Pre-med rankings

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
21

<p>Hey all, Sorry for such a late response but finals studying has been a *****.</p>

<p>I would to clarify a my responses/statements because I feel like NorCalguy and Sakky have miscontrued my analysis
In an earlier post, I said that Wash U has one of the best Premed Programs in the country(the competition is very intense and it has one of the the toughest medical schools go get into)--however, I never made a link between having high standards and having a great premed program.
My first reponse was refuting "Princeton, which does not have a medical school at all, and being an undergrad at a place in no way means you are going to medical school there. Example Wash U has 120 students per class, and as cited above 9 of these slots are filled by Wash U grads. Harvard Medical School rejects the vast majority of Harvard undergrads who apply. The same is true everywhere"-I wanted to make it clear that reason why nine undergraduates from wash u received acceptance was a result of their high qualifications.
My reason for stating why Wash U has the best premed program is because of the nature of science classes here. We have one of the best chemistry departments in the country ( in addition to biology). These courses are simply constructed to teach students to memorize or solve problems through a certain method or procedure. However, these classes teach students to think about abstract concepts in an untraditional manner (which is very helpful in building critical thinking skills) The program is very focused on getting its students to learn well and be prepared for the stress of medical school. I never refuted Sakky's statement that schools like wash u , u chicago, etc have no added premed value. This is true. The grade that you receive is not inflated by any means. You may have worked hard and received a C. However, you may have worked hard and received an A. My argument--which has been the same argument from day one----is that graduating from here (going through the premed program) will give any undergraduate more than enough preparation for medical school. However, the quality of medical school you get accepted is ultimately based on grades/MCAT score that the individual student can pull off</p>

<p>----I hope that clears some stuff up ----</p>

22

<p>University of Rochester is a good premed school</p>

23

<p>Well, rangerrick, I'm afraid I still have to dispute, if slightly, some of the conclusions that you have made. </p>

<p>Specifically, consider your quote of "I wanted to make it clear that reason why nine undergraduates from wash u received acceptance was a result of their high qualifications". I don't dispute that many premeds at WU are indeed extremely qualified and that is one reason for why there are 9 of them in the entering class at WU Med. </p>

<p>However, there is also a confounding statistical factor - namely you also have to look at where people tend to apply in the first place. One reason why WU Med has more WU premeds in its entering class than it has premeds from other top schools is that, for whatever reason, a lot of premeds from other schools simply don't apply to WU Med in the first place. I don't want to speculate as to why this might be, but the data seems to indicate that WU Med doesn't attract the plethora of applicants the way other top med-schools do.</p>

<p>For example, consider Princeton premeds. As you can see, from 1998-2003, not all that many Princeton premeds applied to WU Med as you might have thought. WU Med was only the 19th most popular medical-school for Princeton premeds to apply to. WU Med was beat out by more highly ranked medical schools (i.e. Harvard, Johns Hopkins), and less highly ranked medical schools (i.e. Mt. Sinai, Albert Einstein, Tufts etc. - these are good med schools, but not as good as WU). One could say that Princeton premeds are biased towards East Coast medical schools, until you notice that even Stanford and UCSF got more Princeton applications than WU did. </p>

<p><a href="http://web.princeton.edu/sites/hpa/data98-03.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://web.princeton.edu/sites/hpa/data98-03.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Or take a look at the Berkeley premed data. Obviously Berkeley premeds will tend to apply to West Coast schools than they would to WU. And it may not be a total surprise to see that Harvard and Johns Hopkins got more Berkeley applicants than did WU. Yet, even Yale, Duke, Michigan and Cornell get more Berkeley applicants than does WU. </p>

<p><a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/top20.stm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/top20.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>One could try to use the 'calibration' argument - that perhaps maybe a lot of premeds aren't applying to WU because they don't think they will get in, so they don't feel like wasting the application fee. Yet, that argument seems highly dubious to me, simply because I doubt that one could really calibrate your application in such a finely-tuned manner. For example, does it really make sense that a Princeton premed might not think he's good enough to get into WU (and so doesn't apply), but yet thinks he's good enough to have a shot at Johns Hopkins or UCSF and so chooses to apply there? Does it really make sense for a Berkeley premed to calibrate his applications such that he doesn't think he's good enough to get into WU, but does think he's good enough to have a shot at Duke? That doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.</p>

<p>Look, I don't want to overly speculate as to why these premeds at other schools aren't applying to WU at the rates you might expect. The point is that for whatever reason, they're not applying. WU Med is one of the most popular, if not the most popular med-school for WU premeds to apply to. However, I have seen the Harvard premed data (too bad they don't publish it online) and WU is rather low on the list in terms of being the most popular med-school to apply to for Harvard premeds. </p>

<p>The point is, a big reason as to why WU Med has lots of WU premeds in its entering class is simply because lots and lots of WU premeds apply to WU Med in the first place. Relatively speaking, Harvard premeds don't apply to WU Med that much (they apply to places like Johns Hopkins, Yale, Columbia, etc. more than they do WU) and so it's therefore unsurprising that not that many Harvard students are at WU Med. For whatever reason, they decided not to apply in the first place.</p>