Thank you! I️ have gone through many threads on the individual schools but I️ posted this because I’m interested on how they are compared to each other rather than information about the schools individually
@warblersrule you attend/attended duke? Could you share more about the school outside the majors?
This has already been said, but I’ll add to the chorus until maybe it sinks in:
Unless you get significant financial aid that make the privates cost the same, or maybe a little bit more than UT Austin, then you should go to UT Austin. Full stop.
@harvardandberkeley okay so hypothetically speaking if I️ was able to get enough aid/financial aid from the other schools how would your opinion change?
@Sirens56 If money were truly not an issue (meaning scholarships make all costs in the same ballpark) - are you interested in the best school? Or a good school where you are most likely to get the highest GPA for med school apps? I’m just a little confused. Duke is the “best” school in the group, I think followed by Notre Dame, with Emory not far behind. But I’m unclear what your priority is and if you feel there’s any chance that you may get to college and not want to pursue premed, in which case you’ll need to make a new plan at the time. If that happens, you’ll want to be in a place where you’ll be happy. Have you visited all 5 schools? Just curious which ones appealed to you in terms of location, campus, culture. I appreciate your long term vision, but 4 years is still a long time and you want to be happy during those 4 years:)
“Duke is the “best” school in the group, I think followed by Notre Dame, with Emory not far behind.”
Perhaps, if you are a slave to USNWR. These schools are peers.
Go where you can get a good GPA.
@rjkofnovi Perhaps I could have worded my comment better. By “best” I meant hardest to get into – lowest acceptance rate, highest mid-50 test scores, etc. (You don’t need to look at USN to get those numbers, especially if you just lived through the app process last year). In this case, I would agree with you that Notre Dame and Emory are more similar. Don’t agree they are on the same level with Duke, which in my opinion is a peer to the Ivies/Stanford/MIT. ND and Emory at one level lower. People define best/better schools in different ways, so I’ll agree to disagree, because not looking to have a school debate here. My question to the OP remains the same, which is… what is their true focus? Because as I said in a prior comment, these are all great schools and if they work hard they can find success at any of them.
@suzy100 <<>>
That is meaningless data.
The student needs to go where he/she is most likely going to get the best GPA.
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to help me into a nice med school.
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All US med schools are nice. We don’t have any “not nice” or subpar med schools here.
What is your parents’ budget for college?
The goal is to go where you’ll get the best GPA and for little/no debt.
Going to the “best” undergrad as a premed is short-sighted. Right now, there’s a Vandy applicant that I know who has a borderline GPA who’s understandably upset because he has no med school acceptances yet. He sees his younger sibling with a big merit scholarship at a state flagship with a better GPA. The med school applicants in my facebook premed group all have at least one med school acceptance. Most have multiple acceptances. One group member is a MD/PhD applicant with 4 acceptances so far.
Go to a good school where you can shine.
" Don’t agree they are on the same level with Duke, which in my opinion is a peer to the Ivies/Stanford/MIT. ND and Emory at one level lower."
Duke is not a peer of HYPSM. Sorry.
“Right now, there’s a Vandy applicant that I know who has a borderline GPA who’s understandably upset because he has no med school acceptances yet. He sees his younger sibling with a big merit scholarship at a state flagship with a better GPA.”
I’m surprised that he/she even applied to medical school with a lower GPA from Vanderbilt. Many of the so called “elite” private schools discourage their students from applying to medical school if they think they will be rejected. After all, it’s very important for them to have a high acceptance rate for students to help keep the school’s image up.
Go to where you can get the best GPA you can. My cousin just graduated from Florida State University and has a few options. He choose FSU Cheaper, fun, and better chance to get into medical school) at the time over a much higher ranked Michigan with no merit, Georgetown with a good amount of merit, and Wake Forest with a good amount of merit. His sister graduated from Emory and could not get into medical school. She is getting a master in Psychology.
@rjkofnovi Again…agree to disagree. You seem to feel strongly and are entitled to your opinion. I personally have no ties to Duke but I have formed my opinion based on information available about the various schools (including resources and student data, not ratings/rankings). One of the things I used to form my opinion is that Duke is harder to get into than Cornell and Dartmouth and has same admission rate as Penn (9%). I believe it is a peer and that’s my feedback to the OP. Sorry.
" One of the things I used to form my opinion is that Duke is harder to get into than Cornell and Dartmouth and has same admission rate as Penn (9%)"
That seems to be your main criterion. My main criterion is academic strength. They are all peers in that regard.
