<p>I was just wondering how good of an idea it is to go to MIT with medical school in mind. I've heard stuff about MIT having a low acceptance rate to med school as opposed to other schools and that it is so hard (A at Harvard = C at MIT) that your GPA might suffer and med schools wont be happy. Just looking for a discussion on doing any major at MIT as a premed.</p>
<p>Btw, I will most likely be doing Course 2A (the one with BiomedE, MechE, and premed).</p>
<p>owow..well i hear med schools are a little more lenient with engineering students in terms of GPA..yes and i also heard about MIT not having the greatest acceptance rate into med schools..but u should be all right as long as you maintain your grades and your MCAT is great</p>
<p>Last year, 83.6% of MIT premeds were accepted to medical school. Of those who utilized the MIT Careers Office's premedical advising service, 89.7% were accepted. (Numbers here</a>.) That's in line with the acceptance rates reported by MIT's peer schools.</p>
<p>^^^That's more assuring. Could you give me other reassurances about doing premed at MIT? I'm thinking as long as I apply myself super hard and not take on too much at first, I can get used to the workload and get a good GPA that good med schools will take right?</p>
<p>In general, yes, especially if you have respect for the difficulty going in. It helps that your first semester is pass-no record, so you can get used to MIT while not having to worry about your grades (unless you want to apply to Johns Hopkins for medical school).</p>
<p>If you'd like information specifically about 2A premeds, you should definitely email [url=<a href="http://www.mitadmissions.org/Melis.shtml%5DMelis%5B/url">http://www.mitadmissions.org/Melis.shtml]Melis[/url</a>]. She did 2A, although she's not going directly to medical school because she won a Rhodes scholarship.</p>
<p>Haha, I just saw the great premed discussion on the MIT Vs Harvard thread. That's the sort of discussion I was looking for. If you want to move it over here, that's fine. What I seem to get from what you are saying is that if you take seriously the premed requirements and what it takes to get into Med school you will do very well. You counter that with the idea by saying that mentality is not the same mentality with MIT culture. Is this correct?</p>
<p>I seem to think even though that may be the case, it's not like everyone on other campuses are trying to get As and do everything that will look good for grad school. At most schools, people are trying to learn and do ECs that they enjoy. So couldn't you say that really the premed mentality is out of place in a lot of places? But then really, its not like the architecture kids are a lot like the engineering kids at MIT are they? One group loves drawing while the other is really involved with physics and math. So perhaps premed is just another type of group. I'm not arguing I'm just wondering politely :-)</p>
<p>Something to consider in this discussion is that leadership positions probably are easier to come by at MIT.</p>
<p>bballdude:</p>
<p>MIT definitely has a variety of different subcultures each with their own idiosynscracies. The East campus students heavy in Course 6 and hacking, West campus students, more into science and management (probably a somewhat outdated classification, as it is now more than 25 years since I attended MIT) ... There is no such thing as a typical MIT student. But they do have some traits in common. They all share the same drive to try something new, to come up with something nobody has ever done before, take risks... Everybody collaborates, you simply can't succeed at MIT if you are not a team player. </p>
<p>My D has been determined to become a physician since she suffered from chronic Lyme disease as a freshman in high school. She did not really pick MIT as her first choice initially because she had no real interest in engineering. After visiting MIT and meeting life science students such as Mollie, she realized she could thrive at MIT even if she had no interest in building a robot or had ever programmed a single line of code. She was good in math and physics but is nowhere near the level of some of the students she has met. But she does not mind. She gets help on her math and physics psets from other students in her dorm and helps them with chem and bio in return. It all works out in the end. I am sure that she could have found a college with less work or stress, but she loves the intellectual challenge. She did get into several Ivies but would not have made a different choice with the benefit of hindsight. She is very organized and knows what it takes to get into med school. She knows she needs decent grades and that there are no gimmies at MIT. At the same time, she is already involved in more medical related stuff than she could dream of. It is very easy to get to do advanced research, even as a freshman. Because the life science departments are somewhat smaller (she is a Course 9 major) , she gets to know the professors and their labs very closely. She is working with an HMS professor on a new type of PET-MRI scanner for brain imaging. She is also volunteering at Mass General in the emergency radiology department where there are a number of MIT trained physicians. She has been shadowing an anesthesiologist during surgeries. She would do even more if there more hours in the day.</p>
<p>^^Thanks so much! That's really what I wanted to hear. I just wanted to know if there were successful premed students at MIT. It seems that there is a lot of evidence for both sides. If you dont mind me asking, what year is she and has her GPA been suffering because of MIT? Suffering in the sense of how med school would view it.</p>
<p>^^some premeds are confident they can get a near-perfect GPA, even at MIT.</p>
<p>
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^^some premeds are confident they can get a near-perfect GPA, even at MIT.
