I am an aspiring high school senior who just finished the 3 signature scholarship applications to Vandy. I have two questions, a quick one and a long one.
Quick one: If I am accepted for the Cornelius Vanderbilt Scholarship in Biomedical engineering, do I lose my scholarship if I choose my major? What if I am accepted for the Ingram or Chancellor’s Scholarships?
Long one: I have researched online about going pre-med but majoring in biomedical engineering at Vandy is pretty much suicide for your gpa and thus ruins your chances at a good medical school. But, do you think since Vandy is an esteemed school that the name will carry a slightly lower gpa for Medical Schools?
The three big scholarships stay even if you change your major/school. I don’t know if there are smaller ones for the engineering school that I haven’t heard about, but if so, it probably wouldn’t be given until you were an upperclassman. Anything they give to a high school senior will be flexible, since most people don’t tend to have their interests remain exactly the same from the time they are 18.
Biomedical engineering is definitely a bad choice for premed (unless maybe you’re the reverse of most people, and find humanities/bioscience classes harder than straight math). Obviously you have to take a greater number of tough quantitative classes, which tends to deflate the GPA. Everyone will take the weed-out pre-reqs. The difference is that A&S science majors tend to have upper levels in junior and senior year that aren’t curved as harshly, whereas the engineers will be struggling to avoid bad grades right up until the end. Med schools will give some GPA leeway coming from Vanderbilt, since they know it’s tougher. However, what really gets you is that you lose time to pursue ECs over the long term (research, volunteering, shadowing, etc.) so most engineers end up graduating with a lower GPA + a worse app, so even the subjective bump from being in a harder program doesn’t make things come out to be equal.
It pretty much depends on why you want to do it. If you’re just being cautious and trying to find something that has better job prospects than being like a bio major, that’s not a very good reason - overcommitting to having the backup plan will make it a lot more likely that you have to use your backup plan. If you want to do it because it’s kind of your thing (i.e. maybe you did biomed eng. research in high school, maybe you’ve already taken college courses through linear algebra and diff eq and love math, or maybe you’re really trying to pursue an MD/PhD or want to otherwise do biomed eng research as a physician) then that’s a fine reason. Many of the super-elite med schools even seek out students with quantitative backgrounds and cater to them (like the HST program at HMS), but if you go this route, you better be exceptional even among the Vanderbilt engineering student body.
@Morrison3650 : VU is no special case, engineering is hardly ever recommended for pre-healths anywhere due to the GPA sensitivity of medical schools. The GPA of engineering majors is likely to be lower than regular pre-healths (even other STEM majors) because of the heavier STEM courseload per semester. Technically natural and physical sciences classes grade a tad lower than engineering courses, but that is partly because of self-selection in the actual engineering courses and the differences in how they are graded (projects and HW make up a significant chunk of the course grade), but natural and physical science pre-meds can more easily balance so that they spread pre-health cores and any other STEMs out. Engineering majors usually do not have this luxury.
See, in high school my physics teacher was a Vanderbilt school of engineering alumni, and he taught his class as such. I killed his class (got a 5 on AP Physics 2 exam and highest gpa in his class), I love math and physics.
But i agree with your points, biomedical engineering is gpa suicide. Its good to know that i can still change majors and keep scholarships.
If you have a 5 on AP physics, and maybe like a 5 on BC calc, then you probably have a reasonably strong background so that you wouldn’t be struggling. It’s not so much that it’s GPA suicide, but more like the time investment towards a high GPA is greater, which leaves weaknesses in other areas, and sometimes makes life a lot less fun.
The most common premed majors are neuroscience and MHS (medicine, health, and society) but I wouldn’t completely give up your interests just because you’re trying to protect your GPA. You could major in physics in A&S. That won’t be an easy major either necessarily, but it would give you more flexibility in creating your schedule to avoid having a ton of hard classes at once, and it would also let you balance out your GPA with more humanities classes to fulfill the liberal arts requirements.
Physics is pretty flexible career-wise too if you decide not to pursue medicine, since finance/consulting/law schools like to recruit quantitative scientists.
Not inconvenient, tons of people do it. You just have to fill out some paperwork with the registrar. The only place it becomes less convenient is going from A&S/Peabody to engineering as a second semester sophomore or later, because you’ll sometimes need to take an extra year to finish all of the requirements.
