<p>In the fall, I will be entering my senior year of high school, and, as everyone knows, I have to start the actual college application process. Until recently, I have been certain that my desired major is either bioengineering or genetic engineering (slight difference, I think) and eventually earning a Doctorate, but I have recently discovered that I may want to go into surgery instead. One of my colleagues as Fox Chase Cancer Center, where I have a summer internship, informed me of the possibility of having both an MD degree and a Ph.D. After some research, I have discovered that most of my top choice schools offer this kind of program (MIT, Hopkins, Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, Pitt, Drexel, Wash U, etc.), but I am realizing that these are all graduate programs. </p>
<p>Basically what I am asking is:
In order to better my chances of getting accepted into one of these programs, is there any special course of study I should take as an undergrad? In addition, does anyone have any opinions about the schools I have chosen (not based on my chances of acceptance as an undergrad, but about the quality of their bioengineering programs)?</p>
<p>I don’t know. When you are 42, and you’ve been out in the work force for two years, you are going to get nostalgic for school and ask yourself if you really challenged yourself enough when you were there.</p>
<p>Your major doesn’t matter, but you need an absolutely outstanding credentials (GPA, research experience and MCATs) to get into an MD/PhD program. Only the very top med school candidates, who show outstanding interest and aptitude for research, are considered. If you want to be a physician scientist, it is the way to go, but you don’t need a PhD to do research as an MD. It’s at least three extra years, the benefit is that you’ll get your med school for free and get paid a stipend for most of that. You come out of med school with no debt. You seem to be ahead of the game by doing some research programs at Fox Chase, which is an excellent institution. You need to continue to do undergrad research wherever you end up. All the schools you mentioned are excellent with top med schools and major biomedical research programs, although Drexel doesn’t really fit into the top tier with the others like Hopkins, Penn, Harvard, Pitt, Wash U, etc. As far as undergrad bioengineering, here are US News’ 2010 undergrad bioengineering rankings (keep in mind that every program has strengths in different fields). </p>
<p>Undergraduate Engineering Specialties: Biomedical/Biomedical Engineering
1 Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD
2 Duke University Durham, NC
3 Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA
4 University of California–San Diego La Jolla, CA
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA
6 University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA
7 University of Washington Seattle, WA
8 Boston University Boston, MA
9 Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH
9 Rice University Houston, TX
9 University of Michigan–Ann Arbor Ann Arbor, MI
12 Northwestern University Evanston, IL
13 Stanford University Stanford, CA
14 University of California–Berkeley Berkeley, CA
15 Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN
16 University of Wisconsin–Madison Madison, WI
17 Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis, MO
18 University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA
19 University of Texas–Austin Austin, TX
20 Cornell University Ithaca, NY
21 University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL
21 University of Minnesota–Twin Cities Minneapolis, MN
21 University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA
24 University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT</p>
<p>Yeah, seriously. Is bioengineering being hyped up too much? At my school, bioengineering is just a watered down hybrid of MechE, EE, and biology classes. Is it worth going into BioE?</p>
<p>To the OP: Let me get this straight. You’re in 11th grade, and you’re asking about the best way to get a PhD in engineering and become a doctor at the same time???</p>
<p>That was my reaction too. I don’t think a lot of kids these days realize just how much work graduate degrees are. It seems like a lot of them thing a Ph.D. is just like a Masters plus and you get to be called doctor. A lot of people seem to think similarly in regards to the purpose and worth of a Ph.D.</p>
<p>Here’s how you do it. Here’s how to be that schmoozy doctor/scientist in the corner at that yuppie party at that apartment with the zen furniture and drinking cristal from the imported china. </p>
<p>You spend the next year of your life taking as many AP classes as possible. While the rest of your friends are enjoying their final year in school, breezing through typical high school curriculum, you’re taking upwards of 12-13 AP tests so you can maximize the amount of credits you pull in with you to college as well as make sure you’re ready for the rigors of college. At the same time, you’re written and rewritten your college admissions essays, hoping to come off as witty and imaginative, serious but not too serious, studious but fun, intellectual powerhouse but artistic phenom. You play 3 instruments and perform your spoken word on weekends to hipsters. You apply to top schools like MIT, harvard, cornell, JHU. You get rejected by all except cornell. </p>
<p>You go to Cornell, dishing 45k a year, and realize that it’s a heck of a lot harder than anything you’ve done in high school. You spend your hours in the engineering quad churning out BME problem sets like it’s your job and trudging back up one of the many ridiculous hills to your dorm at ungodly hours in the morning. You go to a frat party and take your first sip of alcohol. It’s also your last because you realize you have a 20pg o-chem write-up to finish, a thousand or more drosophila to sex, and several more circuit problem sets that are asking some obscure crap about signal integrity and input impedances. It’s 3am in the morning at this point and you know you should sleep for your test tomorrow, but, oh crap, that microcontroller lab that interfaces your LCD to your thermal mass flow meter decides to crap out on you after spending weeks on it instead of going on that NYC trip with that girl you like. This repeats for years. You spend your summers in obscure labs on campus or prestigious think tank like labs. Your “free time” is also spent in labs. In your senior year, you’re sitting around with your now engineering-only friends and you’re having a party to celebrate the fact that the only homework you have is the op-amp ckt design problem that displays ECG measurements. Only halfway through the party, you realize your professor wanted it to work “in an earthquake” in which case you have to completely redesign your electrode interface to account for extreme motion artifact. You make flash cards religiously for your MCAT and score above a 36. </p>
<p>You apply for top MD/PhD programs. Your GPA is a bit weak for these programs (3.7), but they cut you some slack because your BME (not much) and you have a strong MCAT. You are rewarded for your years in the lab with a glowing letter of recommendation from that one professor who still can’t quite pronounce your name properly. Of the 5 programs you applied to, you get into one and rejected by 4. Other kids are getting in to top schools all around you since they ended up going to that one conference with that one famous professor and got him drunk enough to add them as a footnote on the end of their author list.</p>
<p>For the next 7-9 years of your life, you dedicate your life to learning one of the most obscure branches of science. You put in the time and effort because you think it will be worth it. You come out with your MD/PhD. Great success! </p>
<p>You stumble into that high-rise apartment party, invited by that one lawyer 5 years younger than you that you hate but now rely upon to make sure that no one steals your stuff. You run into your fellow engineering classmates who have gone into software engineering after college, pulling in 80k for the past 8 years youve been in school and have been religiously investing their savings in a diversified portfolio with net gains of 15%. You talk about your work while sitting on the I.M. Pei designed pouf in the corner to the girl you had a crush on in college who is now dating that dumb lawyer and she has absolutely no idea what your work is about. </p>
<p>Haha, an interesting read, though there are a couple spots here and there (for example, med schools don’t like AP credits). </p>
<p>Anyway, to get into MD/PhD combined programs, you must display a strong background in research. Passionate/intensive research experience is almost as much a requirement as the GPA/MCAT statistics.</p>
<p>“I don’t think a lot of kids these days realize just how much work graduate degrees are. It seems like a lot of them thing a Ph.D. is just like a Masters plus and you get to be called doctor. A lot of people seem to think similarly in regards to the purpose and worth of a Ph.D.”</p>
<p>Yep. Personally I had no idea how hard a BA was…</p>