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</p>
<p>Yeah, well, it's a bad assumption for a naive prefrosh.</p>
<p>There are vast opportunities for premed students at MIT, and most premeds (whether the "stereotypical" or "non-stereotypical" type, to use my earlier phrases) get in somewhere.</p>
<p>Some premed students let their medical school ambitions eclipse all the rest of what MIT has to offer, or make themselves unpleasant to others in their ambitions (I have seen a premed trying to scare classmates before a test, presumably in the hope that they would do worse relative to her as a result). But there is not a need to do this, and quite a lot of premeds do not! You CAN have it both ways, it just requires a more careful balancing act. That was all that I was really trying to get at in the other thread! :)</p>
<p>Some of the interesting medicine-related opportunities for premeds include:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Research in top life science labs</p></li>
<li><p>Research or volunteer work at one of the many fine local hospitals</p></li>
<li><p>MedLinks (being a first-aid-type person for your living group, trained by MIT Medical)</p></li>
<li><p>MIT EMS (MIT's student ambulance/EMT service, which trains and certifies student EMTs during IAP)</p></li>
<li><p>Opportunity to take classes at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology, which offers many graduate degrees in the medical sciences, including an MD</p></li>
</ul>
<p>If you're the average person (not freakishly intelligent), would trying to get a perfect/ near perfect GPA cost you all your social life? I'm just trying to see how hard it is so I can make mental preparations for getting B's and C's (I come from a school with pretty high GPA inflation). </p>
<p>On a slightly unrelated note, if I took the advanced standing test out of 7.012 and got a B or C, does that grade stay with me or can I just take the actual class and override it?</p>
<p>If you take the advanced standing exam during orientation, you will get a P if you pass -- pass/no record applies to ASEs as well as to classes first term freshman year.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If you're the average person (not freakishly intelligent), would trying to get a perfect/ near perfect GPA cost you all your social life? I'm just trying to see how hard it is so I can make mental preparations for getting B's and C's (I come from a school with pretty high GPA inflation).