@Morrison3650 : Physics 2 AP is the calculus sequence right (or is that the one YOU are referring to?)? Keep in mind that the competition at a selective college is different from HS (like the HS may indeed have driven students that are all in the AP class, but in a large lecture course at a selective college, you have a wide range backgrounds with most that are at least already “good” in the subject, and some of the very best prepared, not only having a 5 on AP or a 7 on IB, but maybe research experience in the area. In some of the engineering service courses a person with a 5 may only guarantee the upper guarantee the upper quartile or upper third of the class, and a surprising amount will not even get that). For example, your physics teacher may have taught well, but if put back in the VU context, and they were actually an instructor there, and gave the same material, it may not compare very well to the most rigorous instructors(so “it was taught as such” is vague as many faculty likely offered that course. The question ends up being: “Who did they teach like and how did it compare to other options?” In college, professor selection can make night and day differences) in the engineering physics sequence or even the physics sequence just a step down. Remember that AP often has some limitations in that the instructor wants a high pass rate so will at least subtly bias the teaching with that in mind. A college instructor has no such boundaries or pressures. Also, even at elite colleges which have a decent amount of grade inflation, STEM courses buck the pattern and the introductory and intermediates actually grade quite low. Like many difficult instructors physical sciences courses (especially physics oriented classes, maybe more so than chemistry) are going to design exams that challenge a Vanderbilt student body. Some may try to achieve “curvable” averages among people who take multiple choice exams well and have already performed very well in harder high school courses (including those directly related to the course). Given this, it can be rough.
I just advise being careful comparing HS courses to analogous STEM courses at selective colleges, Probably better to go in assuming that you are still new in the discipline (that you say…have AP credit in) but have some background to call on when necessary. Feeling too comfortable can be dangerous in STEM. I see so many people, maybe breeze through 1-2 exams in a course they have the credit in because material at beginning is familiar and treated at a similar level, but then the performance deteriorates because it either becomes kind of new or the instructor asks for a much deeper understanding of what you learned in HS and student is caught of guard.
I talked to one BME professor who is also on Vandy Medical school admission committee at Parents weekend and he said yes the rigor of your undergraduate study, ie. BME will be considered together with your GPA. But you need at least 3.7 for Vandy medical school, higher for ORM.
D is a chancellor scholar who is doing CS on premed track. During Intro to Engineering class, she had BME as one of her rotations. I asked her if she wants to do BME with premed as there are overlaps…she said it takes more credits to graduate with BME, and she is sticking with CS.
Some of her friends are changing majors after the 1st semester…e.g. premed track became PSY major after the weed out of sciences.
Weirdly enough, I feel like CS is honestly a better premed major in a way, especially for kids gunning for top med schools. Not to say that BME is bad; tons of people go that way, and the coursework is obviously more explicitly related to medicine. CS is uncommon enough to be unique and let you stand out, but top med schools recognize that CS-relevant research will be hugely important for the future of medicine, and in my experience, tend to seek people out with that type of academic narrative.
No question that CS majors are in demand in medicine now. Med schools are like Napa Valley vineyards in that they all have their own niche. Some what researchers, others look for leadership, service oriented applicants, or non-traditional students with more life experiences. Many of the new med schools simply want students who plan to work in primary care in underserved areas in their state.
While your major will be considered in your med school application a 3.7 MHS just sounds better than a 3.4 BME GPA to the ADCOM who has 15 minutes to review each application. As a MHS major you will have more time to build other areas of your application (research, service, leadership, shadowing, etc…). On the other hand a 3.7 BME trumps a 3.7 MHS with all other factors being equal.
@SincererLove : Yeah I think VU (and many/most high tier medical schools) med. just denies outright to most below that threshold (maybe 3.8 for ORM), which is senseless to me, but the medical school rankings are much more sensitive to stats than even undergraduate rankings which is why all of them do it. It is kind of dumb considering the level of scientific (and other) reasoning I would want a student at research intensive medical schools to have. With those thresholds, it will certainly discourage many from pursuing majors and courses that develop that because of the potential GPA penalty (STEM courses usually take more time than non, and then STEM courses with a big problem solving and critical thinking element take even more time because most students must adjust themselves to learning STEM that way. If you go on ratemyprofessor, you will often notice students kind of penalize instructors who require more problem solving than others in courses like biology, biochemistry, and organic chemistry which students expect, for some reason, to be memorization oriented. And yes, these expectations happens at elite institutions as well. I am still almost always shocked that students will say the key to success in something like organic is to “memorize everything”, but then that is just how teachers pitch the course at most schools, and it seems like the path of least resistance for the instructor and the students).
It is almost like trading off students who are well trained for students who look well-educated on paper. They need to work to fix that IMHO, and I think the MCAT helps partially, but at the end of the day, it is just one of the better done multiple choice standardized tests so is still lacking because there is no solicitation or premium put on actual thought process. Certain elimination and general standardized test taking strategies will still help tremendously on that type of exam (so you can just specifically prepare for that exam in a vacuum without having had particularly great coursework. This is especially the case for those already good/great at MC tests as most at any competitive institution are).
I will never truly understand their strange admissions criteria. By making the statistical thresholds so high they are making future candidates extremely risk averse/run off of fear and engage in academic decision making that is often the antithesis of aiming for a good education. The irony of it all is that most will arrive and the medical schools will have to reteach them all the content and several times the speed and volume which is a big turn-a-round from undergrad where they had to choose courseloads and courses carefully to maintain the desired GPA. Furthermore, most schools are moving towards PBL in the clinical curriculum which is apparently new and painful to many/most of the “amazing” admits who are used to pure lecture, some regular p-sets (mostly in chemistry, math, and physics, and not biology and neuro, at least not the lecture component). This would not be the case, if it wasn’t so risky to take courses that demanded a very high level of problem solving. I honestly suspect that the standards are so high (aside from just the ranking implications) because they believe most undergraduate life science majors are not heavily exposed to this (and have full control over their courseload) so feel they should have no problem maintaining a great GPA.
