<p>
</p>
<p>do you know the average gpa of premeds? like approximation…or the gpa around which most premeds you know have…</p>
<p>The careers office used to report the average GPA of med school applicants from MIT, and it was always around a 4.6/5.0, which I would also suspect is around the average for course 7 majors at MIT.</p>
<p>4.6 would be considered a high gpa right?</p>
<p>[Preprofessional</a> Stats - MIT Careers Office](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/preprof.html]Preprofessional”>http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/preprof.html)</p>
<p>Accepted Mean GPA at MIT: 3.73 (which is just 4.7 in our scale, which is what I have - I don’t know my second digit to the GPA)</p>
<p>On the same page, you’ll see that Harvard Med took 11 out of 95 MIT applicants, which is a 11.6% admit rate. Global mean to HMS is 2.5%.</p>
<p>(although you would have to take into consideration that those 11 are probably the brightest in MIT’s applying premed pool ; ) )</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Since all majors can be competed generally with 4 classes per term, that is the “normal” load. It’s not uncommon to see people taking 5. 6+ is quite intense…</p>
<p>As a premed, generally it’s more important to make sure you get solid grades (i.e. As) in your classes even if it means taking fewer classes, rather than to overwhelm yourself with a huge amount of units and get a smattering of As and Bs.</p>
<p>could you weight on the pros and cons of taking tons of classes?</p>
<p>definitely, if you take hard classes or double major, your GPA is likely going to suffer. If you take just the required classes, you’ll be able to maintain your GPA more than if you take tons of classes. </p>
<p>would taking hard classes or double majoring or a good GPA (MIT caliber) with Course 7 (with minor in prolly 20 or 14 or 15) impress med schools more?</p>
<p>Medical schools do not really particularly care how hard your coursework was, or how much you challenged yourself as an undergraduate. If your only concern is looking good to medical schools, you should take as few classes as possible and ace them all. </p>
<p>The upside to taking a lot of classes is that you learn a lot. There isn’t really an upside in terms of professional school admissions.</p>
<p>
Note that this suggests that there’s not much selection for high GPA from the MIT premed pool – and this has been true even in years when the admission rate has been closer to 80% than 95%. Basically everybody who applies has a good enough GPA, and only the people at the very left tail of the distribution don’t make it to medical school because of their GPAs. The other aspects of the application are extremely important.</p>
<p><a href=“although%20you%20would%20have%20to%20take%20into%20consideration%20that%20those%2011%20are%20probably%20the%20brightest%20in%20MIT’s%20applying%20premed%20pool%20;”>quote</a> )
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Not really. Past a certain point med schools don’t care about intelligence.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sure, but I would be hard-pressed to say that premeds who aren’t already above the premed average at MIT has a good chance of getting in HMS, unless there’s some extenuating factor.</p>
<p>HMS’s 10th-90th percentile for overall GPA is 3.7 to 4.0, and 3.6 to 4.0 for science GPA, with 3.9 as medians for both. Getting a 3.7 at MIT places you at the 10th percentile overall of those accepted to HMS. As admirable and difficult our curriculum may be, you just have no shot at this numbers game if you’re already following below average at MIT (again, unless you have some extremely extenuating circumstances that factors into your application).</p>
<p>I, for one, will be passing HMS completely just because of the realities of my academics.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I asked this question as a freshman, and I have preserved the response that I got in my email inbox starred ever since. Hopefully this will help - it’s really great advice.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Thanks, Chris!</p>
<p>This really is a great advice. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m a little bit slow. Could you elaborate more on this?</p>
<p>also, are there premeds with 4.9 5.0?</p>
<p>^ Given that the 3.7 is the at the 10th percentile of accepted students to HMS, do you think I have a good chance as an Asian male? (one of the most competitive demographic pools).</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, I still have a decent chance at many other med schools, but for those top elite schools (Harvard, Hopkins), you basically need an impeccable record, which is more than just being average in terms of premeds at MIT.</p>
<p>Of course, there’s still a ton more to the application than GPA, but the GPA will usually provide a good indicator of the range of schools that you should be looking at.</p>
<p>I think one thing that people don’t mention about MIT is that the science curriculum is designed for producing scientists who do research. I think this is especially true in biology (I’m not course 7 but this is based on observations): the tests focus on understanding and designing experiments and there is a big focus on undergraduate research. That stuff is great if you want to do a Ph.D. in Biology but I’m not sure it’s great preparation for Med School admissions (or Med school). I mined some data once and found that (small sample size warning) schools like Harvard and Stanford have a pretty strong correlation between GPA and MCAT results, while at MIT there is next to no correlation. This might be an product of MIT teaching research skills and Harvard/Stanford/etc. focusing on the kinds of facts tested on the MCAT.</p>
<p>I haven’t look at the data closely but from what I’ve seen Stanford, Princeton and Harvard students get higher GPAs (just a little bit) in science classes because of a little extra grade inflation and that this helps them in med school admissions. It seems like Med schools don’t adjust GPAs when they inspect them (even, as noted in previous posts, for the difficulty of the classes).</p>
<p>There is data on GPAs at [National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DNational”>http://www.gradeinflation.com) but keep in mind that at every school science grades are lower than humanities grades, so the gap between MIT and more -liberal-artsy schools is smaller than it looks, perhaps non-existant.</p>
<p>
Not really. Past a certain point med schools don’t care about intelligence.
