Premed at UCSD

Hi all current students and/or prospective students who know a little about this topic,

I was wondering what premed is like at UCSD. Is there a premed committee that can help you walk through the path to medical school? Also, is premed super duper competitive here? How challenging would you compare it with premed at UCLA? Are there abundant of resources here for premed students like internships, hospital shadow/volunteer/internships? Please give me as much information as possible!

Hi! I’m a second year premed in Revelle, majoring in biotech. UCSD is well-known as a premed factory, and 1 in every 100 American med school enrollees last year went here. I’ll do my best to answer each of your questions.

While there isn’t a specific premed committee, we do have four Health Professions advisors at the Career Services Center. Each college’s academic advisors, and advisors from some departments, are also generally knowledgeable about pre-med life and classes. There are also several premed orgs on campus which you don’t necessarily have to be part of to benefit from (I went to an AED networking event last year; some others are AMSA, APAMSA, HMP3, and PhiDE, to name a few).

Premed is competitive in the sense that it’s definitely challenging and you’re expected to keep up. I wouldn’t call it cutthroat; it’s more like everyone’s equally screwed and eager to work together. If you do fall behind, it’s not the end of the world and professors are pretty accessible to help you out. I don’t know enough about UCLA’s curriculum to compare the two, but I doubt it’s significantly easier or harder.

Local resources probably give UCSD an edge over every other school in California. If you want to do research or internships on campus, there’s no shortage of professors creating opportunities for undergrads (being top 5 in research funding in the nation trickles down to us). If you’d rather research off-campus, the Torrey Pines/Sorrento Valley area near campus is the #2 biotech hub in the nation with tons of startups and corporations. There are also major biomedical research institutes within walking distance (Salk (where my roommate works) SBPMDI, Sanford Consortium, TSRI, LIAI). For clinical experience, research, volunteering, and shadowing, there are three hospital complexes on campus (UCSD Jacobs Medical Center/Thornton, Scripps Memorial, VA Medical Center (where I volunteer)), one walking distance away (Scripps Green), and one connected by shuttle (UCSD Hillcrest Medical Center). There are also on-campus outpatient facilities where students volunteer or research (Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center, Shiley Eye Institute, Moores Cancer Center). In other words, if you can’t find an opportunity it’s because you didn’t look.

I would highly discourage anyone from doing premed at UCSD. The first hurdle in getting into med school is to have a high GPA. This is very hard to do at most UC schools, and particularly at UCSD. The next hurdle is getting good letters of recommendation. Again, very hard to come by at UCSD where you have very limited interaction with faculty due to extremely large class sizes and professors whose priorities are research and grad students. Lastly you need to score well on your MCAT- this can be done anywhere by plowing through review books.

The proof is in the pudding. UCSD has an atrocious med school acceptance rate. Last I heard it was around 40%. Given the very gifted group of students that enter there as freshmen this is just an abysmal record. For comparison small liberal arts schools like Pomona and Davidson routinely have 95% acceptance rates.

I know this is hard to hear given all the mythology surrounding the likes of UCSD and UCLA such as “they are great to do premed at because they have a medical school”. FYI: I did premed at Berkeley (do not recommend it- I got lucky) and was on the admissions committee at a top 30 med school.