<p>If you make Harvard undergrad, does that mean you can easily get in their med school?</p>
<p>Nobody can "easily" get into Harvard Medical School. To get in there you will need excellent grades, recs, and MCAT scores no matter where you went to college.</p>
<p>I would actually say that if you're goal of getting into HMS is of a higher priority to you than your goal of going to Harvard, then you shouldn't come to Harvard. The overall rate of admissions to HMS from here (undergrad) is about the same as the national average (around 5%). It's much harder to get the requisite 3.75 and above GPA, however, if you're at an easier school and not competing against the best in the country for your As (especially in the premed classes, many of which are curved to B/B-).</p>
<p>No, it doesn't.</p>
<p>But to counter what h-bomber is saying, I will add that Harvard students are accepted to HMS not at a 5% acceptance rate but rather a 10% acceptance rate -- granted, students who come from Harvard College are well-prepared, since the science classes here are at a high caliber. I will add that 3.7 is a tough GPA to maintain here. I don't think you need a 3.75 GPA from Harvard College to get into HMS. I've known people who have gotten in with GPAs below that - I would say the median would be around 3.7 for HMS and other highly ranked institution coming out of Harvard.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Having excellent grades at Harvard does not guarantee admission to HMS. I know of at least two summas who didn't get in (although they got into other top schools). On the other hand, I also know of plenty of cum laude graduates and graduates without honors who ended up at HMS. </p></li>
<li><p>Getting into HMS is not the end of the game. You need to do reasonably well at HMS (at least top 1/2 to 1/3) to get into a top 5 residency program in your specialty, and even better if you are aiming for a top residency program in a highly competitive specialty. If you are going for a non-competitive specialty like family practice, it's a different matter, of course. And of course, you need to do well in residency for a chance to stay at that top hospital as staff physician, etc. etc. An HMS diploma is not something that you can live off of for the rest of your life, unless you go into private practice, in which case I guess attending HMS might be the crowning achievement of your life.</p></li>
<li><p>It's good to have "long-range" perspectives, but it would be a mistake to avoid Harvard under the assumption that it will increase your chances of getting into HMS in the next round. It just might, but it's also very possible that you won't get into HMS anyway. There are occasionally HMS students who graduated at the very top of their class at the State U or City College, and yes, I think that had they gone to Harvard College, they probably would have been buried somewhere in the middle. You can make a reasonable argument either way.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>
[quote]
There are occasionally HMS students who graduated at the very top of their class at the State U or City College, and yes, I think that had they gone to Harvard College, they probably would have been buried somewhere in the middle.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I'm not so sure about that. The top students I have encountered from a wide variety of places have all been extremely good at the stuff that makes for a top college student. Does not necessarily translate to being a great doctor, but I suspect the first in class from State U would have done very well at HYP. Remember, the State U's of our nation are huge, lots of top students at these places could have gone to HYP but couldn't afford it, thought they couldn't afford it, needed to stay closer to home... The bigger difference is not in the top students, but what you find lower in the class. At a place like H, excluding those admitted for reasons unrelated to academics, you have to go very far down the class rank before you stop reaching very, very good students. From a place like Berkeley or Michigan, the top 20%, at least, would be excellent students anywhere.</p>
<p>There is some advantage in going to Harvard undergrad to getting in HMS specifically, since you know your way around, know which professors have pull, etc. However, this would not help you with getting into, say, Yale or Hopkins.</p>
<p>You can be sure that if you go to Harvard undergrad, and are a premed, it is highly unlikely that you will go to HMS.</p>
<p>"You can be sure that if you go to Harvard undergrad, and are a premed, it is highly unlikely that you will go to HMS."</p>
<p>Highly unlikely in the sense that most Harvard students who apply to HMS wil get rejected. But if you are coming from some other school, even those in the Ivy League, the chances of getting into HMS are not just highly unlikely, but vanishingly unlikely. Harvard College remains by far the best represented undergraduate school at HMS, typically 2-3 times the next best represented institution, which is usually Stanford followed by either Princeton or Yale. I mentioned that some Harvard students with decent but not stellar grades often get into HMS. This simply will not happen if you are coming from some other college. </p>
<p>"However, this would not help you with getting into, say, Yale or Hopkins."</p>
<p>When I interviewed at YMS and Columbia Med School, Harvard College premeds were better represented at these schools than their counterparts at Yale College and Columbia College. Harvard premeds are very well-regarded by medical schools everywhere and are highly sought after.</p>
<p>"From a place like Berkeley or Michigan, the top 20%, at least, would be excellent students anywhere."</p>
<p>It's possible that a top 5% student at Berkeley might be in the top 5-10% at Harvard. A top 20% student at Berkeley will be more like 50% or below at Harvard. The vast majority of state schools do not have the caliber of Berkeley, so you are using an extreme example to argue a case that is not really true. The state schools I was referring to are much less distinguished schools.</p>
<p>"Remember, the State U's of our nation are huge, lots of top students at these places could have gone to HYP but couldn't afford it, thought they couldn't afford it, needed to stay closer to home... The bigger difference is not in the top students, but what you find lower in the class."</p>
<p>I agree that because many state schools are so big that there are bound to be some outstanding talents. But the number of such top talents is still going to be much less than that at Harvard. As a concrete example, the following is a ranking of schools based on the number of Putnam fellows (top 5 scorers in the country).</p>