[/quote]
This question is basically impossible to answer.</p>
<p>(I'm speaking for course 7/9-type classes here, since this is a thread about premeds.) Most of your grades come from tests, although some classes have a minor problem set component, so it really matters how good you are at the types of tests the biology and BCS departments administer. Generally, these are problem-solving-based tests rather than fact-based tests, and are often open-book and sometimes open-notes -- to some degree, spending several extra hours studying for these tests is less useful than having good problem-solving skills in the first place.</p>
<p>In terms of numbers, the general grade distribution in a bio/BCS/chem class is something like 30% As, 50% Bs, and 20% Cs and below. So it's not impossible to get a high GPA, and getting a high GPA doesn't really involve giving up a social life -- it involves training yourself to be very good at problem-solving.</p>
<p>My D is still a freshman although she has sophomore standing, so this is her first semester with grades. She has no expectation of getting a perfect GPA, just hoping to get more As than Bs in her science classes, which by itself is not a given. Together with UROPs and HASS classes which are somewhat easier to get good grades in, she hopes to do well. </p>
<p>MIT has some unique options which allow students to take harder classes without necessarily penalizing their GPA. This semester, my D took advantage of an exploratory option for organic chemistry which crams about a year's worth of material at virtually any other school, into one semester at MIT. Most students take organic chem in their second year, so she knew it would be tough. If she gets a B or below she will just retake the class in the fall, with no penalty. Rather than meeting the premed chem requirements with as second semester of organic chem, most med schools will allow you to take biochemistry instead. You can then elect to take biochemistry in the biology department (no psets) which may be a better choice for many premeds as opposed to the very demanding 5.13 second semester orgo. class. </p>
<p>Some of the hardest classes to get As are the GIRs because they are curved against nearly the entire class. Clearly you are not competing against the math Olympiad types in the intro classes because they have generally taken the ASEs for these classes, but the average student at MIT is obviously very strong in math and physics. If you are a life science major, you may have a tough time getting an A when the average on intro math classes is a 90. If you use AP credits for 18.01 and 8.01 or can pass the ASEs, you can then take 18.02 and 8.02 P/F first semester. </p>
<p>If you are a masochist as a premed and want to take the computing bootcamp of 6.001 for the fun of it, you can take it as P/F junior or senior year. You generally can't take premed or major requirements on a P/F basis.</p>
<p>The statistics show that the GPA for all students increases gradually from frehsman to sophomore and beyond. As you get into smaller classes in your major department you generally end up doing better. Grade distribution for every class as well as average time required for study from prior years is available to students so you can see what you are getting into.</p>
<p>
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Grade distribution for every class as well as average time required for study from prior years is available to students so you can see what you are getting into.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Grade distribution can be highly misleading though. It doesn't account for people who dropped the class because they were failing (how much of an impact this makes varies by class - some classes have no drops, some have large numbers).</p>
<p>Sophomore exploratory is a wonderful thing, and I encourage anyone going to MIT to take advantage of it.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Rather than meeting the premed chem requirements with as second semester of organic chem, most med schools will allow you to take biochemistry instead.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I thought both were required?</p>
<p>Also, 7.05 (that's the bio department's biochem) is absolutely not a gimme. I'm awful at chem, so I'm sure that if I'd taken 5.13 I would have found it much harder than 7.05, but one should not take 7.05 expecting it to be easy.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Most of your grades come from tests, although some classes have a minor problem set component, so it really matters how good you are at the types of tests the biology and BCS departments administer.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yep.</p>
<p>I struggled a lot with the tests (in BCS, primarily). It was very, very frustrating. There were classes where profs would compliment me on my understanding of the material, and then I'd end up with a B or C in the class, based on the tests, while people who had seemed to me to not understand what was going on in class very well got better grades. I will note that my experience in this regard was not typical, and that I still don't understand why I had so much trouble doing well, or even adequately, on the tests.</p>
<p>One word of caution: Harvard and Johns Hopkins Medical Schools request your "hidden" grades from freshman year, so if you plan to apply to these places you need to be careful freshman year too.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice. Do they calculate hidden grades for your GPA as well?</p>
<p>hm...never thought about that one.</p>
<p>You might just call up Harvard or Johns Hopkins and ask them that.</p>
<p>I don't believe Harvard requests hidden grades from MIT although Johns Hopkins has been known to do so. </p>
<p>Nobody knows exactly what each medical school does with the GPA or individual grades although they generally assess the science GPA separately from overall GPA. Some provide a boost for notoriously difficult schools like MIT. Harvard in particular admits a substantial number of MIT premeds.</p>
<p>^^I heard this from a Harvard medical school student who had been a MIT undergrad. And yes, you're right, HMS sometimes makes exceptions for MIT students with lower GPAs. Like I said before, I met a guy who got a 3.8/5.0 GPA as a Bio major at MIT and got into Harvard Medical School.</p>