Hi, I’m currently a senior in high school that has been blessed to have been accepted to a number of great undergraduate universities. I will have the option to attend Johns Hopkins, Duke, Rice, and Brown next year and plan to double major in biology and music/economics/public health. I am looking for a semi-competitive but not cutthroat environment where I will be best prepared for medical school or possibly a MD/PhD program. I am interested in hearing your opinion about each school’s premed program and how the students do historically in terms of med school acceptance, GPA, MCAT especially from those of you that have attended the specific university.
Congratulations, these are all great schools, you will have plenty of opportunities and achieve whatever goals you have at any of them. For the record, I’m a 2013 Neuroscience grad who had the Hopkins premed experience and is now in medical school. Just to outright tell you: Hopkins is not cutthroat, people have social lives and Baltimore is not a war zone. These are the same three things people ask again and again, and they simply aren’t true. Make sure you ultimately base this important decision on real information with real students and not just hearsay from a friend of a friend. Look over these threads where there is more discussion on these common misconceptions:
Hopkins Program Benefits and general JHU questions (these are for neuroscience, but as a Biology major on a premed track many of these will apply to you): http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/johns-hopkins-university/1878658-johns-hopkins-vs-cornell.html#latest
Hopkins as a Premed “Pressure Cooker”: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/johns-hopkins-university/1880071-hopkins-vs-brown.html#latest
While Hopkins undergrad is often viewed by the public solely as an engineering and biological sciences school, many of the most popular and most respected programs (from academia’s perspective) are non-science related. International Relations (IR) is often the second (or so) most popular major at the school. Additionally, Economics, English, Political Science, History and Writing Seminars are often in the top ten most popular as well. Public Health (since you expressed interest) is very popular at the school (often third most popular major) partly because it is associated with the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the consistently highest-ranked graduate public health program in the country, Additionally, Public Health is often part of a double-major education at JHU (about 20-30% of students double major at Hopkins due to its flexible curriculum). As for music, the Peabody Conservatory is a member college of Hopkins, and if you’re familiar with musical education in this country, Peabody is considered one of the best with many Arts&Sciences/Engineering students taking classes and pursuing degrees there.
In regards to medical school, don’t forget that there are many paths to medical school and that students are accepted (in large quantities) from public, private, liberal arts schools, etc. with any type of major. Undergrad is meant to be its own unique experience, so don’t solely evaluate undergrad institutions with medical school in mind, that’s not the way to approach some of the most enjoyable years of your life. Nonetheless, Hopkins does very well with its students often having the highest per capita of applicants and very successful acceptance rates. Since there are so many premeds, the advising is top-notch and well organized with all the resources that you could want (http://studentaffairs.jhu.edu/preprofadvising/pre-medhealth/) Additionally, AMCAS (basically the overseer of medical schools) publishes data each year, but you’ll notice that the data you’re really looking for is not provided (how many applicants from each undergrad get in) and that data is not published for obvious reasons (think of the fallout!). Schools on their own will provide data, but there is significant manipulation of the data and it can be misleading since many students are out of school for years before applying/being accepted, and who’s to say they were accepted because of their undergrad and not other achievements since graduating. I wouldn’t base your decision on a few numbers that are very contentious, but here is whatever information is available from AMCAS: https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/ You can look around JHU premed advising and the Internet to find school’s posted figures (if they even publish them), but take everything you find with many grains of salt.
Lastly, if you are interested in going the MD/PhD route then you MUST have significant research experiences under your belt, and as you’ll read in the links I posted above, Hopkins is THE research giant in terms of annual spending (by a landslide), and the opportunities to start as early as freshman year with research are endless. You will find just about any topic of research being conducted between JHU and the NIH, which has many of its labs in Baltimore due to its proximity to NIH headquarters in Bethesda.
Hope this helps, and let me know if you have additional questions that aren’t addressed in the provided links.