@SBSapphire I also advise you not to think about specialties this early. You can’t ask about places being cut-throat but also be a person already worried about medical specialties which are usually decided the 3rd year of medical school after some rotations lol. And there answer is, yes, you get access to emergency medicine experience or whatever you want. There are so many medical facilities and oppurtunities on campus including the emergency room. In addition, there are the connections to Grady which one of my mentees has a research and shadowing connection through. You can look into what is nearby, but I’ll bite. You have most of Emory’s Healthcare facilities and Children’s healthcare of Atlanta right on the core campus.
As for that number: That number is for ALL applicants, including re applicants, and basically all of them (but especially all first time applicants) get a committee letter unless they skipped the “check-ups” and required events hosted by the pre-health office. This was covered in another threat where you asked us to compare two schools. I don’t know why this is asked to be addressed here when enough about this particular issue and others have been addressed in that thread.
The pre-health courses are challenging but you should do fine if you have a good attitude and do the work. The general chemistry, physics, and NBB courses (if you take some) are more weedout"ish" than general biology courses. However, they all will have B-/B, B, or C+/B- averages. I have the whole thread where I discuss STEM at Emory for different groups of folks with different attitudes about learning and stuff and stuff. Perhaps take a look.
pHMO is not really there to help you with the MCAT, but okay. How about you look at their site to see what all they offer:
http://prehealth.emory.edu/
Looks really helpful to me (lots of events and advertisements of opps and good information on that site and in their blog and fb I think), but no entity can prevent people from being stressed about those things and it is really your personal journey. It is up to you to do well in classes, and if you stumble, get the advice you need (not only from the pre-health advising office but actual STEM faculty. In fact, I would say take STEM faculty even more serious as sources of advice) on how to move forward.
And MCAT performance is going to largely depend on the training you give yourself. If you choose easy science instructors or those that do not stress real applications, critical thinking, data analysis, and problem solving (you should find ways to determine how much these are stressed in your STEM coursework), you will be making the preparation process much harder for yourself as you will likely have to learn both the STEM content again (because you may forget if the course required a lower level of understanding to do well) and learn how to deal with the style of MCAT passages (because if you took easy STEM instructors, they likely did not stress the skills I mentioned and just had you memorizing and regurgitating content which you forget after each exam). MCAT passages look like this:
http://offers.aamc.org/hs-fs/hub/259636/file-2239561794-pdf/MCAT_MiniTest_ebook.pdf
If you are not being asked to do AT LEAST this level of thinking or applications in your STEM problems sets and exams, or other assignments then the instructors that you choose are not doing the best job or you are choosing unhelpful instructors intentionally. The fact is, this passage based style is hard and requires a solid understanding of the basic science in each area as well as an ability to extrapolate about new scenarios, interpret data, and understand experimental design. Again, in my thread on STEM courses at Emory, I tell of several life sciences courses (mostly beyond intro) and specific instructors that help enhance those skills, and some of these courses are not particularly hard to score well in. They just make you think harder and more nuanced than what more “standard” courses do. Many are able to choose these types of instructors and maintain a competitive or even extremely competitive GPA for medical school so the expectations are fair and solid performance is doable.
There is a hierarchy at Emory on who to take and what professors end up producing successful pre-meds and scientists, and those who almost always choose the easiest options with disregard to quality fare worse because the difference is that large. You should usually identify the highest rated instructors known for rigor in courses that help from the MCAT/required for medical school, and then balance your schedule out with easier or funner courses and instructors. Hell, if you get some Bs taking the harder pre-health instructors, you can also seek out easier upper division biology or NBB instructors or take STEM seminar style courses that tend to grade easier/not be as test focused to boost that science GPA. But usually those who get some type of B in the best instructors’ course are really well prepared for the MCAT. Furthermore even get really good rec. letters from said professors. They usually end up in medical school. So don’t advise a “fear based” approach to choosing classes and instructors at places like Emory. Think about the thinking skills you need to build or enhance and get in there and try your hardest. The more rigorous instructors usually provide lots of resources and/or a very supportive learning environment because they know that their intellectual standards are far higher than average. Others don’t care, and usually end up with the same course GPAs as instructors that are technically “harder” (in terms of testing, and problem types) because they provide a Vanilla classroom and often make themselves less available to students.