them. One way or another, he has that spark, that something extra that makes people sit up and take notice, and he has the ability to communicate that. At this point in his life, he is a complete winner.</p>

<p>What could possibly go wrong for him? He could burn out, he could lose interest, he could crack from the stress of trying to be perfect. If that is going to happen, it could happen anywhere. Maybe it’s a smidge more likely to happen at Harvard, whose Harvardness seems to weigh more heavily on some students than Princetonness or Yaleness would, but any difference is truly marginal. The other thing that could go wrong is that people could decide he’s not really extraordinary, doesn’t have any spark, that he’s just painting by numbers. And, it turns out, that’s just how his mother seems to want him to behave! Nothing could be worse for him.</p>

<p>Either way, the main determinant of the son’s success is going to be himself. Maybe there’s some tiny difference in medical school acceptance rates (or “top” medical school acceptance rates) among these amazing universities, which are the best in the world. (Maybe, but I doubt it.) However, the son’s internal factors are going to swamp any difference among the universities. </p>

<p>To get into a “top” medical school, the son will have to continue to do better than others in college. That’s not a given for anyone, but something some people achieve at every college on his list. If he’s that kind of person, it won’t matter which college he is at. But he will also need to be the kind of person who goes beyond mere classroom success to accomplish extraordinary things, just as he has been that kind of person in high school. So he needs to pick the college that will most inspire him to do that, and where he will feel most comfortable doing that. And that sense can’t be garnered from statistics, because it’s HIS feelings, not average feelings, that matter here. And he will need to avoid burnout – which in my experience happens a lot more when people are trying to live up to external expectations, not their own. The worst possible thing he could do here would be to make a choice based on what other people think rather than how he feels.</p>

<p>Right now, he looks like the kind of person who could accomplish great things no matter where he goes to college on his glittery list of choices. It saddens me no end that his mother, of all people, doubts his ability to do that, and seems to be willing to whisper in his ear to play it safe, to look for the statistical edge. That’s not how you reach the stars!</p>

<p>JHS, I totally agree with your opinion. As a mom of teenager, I already realize that I couldn’t decide anything for him, he lives his own life. But if such statistic exist, I believe he would be also interested to see, though his college decission would not simply rely on that data. Not hurt to know more info. before May 1.</p>

<p>I doubt that data exists, certainly not in any standard form that would permit comparability among colleges. And if it did exist, I find it hard to believe that there would be any meaningful difference among the five colleges you mention.</p>

<p>Look carefully at the Princeton material – which is a lot more disclosure than most other colleges make. First off, notice that it is not a neutral presentation of data. It is part of an advocacy piece, defending their grading system against the charge that it hurts Princeton alumni’s prospects post-graduation. (It doesn’t, by the way.) They tell you how many people get accepted to some medical school, and (if you do the math) how many applied. So you may note that it works out to about 120-130 applicants/year, 10% of the class. Do you want to bet that a lot more than 10% of the freshmen entering Princeton every fall plan on going to medical school? At Princeton, as everywhere else, there is a huge cut-down between the number of people who want to go to medical school and the number who apply. Does the cut-down vary from school to school? Probably a little, but we’ll never figure out how, and none of the schools has any interest in giving us this information. And even if we knew the numbers, we wouldn’t know how much of them were due to promising students been weeded out or discouraged, and how much were due to students’ interests changing and finding brilliant opportunities elsewhere.</p>

<p>With regard to “top 10” medical schools, Princeton tells us: (a) The range of the gross number of applications per year to top medical schools. Which turns out to be about 3 per medical school applicant – which tells me that a decent percentage of Princeton medical school applicants aren’t applying to top medical schools, or aren’t applying to more than one of them, and only a few are applying to several systematically. But how many? I don’t know. (b) That Princeton applicants are accepted at three times the overall admit rate for those schools. That’s great, but the overall admit rate for those schools is pretty small – as low as 3% for some, and under 6% for all of them. (c) That a quarter to a third of the Princeton students actually going to medical school went to a top 10 medical school. Note that there’s probably something of a gap between the number of people accepted to medical school and the number who actually go. (At Princeton, or Harvard or Yale, things like Rhodes Scholarships may intervene. Or lucrative jobs.) In any event, this number probably translates to 20-30 students/year going to top 10 medical schools. Which is pretty great, but still underlines how tough it is to get into those schools, because I’m sure there are more than 20-30 really impressive Princeton pre-meds per class.</p>

<p>Note, by the way, that these numbers have stayed pretty constant through a 25% expansion in the size of Princeton’s class, which affected the last couple of years of this data.</p>

<p>My point is, even with that extraordinary disclosure, we really know very little about how going to Princeton affects medical school applications, much less how going to Princeton affects medical school applications differently than going to Harvard.</p>

<p>To add to what JHS says, and to confuse things further, more and more students are taking a year or two off after graduation before applying to med, law and business school. The med school data could very well include all Princeton students/alumni with Princeton undergraduate degrees that that applied that year and not just the undergraduate seniors of the year specified.</p>

<p>Michelle - I am a bit surprised John Hopkins is not in the mix. They usually send 300+ each year to medical school. They mentioned they accept 10% of their own students each year.</p>

<p>Really, the HYP admission rate to medical school tells you little about your son’s own chance of getting into medical school ;). But overall, I think the Harvard admission rate is about 93%, with around 20 each year getting into Harvard Med straight from undergrad (?), without taking any year off. No idea on average how many apply in the first place. If your son is visiting, make sure to stop by the Office of Career Services, which keeps record of this kind of information. Good luck to him!</p>