@HKimPOSSIBLE business associate of mine.
Young guy. Maybe 40.
UIUC chem engineering grad born in Korea. Emigrated as a child. First gen and low SES.
Then went to a noted Boston area school for his masters and then to another noteworthy ivy for a mba.
Now a private equity rock star at a world renowned firm, leading large acquisitions of major emerging tech and pharma and others.
Sound like a familiar story ?
Congrats @HKimPOSSIBLE. May this acceptance be the first of many.
This is it in a nutshell. UIUC Promise is full COA, including books. But recipients do have to work 10-12 hours per week. No loans either.
Although all QB schools meet full need, as we know these need calculations are based on each school’s internal criteria, so results can vary…but hopefully less so for an applicant with EFC 0.
Some of the QB schools also include loans to meet full need, as well as other self help (summer earnings, school year work-study). Of your potential ED2 schools, only Carleton (at least as of last year) and CWRU (not a QB partner) include loans.
Bottom line, Hkim, think about the loan issue and do run the NPCs at all the schools you are considering for ED2, as well as the ones you intend on applying to RD.
Wow! Congratulations on UIUC. I would think about whether you really want an engineering degree. If the answer is yes, some of those LACs can come off your list. If you’d be happy with a chemistry degree, apply. It sounds, though, like you may really want to compare options, and if so, ED2 may not be the right thing for you.
First off CONGRATULATIONS!!! I think I am happier for you then my own kids. This should be pinned. You are an inspiration to us all and any future applicant.
Do you know about the new engineering driven medical school at UIUC? This might be right up your alley… https://medicine.illinois.edu/. This is the future of medicine and a totally different take on it.
AP credits at Illinois takes anything 3 or above. I forgot what you have or how many you have but you will have plenty of room to take classes you want.
Instead of thinking about other colleges UIUC is one of the best for your fields considerations. Everything else is gravy at this point.
Start conversing with a counsler to see your options. Just remember it’s easy to transfer out of engineering but very hard to get into it at UIUC. Make very careful decisions!!
So happy for you
Thank you for the overwhelming support, really could not have done it without everyone pulling my forward!
For ED II, there are a few colleges I’m seriously considering.
From a purely logistics point of view, UChicago comes out the 18th - but with NU having rejected me, not sure how I even have a chance at UChicago (and especially given my ED Rejected last year, though my essays have changed…quite significantly…can anyone assess if it has proper tone?).
With that, if I’m lucky, I’ll be deferred giving me an option to ED2 (which I’m not so inclined on).
My “top” ED II choices are:
WashU
Bowdoin (Yesssss)
Swarthmore (Ooooh yeah, quirky like UChicago)
Emory - great for PreMed
Case Western - Amazing for Pre-Med
Pomona College - Extremely hard to get into, but the more research I’ve done, the more I seem to like these uber small schools (but really it’s that California sunshine that’s the cherry on top).
Vanderbilt - Shameful walk because I initially didn’t like it for it’s “southern” vibe that people have been telling me about…but it’s amazing for PreMed (especially their Psychology).
Boston University - new 100% Need Meet Initiative!
The issue with many of these…is I’m getting the feeling my parents and family are getting rather sad that I might leave…and are also hinting at they won’t be supportive of an out-of-state college, especially for a college they have not heard of.
I absolutely love Bowdoin, but the above is something to think about.
WashU and CWRU are ones my parents and family are “okay” with because it’s at a neighboring state. I don’t think they’ll outright not allow me to, but it might take some convincing for ED2.
For CA schools, no problem; we have a really close family (my aunt) who used to live there and are just next door in Las Vegas.
Dont get caught up in the Emory and CWRU amazing for premed hype. ANYWHERE you will end up will be great for pre med. Its not the school but the student. I actually think LAC’s are better for premed. Smaller classes and professor interaction, good advising and Committee letters. Emory and CRWU are great schools but the premed competition will be intense. You wont have a “better” chance of getting into med school from those than a good LAC. Good luck.
!!! Congratulations !!! You earned it !!!
Remember, there is no need to apply anywhere ED2.
Choosing a UG college because it seems to have a great rep for premed is tricky. Much more complicated than lots of seniors getting into one of their top med school choices. Some will brutally weed out a huge proportion of those start college with the dream.
