<p>Hey</p>
<p>I recently went to the Open House Stony Brook was having, and it got me pretty interested in the school.</p>
<p>Just wondering though</p>
<p>Are the research opportunities as plentiful and available as they claimed them to be? Do Stony Brook students get accepted to top med schools? How is the honors college? Why are Stony Brook students so unhappy?</p>
<p>and uh, anything else you think I should know, please add</p>
<p>The research opportunities are pretty decent imo. I'm not in the honors college so I wouldn't know.</p>
<p>As for your question about if Stony Brook students get accepted to top medical schools. Let me say this, that it does not matter what undergraduate college you go to. It honestly does not matter if you go to Harvard, or Stony Brook if you want to go into the medical field. What does matter however is the GPA you attain, especially your science gpa, and your MCAT score. The medical schools will also look at the prereq courses for medical school and see how you did in those, namely orgo chem, bio, physics, etc. Be warned that Orgo Chem and a couple of other hard courses are known as the courses that "weed out" the strong students from the weak. If you do well in these courses, this tells the admissions committees that you can handle medical school workload. Proof that what undergraduate school you go to is irrelevant are the MCAT scores of different schools. The MCAT scores from medical school matriculants from Stony Brook and the matriculants from Harvard........the difference is negligible. Since the MCAT is a nation-wide test that pretty much all medical students take, it tells the admissions committee that the education isn't any different from school to school. Unless you just want to go to a big name school and show off or something, I'd go to a state school. Their tuition is much cheaper. </p>
<p>Also, get the idea of "top medical schools" out of your head because...there isn't one. If you're thinking that Harvard medical school is better than Stony Brook medical school, you're wrong. There are several tests that ALL medical students must take called the USMLE (US Medical Licensing Exam). There are 3 steps or parts to this exam that are taken at different points throughout your medical school education. Comparing these test scores from school to school, the difference is very minute. This tells us that the difference in education between each of these medical schools.....is pretty much non-existent.
So then, why is Harvard, Yale, Hopkins, etc. always considered the "big" names in the medical field. Why have you heard it SO many times. It is because of their residency programs and their hospitals, which all share the same name of the university they're tied to. Residency, if you don't already know this, and if you do then disregard what I'm about to say, is the several years of on-hands training you get after you graduate medical school. You get paid during this time, but not much. Residencies are also when you get training in a specific area of medicine, whether it be orthopedics, neurology, pediatrics, etc. Now yes, a lot of programs are at the "big" name schools, but not all of them. Emeregency Medicine is one example. One of the TOP residency programs in the nation for emergency medicine resides in University of Maryland...a state school. So.....the point in all of this is, don't get swept away by the names of schools when it comes to medicine. To be successful....just have self-discipline. Often times between pre-med students, the difference between a 3.2 and a 3.8 gpa is NOT intelligence. It's self-discipline, their drive, their motivation to become a doctor, knowing one day that they will save lives using what they're learning. I hope this helped.</p>
<p>As for the question regarding Stony Brook students being so unhappy...I'm not touching that one =X
I'll just say personally as a Stony Brook student, it's ok here.</p>
<p>Research here is definetly pretty good. If there is anything great about this school, it's the research. A lot of the projects are really interesting and are very pressing issues.</p>
<p>Agreed. Getting a lab is really easy and if you just go to like the head of the dept of the field that you are interested in, they will help you find a person to do research with. Most of the profs are researchers themselves so, just check online what projects are interesting to you and take the initiative to see these ppl. The problem with the profs being researchers is that in most cases, there research takes priority over their classes, so they may not be that readily available during their office hrs if you have questions. So take a highly respected research institution as a double edged sword.</p>