JHU Undergrad: Competitive or collaborative

Can someone enlighten me on the undergraduate biology program, specifically the pre-med track? Do the students compete against each other or collaborate in a “we’re all in this together and we are all going to get into med school” sort of way?

I am very leery of sending my kid to JHU for fear it’s cutthroat competitive which would make it, , in my view, worthless as an undergraduate experience, even for a talented science kid.

My child’s pre-med biomedical engineering experience is filled with collaboration. Kids work hard but share ideas, work on projects together and are very supportive and encouraging of each other. There are so many world class opportunities to work in labs and gain clinical experience that kids do not feel like they are competing against each other to take advantage of all the university has to offer. Most classes (but not all) encourage students to work together on homework assignments so there is a sense of group effort. Kids are so smart that it is not like in HS where one kid did all the group work. Here, collaboration involves the whole team.

I have only heard that it is more on the competitive side, but that was from a researcher who graduated from JHU around 15 years ago. Perhaps there might be a way to reach out to more recent alumni or current students there?

Did your student go to an info session and tour at JHU? When we attended one with my son, I felt like they were going out of their way to mention how collaborative it is. I asked the tour guide about it afterwards and he agreed that it is definitely a collaborative environment, and they want to dispel the notion that it is super competitive.

D2’s best friend went to JHU as a pre-med. She visited us often because her family lived outside of this country. She said it was extremely cutthroat. She wished she had gone to a different school. It may not have been due to where she was going school, but she drank heavily while at JHU and stopped after she graduated. She is a first year med student at a very good Uni now.

My good friend’s son also went to JHU as an econ/applied math major. He went into IB after graduation and is doing very well. Over Thanksgiving he said to me that he probably should have gone to a different college because he was not happy there.

Just a side note, my nephew and his wife were also graduates of JHU. Nothing negative from them, but I never heard anything glowing from them over the years either.

D1 (Premed 3.7/3.6 gpa/ science gpa) attending now and loves it, but says that people from outside the country keep to themselves and really party hard on weekends. D is in athletics and sorority and works with many athletes and non athletes and depends on collaboration to excel. She actually thinks with the elevated ranking JHU has improved the balance of students and improved collaboration. None-the-less D is being pushed academically. To excel there ,you definitely need to be the kind of kid who is willing to give up going out to study…frequently. Opportunities for academics abound there. D got into lab as freshman and is closing in on publication. The school is top notch in helping the kids know all the hoops they must jump through to get into Med school. Sooooo much better than the school I attended when I was premed.

Having graduated from there recently along with my spouse, I would say it was an amazing place that was highly supportive. We’re both doing fairly well now too (live in silicon valley and work in tech at google with over 600k in household income just 8 years out of undergrad). I have tons of classmates friends who went to top graduate/med schools and love Hopkins as well.

I would recommend you speaking to actual undergrad students there to balance anecdotes from posters like @oldfort. Try to visit and solicit opinions from students on the ground. There’s a reason why the undergrad alumni donation rate is top 5 in the country year over year. You can find current students through LinkedIn, visiting, and Facebook/reddit. Do not trust sites such as this which is predominantly filled with high schoolers and others with no/loose connections to the school.