<p>Hello, i'm a junior in high school listing the colleges that I want to apply to.
I live in Texas and was wondering if going to a big school like University of Houston compared to a really competitive school like Trinity University or Baylor. </p>
<p>The thing is, I'm really interested in majoring in Neuroscience. I enjoy the depth and complexity of mixing psychology with biology&chemistry. </p>
<p>But that major is only offered at TCU(private), Baylor(private), Trinity(private).
If I was to choose University of Houston(public), I would probably want to major in Biochemistry.</p>
<p>Also, I feel like the private schools would be more competitive hence, I might not have as high a GPA as I would have in maybe a bigger school.
But, I do enjoy learning in a smaller demographic, which would be a reason to attend a private pre-med program.</p>
<p>The thing is, all the private schools would ,of course, require immersive amounts of loans. </p>
<p>My primary question here is, which do you think is a better pathway into getting into medical school? </p>
<p>Private schools, while pretty competitive, do offer a lot of resources. They also don’t try to weed out the majority of their premeds, like some public schools do (the UC’s). There will be some weeding out regardless, but probably less at private schools.</p>
<p>Public schools do offer a lot that many private schools don’t either. I suggest just visiting the campus and getting a feel of the environment before anything else. The best fit school is the school where you can, not only succeed, but also enjoy your undergrad years.</p>
<p>Stay open to other career paths too! Don’t pick a school purely for premed purposes.</p>
<p>Not true and highly school dependent. Many privates have tough weeder classes designed to severely winnow pre meds. Others use other means (restricting who’s allow to register for pre med classes; refusing committee letters for those applicants deemed too weak) to control the number of pre meds.</p>
<p>For advice about choosing a pre med college, please start with the stickied thread at the top of this forum:</p>
<p>One sure thing, though, if medical school may be in your future, do NOT take out excessive student loans because there is little to no grant aid for medical school. You will be taking out large loans for med school and any lingering undergrad debt just adds to the already very high debt burden new doctors face.</p>
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<p>Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field. At many schools, it’s a subfield inside either the biology or psychology department. You may need to dig deeper into the departmental website of the colleges you’re considering to see if a neuro specialization is offered. </p>
<p>Sometimes neuro is called by name other than neuro. (Usually cognitive studies.) Try using: cognition, cognitive, brain in the search box at the schools you’re looking at and see what pops up.</p>
<p>It’s also possible if the school doesn’t offer a neuro specialization to develop your own by a careful selection of courses from the bio, psych, computer science and math depts.</p>
<p>I looked at UH’s website. The school doesn’t offer an undergrad program in neurp, but it does have a graduate program in cognitive neuroscience (offering specialties in vision, behavior, addiction, language, developmental and cognitive neuroscience) thru the psych dept. The psych dept also offers undergrad courses in cognition and cognitive development.</p>
<p>The bio dept offers courses in neuroscience and animal behavior.</p>
<p>Thus while while you won’t be able to get a BS/BA that says neuroscience, you will be able to get the foundational coursework at UH by judiciously selecting courses from the bio and psych depts.</p>
<p>DS did some neuroscience research before. His only complaint is that it does not smell too well in the lab. Believe it or not, they use fruit flies almost exclusively, not anywhere near mammal’s brain, let alone human’s brain (unless neuroscience has nothing to do with human’s brain.) Some senior researchers even need to do some surgery on the brain of a fruit fly. It appears they also use the computer to crunch/analyze data often; so some proficiency with a computer scripting lanaguge (e.g., Matlab or even Python) may be useful.</p>
<p>The reason that it smells is that, when there are a lot of fruit flies, there is some unpleasant smell. (This could be a good training for the anatomy lab as it does not smell well there either.) Also, many fruit flies are very sick. It seems we human beings could “torture” insects without being too guilty; but when the subjects have furs, it is totally another story. I heard even “rat” is costly, as compared to fruit flies. (Also, when you are an UG student, you really do not want to conduct an experiment that has anything to do with with nocturnals like rat or mouse. Some of the experiments need to be done when they are awake and a busy college student need to sleep during the night. Leave the job of a more serious research with those animals with furs to the full-time researchers who at least do not take zillions of classes and join zillions of clubs as many active college students do.)</p>
<p>^^Interesting. D’s neuro program doesn’t use fruit flies at all! All neuro majors get rats which are sacrificed after being experimented on, then the brains get necropsied for gross and fine anatomy studies and made into thin slice slides for detailed tissue and structural exams and neuronal counts. </p>
<p>(A neuro major is not for the squeamish…The students have to do their own ‘sacrificing’ too. The instructor will not kill the rat for you. D has said repeatedly how glad she was that her rat was ‘mean’ and tried to bite whenever handled. She had very little angst over offing the thing. Her classmates who made pets of their rats were a sorry bunch when it came time to sacrifice the critters.)</p>
<p>Her neuro dept also maintains a primate lab. (BTW, D says working with monkeys–not as much fun as you might think. They bite, they spit and they throw feces at you.)</p>
<p>D’s senior project involved working human subjects. (Who, you will be relieved to know, weren’t sacrificed.)</p>
<p>^^Must really depend on the interest of the PI and how s/he gets funding for his/her lab. D’s a neuro major as well, and didn’t even see fruit flies in Gen Bio. She has performed lotsa surgeries on rats, however.</p>
<p>That’s so interesting! I really appreciate all the replies! Mcat2 and WayOutWestMom were do your children attend school, if you don’t mind me asking? </p>
<p>And does anyone know if UT would suffice? Even though the school is huge ? </p>
<p>All of this really helped, especially the ‘design your own’ part!</p>
<p>UT does have a neurobiology program (Under biology in the College of Natural Sciences).</p>
<p>UT will suffice for pre med. Excellent school with lots of resources. The challenge will be carving a niche out for yourself. If you are a determined and positive person, you should be able to do well. (My older D–now in med school–attended a large state flagship so I know it’s possible to do well, thrive even, at a big school.)</p>
<p>Go where you will enjoy what you do. You may not get into medical school, so get a degree that you enjoy and has a profession you would like. Don’t listen to this school better than that as it is worthless. You will get the best grades where you are the happiest.</p>