Need some advice on picking a school to attend!

College Search & Selection
1

I live in Kansas, and I’ve been accepted to many schools and am still waiting to hear back from others. I need some help in deciding a school to attend. The primary factors that I’m weighing in are quality of pre-med program and helping students get into med school, location(preferably urban, although open to non-urban locations), and cost. I am likely going to qualify for the max grant for fasfa, so that will dim the cost a little bit. Here are the schools I am choosing from and if you could tell me your top 3-5 that’d you’d pick based off of scholarships and program quality that’d be great!

-University of Kansas(accepted in-state)
- 1K per year scholarship, plus 10k pell grant
-University of Pittsburgh(accepted)
- no scholarship
-Baylor University
-10k per year scholarship
-Loyola University Chicago(accepted)
-20k per year scholarship
-St. John’s University(accepted)
-35k per year scholarship
-UIUC(still waiting)
-UCB, UCLA, UCD, UCSB(still waiting)
-University of Washington-Seattle(waiting)
-Pepperdine(waiting)
-will likely apply to John’s Hopkins and Cornell as reach schools this week to see if I get lucky haha!

If you can, do a top top 3 in order of the ones I’ve been accepted to and top 5 if I were to be accepted to the others! Thanks :)j

2

As an out of state student, UCLA/UCB/UCD and UCSB will give you little to no financial aid so expect to pay $55K/year to attend. Since Medical school is a consideration, then you do not want to have a huge amount of debt as an undergrad regardless of the academic quality of these schools.
FASFA does not give financial aid. You fill out the FASFA form to determine if you are eligible for federal aid. The majority of FA comes from the universities themselves and state aid, that is why many OOS public schools such as the California UC’s are expensive if you are not a California resident.

3

Agreed! I just figured I’d send some apps to those schools since I got an email saying that I could apply to a maximum of 4 UC’s with application fee waiver so I figured I’d do it!