[/quote]
I would argue that medical schools don’t demonstrate any interest in intelligence, just in high GPAs and high test scores. </p>
<p>Note that my biases as a PhD student are clear and obvious, but the students I know in the HMS MD programs (including the MIT alums) are not uniformly exceedingly intelligent as I’d define it. By god, they were great premeds, but I wouldn’t call them brilliant as a whole. And I wouldn’t say that the current HMS fourth-years were the best and brightest students in course 7 with me.</p>
<p>so, would this approach work?</p>
<p>a hypothetical situation in which a student does a Course 7 major and minor in something while watching his/her GPA very carefully so that it will not get below 4.9 Then, s/he spends the rest of his/her time (after subtracting sleeping time and studying for the classes and doing psets) doing EC’s (student groups, volunteer work etc) and UROP.</p>
<p>is there such a thing as “acing” a class at MIT though?</p>
<p>^ Well, normally that’s what any premed does anyway.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Note this is a lot easier said then done. You’ll find out when you come here. Maintaining 4.9s and 5.0s at MIT require not only diligence but also quite a lot of intelligence. Do you think we who have 4.7s just party all the time? : P</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>lol i do not mean it to be that way :]</p>
<p>but, is it possible though if you like take only 4 classes a term?</p>
<p>Yes, and it varies for different people.</p>
<p>I’ve never taken a semester with just 4 classes (I’ve usually done 5), so I think if I take less classes it may have been easier for me. I don’t know, just because I can’t speak in hypotheticals. I think I could have had a better GPA if I played the numbers game better my sophomore year (especially this time last year), but what’s done is done, right? : )</p>
<p>I don’t mean to scare you or any other potential prefrosh on this thread, but yes, being premed is a numbers game, either here or elsewhere. I don’t think people should be scared off by the GPA thing to just not come to MIT, because I think if you balance yourself you should still end up with an outstanding GPA (like Mollie said, there are some terrific premeds here that I wouldn’t consider to be brilliant - they were just cautious and played their cards right). All throughout MIT, I have just been more of a “come what may” type of person, so I’ll apply to med school with the grades that I have, and as long as I don’t have to go to the middle of nowhere to do my med school, prestige doesn’t matter as much for me personally in the long run (I don’t want to do research medicine at all - I just want to become an internal medicine physician and do general practice).</p>
<p>[I tried adding to the top but the time stamp expired : ( ]</p>
<p>The long and short of it all is that you choose the path that you want to take here and form your own objectives. If getting into HMS or Hopkins matters to you, then you should structure your schedule accordingly so you can make sure that you will get all As or almost all As (which is completely possible if you apply yourself). Going to another university I don’t think is definitely a better choice because I hardly think just because you went to Columbia or Brown instead it’s suddenly extremely easy to get As and your GPA will jump 0.2 at the end of your college years. Yes, maybe you would have had a better GPA, but I think the margin would be so insignificant that it wouldn’t matter that much anyway. (i.e. not 0.2)</p>
<p>I’m going on a tangent now but I just wanted to point out that I’m an example of an “average” premed at MIT - Melis (one of the old bloggers), is on the other end of the spectrum as one of those crazy 5.0 premeds that won a slew of other awards (cough* rhodes) who makes everything look effortless. And you will meet those people during your time at MIT. And in the same way that there exists a spectrum here, I can’t predict for you how you will turn out if you do premed at MIT. You may be average like me, or you may be like Melis, who I can never emulate. My gut feeling says you’ll be okay, as long as you put your priorities in order. </p>
<p>I disagree with picking the school based on how likely you’re going to get a high GPA because if that was the case I think an argument can be made that people should go to their hometown state college because they probably will have been a 4.0 student there, rather than even enrolling in private colleges. However, at the end of the day, if you factor in your opportunities and the culture you surround yourself with for the next 4 years, do you think that is a fair exchange? To me, life is just so much more other than being a premed and vying to get a high GPA when you apply to med school.</p>
<p>I sometimes jokingly comment that I should have gone to Stanford, where there is grade inflation because it would have been better for me as a premed and a dual science and humanities major. I’ve seen somewhere in the past that their average GPA is 3.55 (whereas MIT is somewhere like 3.2 ish) and so I was like sweet, I could have had a 4.0 there! But at the end of the day, this is all just talk anyhow, and I really don’t regret coming to MIT (I’m serious).</p>
<p>MIT has challenged me in so many ways that I didn’t imagine possible, and had allowed me to flourish as a more “liberal-artsy” major in a school full of engineers. I live in an awesome community here, and - let’s be honest - Boston and Cambridge and proximity to Harvard and Wellesley is still better than being the only school in the hills of Palo Alto (even if the weather here sucks during the winter). Even if I went to Stanford, can I definitively say that premed would have been easier there? It probably would have been around the same, anyhow.</p>
<p>So the point of this long rant is that as long as your own goals of what you want to accomplish are in order (HMS, staying above average, or aiming to get into your state med school), you will become a doctor here. I’m speaking to the prefrosh here, but don’t be scared off by MIT’s GPA “problem” because there is really no problem. MIT is an awesome school to do one’s undergraduate at, and I still maintain that if all you’re going to see MIT as purely the stepping stone between you and med school, I candidly recommend you not to come here anyway. There’s probably other schools out there that can serve the same function without the IHTFP nights.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ha, actually I agree with you. I was trying to be somewhat charitable. I’d go one further, actually. Even if you restrict yourself to people with sky-high GPAs (4.9-5.0) and MCAT scores, it seemed like the most intelligent people in this pool were selected against.</p>