“Right now, there’s a Vandy applicant that I know who has a borderline GPA who’s understandably upset because he has no med school acceptances yet. He sees his younger sibling with a big merit scholarship at a state flagship with a better GPA.”
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I'm surprised that he/she even applied to medical school with a lower GPA from Vanderbilt. Many of the so called "elite" private schools discourage their students from applying to medical school if they think they will be rejected. After all, it's very important for them to have a high acceptance rate for students to help keep the school's image up <<<
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I was probably too vague. The student’s GPA isn’t low, it’s fine but it’s borderline for med schools…about 3.6 science and cum. MCAT is fine…around 315 (being vague for anonymity purposes)
As for Vandy’s rep… the parent of this student told me that they are so upset they want to call Vandy up and tell them that they’re not as prestigious as they think they are. :))
But really, the parent and applicant are realizing that if they hadn’t been so enamored with the idea of going to a top 20 undergrad as an impressive route to med school, the GPA would likely have been higher.
There’s a parent on this forum whose premed child went to UChicago (full pay) and also ended up with borderline med school stats. Wasn’t interviewed by ANY MD med schools…even tho applied to about 30 MD med schools. Did end up with 1 or 2 DO acceptances which is fine, but the parents were disappointed because surely they thought that being a student from a Top 5 school would pave the way into a MD school. If this same student had attended of their best instate univs, likely the result would have been different.
Getting back to Vandy…Like most Committees, Vandy’s probably ranks its med school applicants. If so, some have to be in the middle or bottom…even if they have good overall stats. When dealing with a group that survived premed weeding, and the caliber of Vandy’s students, not getting at least the “strongly recommend”** or similar notation can be a death knell. <<=== this is what many premeds and their parents don’t understand.
Some Committes rank their med school applicants as follows:
Top 10% Top Recommend (or some other label)
Next 15% Strongly Recommend
Next 60% Recommend ~~ (Some schools include another level: Recommend with Reservations)
Last 5% DNR (do not recommend )
BTW…the vandy student has learned that they’re now on the WL for their state’s 3rd best med school. Likely will get accepted as holding a place in the upper 1/3 of the WL. Still also hoping for an acceptance from an OOS public med school. Was rejected or not interviewed at their top 2 state meds. Only received 3 interviews.
But contrast that with one of the students in my premed FB group. Mid-tier state flagship student, same MCAT score, 3.9 GPA, currently holds 4 acceptances and is waiting to hear back after interviewing at Georgetown, UVA, Einstein, and URoch. (This isn’t the MD/PhD student mentioned above who also holds 4 acceptances and is waiting to hear back after interviewing at Harvard, JHU and Mayo.)
Won’t matter for medical school admissions. If the other options you listed would mean going into six figures of debt, I would pick UT-Austin. Having to juggle medical school debt + 100K in undergrad student loans is not pretty.
@mom2collegekids your post should be required reading for all pre-med students.
A question and a comment. The question is does anyone think there is a chance med school admissions start looking more carefully at GPA? My guess is no, since the people doing it came through this same system. MCATs are presumed sufficient to normalize.
The comment is my experience knowing peers going through this is a long time ago, but back then a couple of then kids at top ten schools with not great enough grades did a few years in a research lab, which seemed to bolster their admissions credentials to get them over the hump. Assuming a student is willing to do this for a few years, is this still a viable option?
waitingmomla, you seem to equate selectivity with quality on a linear plain. While selectivity is indeed one of the many criteria that comprise institutional quality, there are many other criteria, some tangible while others not so much, that play an equally, if not more, important part in determining overall institutional excellence. For example, Caltech and Chicago are more selective than Stanford and Princeton respectively, but are they better?
Needless to say, our opinion means very little to the OP. I would think the OP, as a premed, is far more concerned with the opinion of medical school admissions committees. In other words, the reputation of those universities according to academe. As far as academe is concerned, all five of the universities that the OP is looking into are considered peers. According to the US News academic reputation rating (on a 5.0 scale):
Duke University 4.4
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 4.4
University of Notre Dame 4.1
Emory University 4.0
University of Texas-Austin 4.0
For what its worth, I think Duke, Emory and Michigan offer more opportunities than Notre Dame and Texas because they have large medical complexes on campus, and that usually means more life science/medical research and internship options for undergraduate students.