I am a doctor, there are so many paths to medical school and I would encourage your D to get the broadest most exciting education in college if her goals include medicine. Medicine is a hard, taxing road and many kids are not successful getting into MD/DO school. Doing a focused path with the current low acceptance rate for med schools and so many other options for ways to participate in health care is not a path I would suggest for my kids.
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@sbinaz , I have been following your posts. I really appreciate your daughter for her hard work and determination. My D is in BS/MD program in East coast. I totally agree with you on BS/MD path, it needs planning from little early on.
Your D doesn’t have to take Medicine major to get into medical school. She can take any major and take few require courses to be qualified to apply t medical college. Medicine is a tough path so you should always have a back up plan. Honestly with Medicine as major, her BS degree may not have much value to get into a job in case Plan A doesn’t work out. I suggest her to take a major that really interests her and has some opportunities either to get into a job or do some advanced degree. Lot of students take Biology, Psychology, Neuroscience and Bio-Medical etc. There are students who took History or Economics, Dance and Data Science major too.
ASU is a very good college and as they have BS/MD program too, they must be having a good medical advisors too. She can do any major and can be on pre-med track. Talk to the admissions counselor at ASU. Follow this thread and post your questions in that
@WayOutWestMom is a highly experienced with 2 successful kids are physicians now. Please let me know if you need any help.
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D24 was never considering a BS-MD direct entry program. I just mentioned it because sometimes, people on CC hyper-focus on all of the elite programs and forget that there’s more than one way to get where you’re going.
Besides, she could change her mind 10 times or more between now and college graduation.
I appreciate everyone’s input and trust me, I’ve told my kid that you don’t have to major in that specific thing. She’s currently in the “my parents are stupid” teenager phase. I don’t think this is anything for DH and I to get worked up over right now. For the time being, I think that it’s nice to see her at least interested in SOMETHING.
She really dislikes ASU, so going there is off the table.
Time will tell how it plays out.
Edited to add:
Honestly, I think that D24 would be happier as a PA. Less time in grad school, so lower overall grad school debt to pay off, the overall job satisfaction rate is way higher for PAs compared to MDs, and there’s better work-life balance…which would be a factor if she decides to start a family at some point.
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PA is great. Another good alternative to MD is to do a nursing degree because there is so much opportunity for advancement in discrete tiers. She can become an RN and then get degrees all the way up to the doctorate, and even become a professor if she wants. That would also enable her to eventually be pretty independent in her practice if she wants. But she can just stop with the bachelor’s, or do any extra education as she want in the future.
If someone knows they want to be a clinician, I think these are both great paths, and basically guarantee excellent jobs just out of the main program. If they want to be a physician/scientist because they crave the intellectual rigor and challenge, they should do the conventional basic science degree and MD.
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Hi, anyone’s kid taking the new digital SAT pilot test? I originally signed my son for the August SAT but then ended up signing him up for the June SAT at the last minute (paid the late fee). He had a great score so we were going to cancel the August test but then he received an invite to take the digital SAT as trial test. In exchange, he gets a $50 gift card and he gets to see his score AND THEN decide if he wants to keep it or delete it. He thought it was a no brainer and it would help him to prepare for the PSAT in October (he’s hoping he will qualify for National Merit). However, the catch is that he would have to take the regular SAT in August or October to help gauge the accuracy of the digital SAT score. He decided that he would just take the August SAT since he’s already signed up for it and he ended up getting the exact same score.
My S also got an invite but the timing doesnt work. I didnt know that they could use the score if it was helpful, thought it was just a pilot. Interesting! Good luck to your S!
So our new discussion in the house is teachers. S is having a good year academically so far, seems he made the right decisions, but all of his teachers are just meh. He doesnt think he will be able to make a connection to any of them. The APUSH teacher literally just lectures the material, AP lang teacher is new and his Physics teacher is not very kind. The math teacher wrote my older one’s recommendation and it was a little stressful since she was not so reliable but she may be the one to know him best and he may have to ask a humanities teacher from 10th grade, ugh.
it might be too early to say that. he may connect to one of them later in this school year.
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@southernfemmom how does your D24 measure access to a major city? i.e. quick bus/subway? X miles?
We are behind most of you with S24. He hasn’t taken the SAT yet but is signed up for the PSAT in October. Not sure how he’ll do - last real standardized test was the SSAT in 8th grade (he did really well without studying but that was several years ago). He is taking 3 APs this year after getting denied the 4th due to over enrollment (4 per year is the absolute maximum and only a handful of kids can do it - no APs until 11h grade). He isn’t sure about college yet - his brother is a freshman at UMass Amherst so we just finished up one college search so we’ve been lax about getting started with S #2. He did mention Georgetown (no idea why) but is pretty vague about what he wants - in either a college or a major. We’ll get there.
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School has been open for 4 weeks now and we had our back to school night 10 days ago and the teachers were mostly good per S24. He has very rarely complained about a teacher so hard to say how they really are.
