<p>Thanks Poeme I understand that I just feel like I have already decided what i want to do and in order for it to work out I have to start planning immediately. And most of the courses I’ll take in college aren’t really comparable to working with a patient which is what I want to do so I don’t think I would change my mind. But I am going to keep an open mind and try not to freak out too much about grades.</p>
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<p>Your older self will probably chuckle at this sentiment.</p>
<p>I’m sure you realize that many physicians today feel like they are in a dead end jobs. Longer hours, decreasing pay, increasing paper work and decreasing patient interaction. This trend in medicine will worsen. </p>
<p>The excitement of ascending though med school and residency is often followed by decades of stagnation and monotony. It’s not for everybody.</p>
<p>I have a friend who is a neurosurgeon and he often compares it to blue collar work - a lot of monotonous and repetitious tasks. Hours upon hours. </p>
<p>OP wants to go to Princeton for the perceived prestige. That is what it all boils down to. I don’t think she will be happy going somewhere else because she will feel she chose something lesser. Her op says that she feels it is more prestigious than Columbia for med school admissions and that going to Brown would sacrifice Princeton prestige. I have never heard that med schools split hairs about which prestigious colleges are the very most prestigious, but that is what is important to her at this point in time and her week is up.</p>
<p>plzhelpmeh: </p>
<p>Unlike you, I am an adult, and I have seen lots and lots of people go through college, medical school, medical practice, and medical academia.</p>
<p>Here’s why your initial (and subsequent) posts offended me enough to make me be, yes, rude about your obvious immaturity:</p>
<p>There is not one word in there about where you will learn the most, where you will be challenged to do your best work, where you will be most able to become the person you want to be. All you talk about is which – of four ultra-high prestige options – will impress medical school admissions committees the most, and which will make it easiest to obtain a high GPA and to do as little as possible that does not have a direct connection to medical school admissions.</p>
<p>Obviously, you are a talented student with a lot to offer, otherwise there’s no way you would be deciding among Princeton, Penn, Columbia, and Brown. You have absolutely no reason to doubt that you will get into one or more medical schools. As you have seen, 90%+ of the students who go to the schools you are choosing among who stick with the pre-med program go to medical school, and you don’t see yourself as someone who is not going to stick with the pre-med program. To my mind, someone with your abilities and opportunities should be focused on achieving the most you possibly can, challenging yourself to be great, but you seem to be interested in achieving the least you possibly can. </p>
<p>That saddens me. It certainly isn’t the attitude that people who become great doctors have when they are 17. In my experience, they are way more ambitious than that. They want to win the Nobel Prize. They want to eliminate malaria and AIDS. They want to write novels and symphonies while they practice medicine. It’s not that they don’t care about getting into medical school, but getting into medical school is not the limit of their ambitions, and they don’t back away from challenges because they are afraid of taking even a small risk.</p>
<p>It also saddens me that, for all your likely analytic abilities, your analysis of your options is so skewed towards the irrelevant. At the level of medical school admissions, there is no meaningful difference in prestige among your four options. Just stop thinking about that. All of them offer prestige, but what is going to matter most is what you have achieved and who you have become, not where you achieved it. That’s why, as 45 Percenter advised, the ONLY meaningful question for you to ask is where you are going to feel most comfortable and most inspired. Because that’s what could ultimately make the difference between lots of options for medical school (including “prestige” ones) and merely getting into a medical school somewhere. And – in the worst, highly unlikely case, if it turns out you struggle with college-level science – it could make the difference between qualifying for medical school admission or not.</p>
<p>As for factors like applying to medical school after graduating: As far as I can tell – and a lot of my friends have children in medical school now – the majority of students everywhere, certainly in the Ivy League, apply to medical school the year after they graduate from college, or the year after that. I don’t think many of them think they are “wasting” a year of their lives – what they tend to be doing during that year is medical research, for which they are paid. They do it that way because they believe it makes them better candidates. It also prevents them from having to “waste” their last fall semesters in college doing medical school applications and interviews. (A top medical school candidate would have to miss a lot of classes and activities, and struggle to get work done, right at the time she is able to learn and do the most.)</p>
<p>I would be somewhat surprised if there is a meaningful difference between Princeton and the other colleges in terms of when people apply to medical school. But if there is, and Princeton students tend to delay applying, I suggest it may be because Princeton’s strict senior thesis requirement means that every Princeton pre-med is doing impressive research and writing her senior year, and they want to be able to show medical schools the completed work when they apply. In other words, the delay may be because they are getting more out of Princeton than most students at other colleges get out of their schools.</p>
<p>What you mention @plzhelpme is the problem with medical education. Doing well in premed courses and medical school don’t make necessarily make you a good doctor. You really don’t know what you are getting into until you walk (or crash) into residency. I have heard countless stories of how wonderful medical students have turned into very mediocre or even outright lousy residents. It’s hard to know what medicine is what you want to do even for the most motivated, but I frequently meet people at Penn and other top schools who want to go into medicine for all the wrong (or poorly thought out) reasons.</p>
<p>I really do mean it when I say everything happens for a reason. My experience at Penn is nothing like I would have thought it would have been, but in the most important aspects it has been better. The changes I made turned out better than I had ever imagined in my original plan. Things that I was upset about along the way turned out to be the things that pushed me towards where I am today.</p>