I applaud your daughter for at least sticking with at least some logic and problem solving intensive major despite what conventional wisdom says. And I agree that CS is extremely useful, and believe it or not, as a person who did computational chemistry as my MS, it can couple well with MANY areas of the life sciences and healthcare.
I meant the pre-clinical* (the STEM foundations) curriculum. And congratulations on your daughters success. I didn’t think she would have much of a problem. But do watch out for VU’s math courses. I imagine that like many elites, they vary dramatically by instructor (often things like gen. chem are fairly standard. Even at places with variances, they aren’t but so large because at the end of the day it is “just gen. chem”…a stupid course with loosely connected concepts and presentation of dumbed down applications) and can be very rough.
The new MCAT has placed added emphasis on data interpretation and problem solving (40%). Any classes that aid in the development of those skills will help on the MCAT. I guess it’s their response to pre-meds avoiding challenging classes and selecting faculty that allow them to only memorize data then spit it out on exams.
@bernie12 - My DS is planning to do BioChem major and his research is in Computational chem (he did one summer in HS and already started at Vandy). He thought of doing BME @ Hopkins but given the GPA requirements he decides to stick to BioChem @ Vandy.
@srk2017 : Yep, that is what happens. The thing about the new chemical biology and bchem major at VU, is that I don’t know how tough the new chemical biology courses are. I can tell you that gen. chem and ochem at VU are generally tamer than most elites, but I don’t think I would expect the same from the actual chemical biology courses as they are supposed to be different from most biology classes there and most of the other chemistry classes in that they focus on the problem solving and experimental analysis I mentioned. If your DS likes critical thinking in chemistry and biology (as suggested by his entertainment of BME), then it may just play into his hands. If not, I would naturally try to crush the gen. chem and ochem course and maybe take some of the upper division organic and bio-inorganic (which didn’t seem too tough there) as a buffer. I know the chemical biology upper division course at my alma mater is super tough and requires a completely different thinking style (okay, the woman makes them write an NSF style proposal. I need not not talk about her exams. Amazing teacher, but I feel bad for those used to memorizing or plugging and chugging through chemistry and biology) than the pre-requisite biochemistry course. Again, according to the proposal I read for that major before they formally went live with it, I would expect the same at VU. Chemistry can be just as tough on a GPA sometimes.
@bud123 : The old one had it too…however it and the new one are still MULTIPLE CHOICE in the science section. It just isn’t the same as asking someone to describe or draw a conclusion from data without the crutch of other options (some which are ridiculous). And no they didn’t memorize data, they just memorized content (like pathways and little details). You would actually be surprised at the number of life sciences faculty who choose to run their courses like that even at great schools. And those who don’t often come up against resistance especially if they try to change the tune in classical memorization oriented classes like general biology, physiology, molecular cell biology, developmental, and biochemistry. And unless students really like learning, emphasizing lots of problem solving in something like organic chemistry may not play well at certain schools because of how the MCAT de-emphasized it (though some schools haven’t gotten clever and have altered the organic sequence to incorporate lots of biology applications, which compensates for pre-med biochemistry courses that typically de-emphasize chemical mechanisms and logic in favor of memorization). The “good” biosciences classes certainly make MCAT prep easier, but for many, who may not have time or an inclination towards that type of learning in a course, will probably just save their GPA and rely upon their old test taking skills and an MCAT class that teaches them to do the analysis in a multiple choice context (as many students do not like difficult or particularly challenging free response questions that may ask them to deal with ambiguity, design an experiment, etc. Again, with MC, you have a bank of options to consider that function as cues. FR, just the prompt, the data, and your imagination).
@srk2017 , we have exchanged a few messages in other threads. Since your son is in Vandy, what does he feel about grade deflation/inflation at Vandy? My daughter will be pursuing premed next year. She has got a good merit scholarship from Pittsburgh and it is on top of her list. What would you/your son recommend for my daughter? Going to UPitt or JHU/Duke/Vandy should she be accepted there ? We are Indian American. Her stats are 4.64 wGPA and 1540 SAT. She is well positioned to get straight ‘A’s in seventh semester including 4 APs. Thank you
@bsmd2018 - There is some grade deflation at Vandy but I believe it’s not as bad as JHU or Duke. Vandy weed out classes (Bio and Chem) are much harder than AP or IB classes and my S had to study more than he thought he needed (he qualified for both Bio Chem Olympiads in junior year in HS). Pitt is good school for premed but JHU/Duke/Vandy her elite schools in comparison. GL.