He is taking 3 AP’s and 2 honors classes and 2 regular classes. He seems to be hanging in there though a couple of subjects he needs to get a better handle how to manage (AP US history specifically) . The Physics Honors teacher has not yet posted any test results so hard to know how he is doing. I can understand teacher taking more time to grade this a lot of reading (line english or History) but not sure why for physics.
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D24 attended a Univ of Arizona honors college info session at school today during what would have been her math class. She said lots of seniors attended + 1 other 11th grader. We are scheduled to do an in person campus tour & honors college tour in October.
D24 was animated, interested, and genuinely sounded excited when I asked her about how the info session went. Here’s some snippets of what she said:
- “Mama, there’s a smoothie bar, like, 100 feet from the honors dorm” (she makes smoothies at home daily).
- “It’s the largest dorm on campus.”
- “There’s a dedicated dining hall on the 1st floor just for honors students. And unlike the ASU honors dorm dining hall, at this one, it’s all you can eat for an hour with each swipe.”
- “The lady said that she’s from a small town about an hour from Tucson. I bet I know where she’s from!” (random, but D24 was stoked about this)
- “The professors who teach a lot of the honors classes have offices right there at the honors dorm. So you don’t have to walk across campus to go talk to them.”
- “There’s about 4000 undergrads in the honors college, so it’s kind of like a liberal arts college. That’s way smaller than ASU’s honors college…how big was that one, again?” (~7000 students).
- “Mama, they said that a lot of the honors classes are 25-30 students. Some are as small as 5 students in a class. That’s way better than hundreds of students per class” (yes, dear, but not every 1 of your classes will be an honors class).
- “They said that in the honors college, the general ed classes are a lot like LAC classes with all of these interdisciplinary topics where you can discuss stuff w/the professor & everybody in class. That’s cool.”
- “Mama, I could get in without having to submit an SAT score. I mean, I could get into the honors college w/o test scores. But they said that if you want merit scholarships, you have to submit test scores. But oh…she also said that you don’t have to have a 4.0 unweighted GPA to get admitted to the honors college.”
- “Oh, they also said that to get admitted to U of A, all you have to have is an unweighted GPA of 3.0. And I already have that. So I could get in. And they even have honors students with 3.3 or 3.4 GPA’s…and I have a 3.33 right now.”
I just gotta say…after all of the eye rolling and “Blah blah college, Mama” talk from this kid, it makes my mom heart very happy to hear her legitimately excited about going on this tour next month. Just yesterday evening, she said, “WHY do I even have to go to this thing tomorrow? WHY?!” Then today on the way home, it was “oh, here’s this fun fact” and “Oh oh, listen to this.”
So I told her that when the tours are done on our tour day, she & I are going to walk to the section of University Blvd that’s right next to the U of A campus so she can explore a bit, see what shops & restaurants & eateries & hang outs are there…so that can also help her decide later on if it’s a place that she could see herself living for 4 years. But THIS time, when I said it, she perked up and said, “Oh, yeah! That’s a good idea. I’d like to do that.” Much better than sighing & gnashing of teeth. LOL.
She even said, “Mama, I told my friend So-and-So at lunchtime today that you can get admitted with just a 3.0 unweighted GPA and So-and-So said, ‘I am totally going to U of A w/you and we can be roommates!’”
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She also said that the U of A honors college has these 2-week-long honors students-only study abroad trips where you spend 2 weeks in 1 area and then do a day trip to another city elsewhere…like do the 2 weeks in Paris but then also spend a day in Berlin. She was really excited about that.
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That’s great that she is now so excited and if you want to stay in state this could be a great option for her. I am waiting for similar excitement from my s24.
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That is so exciting, it is amazing that the state offers such an incredible experience for the best students! Congrats!
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ACT scores came out and DS scores were as expected. One thing off the checklist.
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CONGRATS! Such a relief!
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Is anyone frustrated by or does anyone have a spouse/partner/co-parent who is immensely frustrated by your kid’s HS not ranking the students in a given graduating class?
Our HS does not rank its students. There’s kind of no point when the entire 11th grade is 32 students, so the top 10% are only 3 kids. This is something that drives my DH bananas. However, he is a very competitive person in general, whereas our 2 kids are not competitive at all…they do not thrive in an environment where students are vying w/each other for who is top dog.
DH & I debate this every couple of months. He’s even asked the school if they could tell us where D24 is in the pecking order compared to other students in her grade. They provide the same answer, which is “We don’t rank our students.”
I keep telling him to cool his jets, but he repeatedly brings it up. He seems to think that if D24 knows whether her GPA is higher or lower than her peers, then this will motivate her to study more, perform better at school, etc. …when in actuality, it will have the opposite result.
My kids & their friends do NOT discuss their GPAs. This is a concept that my DH just does not understand. He doesn’t get it.
I’m open to ideas if anybody has any. For now, I’ve asked him to keep quiet about it around our kids.
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Our school does not rank either, though ours is larger (260 kids/grade). No advice though I feel you frustration- that is tough and guessing it puts stress and pressure on the kids.
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