Okay, makes sense, thank you! It seems that it does not matter much where I do my undergrad (since I want to probably live and practice in either jersey or maryland when I’m a physician, not PA), I should just look for the place that gives me the best combination of money/opportunity to succeed/ atmosphere.
@Creekland you need acceptances, not matriculants to answer the question. Again, I would imagine PA residents are more likely to choose Penn if accepted vs non-PA residents.
Pitt has a top tier medical school and a lot of other top tier programs in other types of health care. This doesn’t necessarily translate to a top tier undergrad but it certainly helps. However, I don’t think Pitt med school shows bias to their undergrad students. Also, Pitt isn’t really a commuter school if you care about that type of stuff.
Oh ok, interesting. Thank you!
@iwannabe_Brown I agree that one would need acceptances for the final answer, but even when using what we have, one can only argue for a slight bias at best - not a large bias as mentioned by a PP. There are states/schools with large biases. PA is not one of them.
@Creekland I misunderstood your point. I have been arguing no bias and I thought you were arguing the opposite. My bad
^^^ Eh, definitely no problem. Statistically one could argue for a minor bias at best, but with an n=7 the evidence is definitely not overwhelming, esp without the acceptance data. There are definitely plausible explanations for no bias at all but Geisinger. For that one I suspect a bias considering 79 of their 110 class is in state, but only 971 of their 5922 applicants. Considering their stated purpose (as WayOutWestMom said), I suspect many of the other 31 have ties or interest in serving that region or ones like it. A bias is not confirmed, of course, since we don’t have the actual acceptance data, but I’d place my bets that there is one even if it’s not super overwhelming like some other states/schools.
Interesting, so the alleged bias sounds like something I shouldn’t even worry about right?
@Rg10dj10cj81 I definitely wouldn’t factor it in at all.
Go to the school you like the best, are most excited about, are ready to succeed at. You might even change your mind on med school after 4 years. But yes I agree with the above. Where you go to undergrad matters very little as far as where you can get in for medical school.
UVA is known to be on a better scale than Rutgers and Pitt, but if the tuition increase makes a huge difference, don’t go there.
Either way, you could go to the most elite school and get a 3.0 and bomb the MCAT and not get into medical school (hoping that doesn’t happen of course), or you could go to your state school get a 4.0 and kill the MCAT and go to a top MD school. Its impossible to predict.
This is factually wrong.
Also, apologies if I missed it- has anybody addressed paying for medical school? It makes undergrad look cheap. Ask your parents to save the difference between UVa and whichever is less expensive (Pitt or Rutgers) and go to that one.
Ok! Thank you, this helps a lot!
Actually, I stand by my comment that Virginia might give you a slight advantage in some cases when applying to medical schools. The AAMC survey from a few years ago found that selectivity of undergraduate institution was one of the several factors of highest importance for medical school admission for private medical schools. This is also true for UCSF and UCLA. A few years ago it was noted that something like 2/3s of first year medical students at UCLA were from Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford or one of the Ivy’s. A perusal of UCSF’s medical student list from a few years ago shows similar findings. The AAMC survey found that selectivity of undergraduate institution to be of lowest importance for state medical schools but this does not mean that it is not a factor. If your parents can afford to pay the extra 40K/four years without problem I would pick the school you like. If you have to borrow the 40K, I would pick Pitt as that 40 K with interest over the next 11 to 14 years will balloon up to almost 100K of debt.
Hmm - kinda tough. I think if you’re definitely on the med school track, my vote would be for Pitt because of some of the reasons already stated. It’s a great city for medicine.
If you went into statistics, would you still be looking at grad school? Because if so, you want to save $$ undergrad.
I seriously can’t see any med school having issues with a decent graduate from Pitt. Being from PA, it is one of our “go to” recommendations for pre-med because of all it offers including multiple hospitals right on/near campus and its highly ranked med school. A very quick google search tells me the overall school (undergrad) is ranked #68. That’s hardly bottom of the barrel as some seem to be implying.
If in doubt I’ll give my usual advice to ask the pre-med department which schools recent grads have been accepted to and use that to guide your decision (you can do this for all three schools, of course). Usually that’s important for smaller less well known schools, but it certainly can also be useful at higher rated schools too.
Ok, thank you for the information!