<p>Harvard 95
MIT 45
U. Toronto 23
Caltech 21
Princeton 20
Berkeley 16
U. Chicago 10
Yale, Columbia, U. Waterloo tied at 8</p>
<p>Yes, Berkeley gets quite a few great student mathematicians, but in terms of the pure concentration of the creme de la creme, no other school comes anywhere close to Harvard. </p>
<p>On that note, please stop mentioning HYP in the same breath. I was only talking about Harvard.</p>
<p>OTOH looking at the above ^^ 21 for Caltech with 900 undergrads and Harvard with 95 and over 6000 undergrads. Quite a difference!</p>
<p>No, its still really hard, but you would have a better chance because you learned your information from there, so you would have a slight advantage.</p>
<p>Well, if you are going to play the normalization game, then you obviously ought to divide by the number of math majors or by the number of math/physics/engineering majors.</p>
<p>Oh, and here's the number of National Merit Scholars some "top" schools got.</p>
<p>Harvard 294
Yale 186
Princeton and Stanford (tied) 153
MIT 135
Duke 118
Penn 100
Brown 94
Dartmouth 69
Cornell 64
Columbia 62
Caltech 29</p>
<p>Here's how the top state schools measure up:
Berkeley 70
Michigan 58
Virginia 31
UCLA 25</p>
<p>And the top liberal arts colleges:
Amherst 22
Swarthmore 19
Williams 16
Reed College 5</p>
<p>Is there still any doubt about where the top high school students end up? The concentration is by far the highest at the big name private schools, Ivy League + Stanford + MIT + Duke, even if many others are scattered over many different schools. Maintaining a straight A average at a school with 294 National Merit Scholars is a completely different ballgame than doing it at a school with 25 National Merit Scholars.</p>
<p>As a father of a premed student at Harvard, I would suggest that many students may not even want to go to HMS. The focus is different at different schools. For example, it is my child's understanding (my kid has grants doing research at HMS) that the focus at HMS is on research and not much with clinical research. It therefore may not be the best place to go if you want to be a hands on doctor.</p>
<p>That's actually not true. Most of the research done at the HMS quadrangle (where your kid is working presumably) is indeed basic laboratory research and naturally because virtually all the quadrangle-based HMS faculty are basic scientists (departments of biochemistry, cell biology, genetics, microbiology, neurobiology, pathology, systems biology, and social medicine). Most of the clinical research gets done at the HMS affiliated hospitals, not at HMS proper. Just two of HMS hospitals, Mass General and Brigham and Women's, get over $1 billion a year in research funding and most of that funds clinical research. With more than a dozen affiliated hospitals, HMS has the largest complex of basic and clinical research program in the world. </p>
<p>Residency and fellowship slots at HMS hospitals are usually the most sought after in each specialty. HMS graduates are also very successful at landing slots in top residency programs in the country, and usually make up the largest contingent at the HMS hospitals. So it's hard to argue that HMS isn't good for clinical training. Even in primary care, it ranks pretty highly (check the U.S. News rankings). But ranking schools based on the quality of clinical training is far more difficult than ranking them based on research, because it's hard to come up with a good criteria. Different people have very different notions of a "good" doctor. Is it a doctor with great bedside manners who draws universal praise from his patients? Is it a doctor who is extremely thorough, even at the risk of subjecting the patient to excessive tests, and never misses anything? Is it a doctor who runs big clinical trials at the university hospital, gets huge grants from the NIH, and is well-known for his expertise in a particular disease? How do you compare different doctors from different institutions objectively? Is Dr. Brown at Johns Hopkins a better doctor than Dr. Jones at U. Maryland Medical Center because he's published more papers in medical journals and has more grants from the NIH? Is he better because his patients had complications 6% of the time compared to 8% of the time for Dr. Jones? Is he better because he has a larger practice and makes more money?</p>
<p>Actually I disagree with you. My kid spent last year at Brigham and this year at Boston Children's hospital. It is only there that an opportunity for clinical research has taken place. HMS is far better known for research than developing doctors going into practise.</p>
<p>HMS is not known for "developing doctors going into practise." -- Pretty much 99% of HMS graduates do clinical residencies and become practicing physicians, even if later on they might become more famous for their administrative or research roles in medicine or make their name in entirely different careers (e.g. by becoming the Senate majority leader like Bill Frist or writing best selling novels like Michael Creighton). Your neighborhood MD probably didn't go to HMS, and that's because HMS is just one of 140 medical schools in the U.S. (0.7%). Go to a top hospital in a major metro area and check out where the chairman of the surgery department or internal medicine department went to school. There is a decent chance that he/she went to HMS or did a residency or a clinical fellowship at HMS.</p>
<p>HMS graduates include:
9 deans of U.S. medical schools (that's nearly 7%, so that's almost a 10 fold overrepresentation)</p>
<p>78 chairs of departments at U.S. medical schools, excluding HMS</p>
<p>2031 professors at U.S. medical schools, excluding HMS</p>
<p>The average class size at HMS is about 170 a year.</p>
<p>How can you say that HMS has no impact on clinical medicine?? That's a lot of nonsense. </p>
<p>And as far as your kid participating in clinical research, undergraduates cannot participate meaningfully in clinical research because they don't know anything and they cannot legally do anything that might constitute medical care/physical examination, etc. In medicine, medical students are "undergraduates" and residents are "graduates". On the other hand, undergraduates can easily work at the bench in a lab. There are hundreds of clinical trials going on at HMS and zillions of opportunities for clinical research for those who are qualified.</p>
<p>And as far as your kid participating in clinical research, undergraduates cannot participate meaningfully in clinical research because they don't know anything and they cannot legally do anything that might constitute medical care/physical examination, etc. - this statement is false</p>