Several recent threads on this. The idea is the place where you can thrive, get best grades, internship experiences, vol at a quality hospital, have support.
At this point, the urge may be to dream of other colleges. But please, stay rational. A lot of this is new to you, you haven’t, eg, visited Bowdoin or Swat, are counting on their materials to give you info and, in a sense, feed “dreams.”
I agree, many/most of the remaining targets are reaches. It’s not just about being difficult to get admitted. It’s all the work that goes into learning about a school, matching yourself beyond stats or lab research, then making a bang-up presentation in the app and supps. Do you need to keep up a long list now?
I think not. Not a long list.
Cont’d. This win is yours. You came here defeated, found a bold and viable way to max your Plan B.
You grew, gained a huge measure of maturity and focus, clarity, and more. Many kids need years to get there.
Congratulations!
What matters in the end has a lot to do with our efforts, how we add to any good in the world. That’s not just from a lab, podium, a job title, publishing, or phrases like “saving lives.”
It’s more ordinary kindnesses from within, caring, empathy. Lending a hand.
Someday, when you’ve lived a bit more, I hope you “pay it back.” In the real world, in these smaller ways. (I don’t just mean coming here to give college advice.)
For now, you’ve earned the proverbial CC huge bowl of ice cream.
Glad to have “met” you. xx
HKIMPOSSIBLE, congratulations on your full ride! I am so happy for you!
As you are still considering other options, I would like to encourage your further exploration into Pomona. My younger sister has an undergrad degree from them in the sciences. She has always been gainfully employed at top companies and was able to get her MBA from a top school.
My father died unexpectedly when my sister was a freshman and I was a college junior at an unnamed private school not on your list. Pomona immediately jumped into action and increased my sister’s aid package. My school commented that my father died at an inconvenient time in the aid cycle and asked if I ever considered community college (though I was a junior with good grades and active on campus). When Pomona heard my school’s reaction they gave my sister a full ride so I could stay in school.
I share this story so you will understand that Pomona is more than a excellent institution of higher learning, but one with integrity and heart. Though I have been reading this thread for months and cheering you on, I have been reluctant to weigh in for fear of steering you wrong. I hope whatever decision you make it is a good one for you and you have a lifetime of success.
I’m sooooo happy for you!!! Congratulations!!!
You will be successful wherever you go and so thrilled you know your college journey will be beginning soon.
This may have already been mentioned but https://www.thedream.us/ identifies partner schools and scholarships for students in your situation. It is an outstanding organization focused on connecting kids with opportunity. Best of luck
Although that is a great organization, hkim is a permanent resident now!
@HKimPOSSIBLE : congratulations on your full ride to your state flagship. If you are really committed to going to medical school, that’s likely your best path to actually achieving it.
As I have posted before, I am an Ivy league grad who then attended my state flagship medical school, and was very surprised at the time at how few of my fellow med school classmates were from highly selective schools. There were more kids from my HS alone who went to the tippy-tops (Ivys, Williams, Amherst, Swat) than in my entire med school class, which should have been composed of our state’s best and brightest.
I always suspected that it was because the weed-out process was so brutal at the highly selective schools that most kids would have been better off if they had gone to less-selective schools in which it’s easier to maintain the near-perfect GPA necessary to get into med school.
My suspicions were finally empirically confirmed by Malcolm Gladwell in an analysis that he presented in a Ted-type talk called something like ‘Why did I say Yes to this’. Please google and watch it before you keep chasing admission at highly selective school if you’re really certain that you really want to be a physician.
I have also been on the admission committee of state flagship med school (I’m not any long since it was too much of a time commitment). At my school, undergrad name/prestige is NOWHERE on the list of criteria by which our applicants are judged. That may differ at private med schools, but at our state school, GPA, MCAT scores, research, volunteer/community service, experience in the medical field, LORs, URM status, and state residency are the only factors that are considered. We could care less where applicants went to undergrad. Truly.
I think that you should embrace UIUC and celebrate!
I think there are a few elite schools where the internal competition for the school to endorse a med school application actually increase the odds of weed-out compared to a top state flagship like UIUC. Hopkins, perhaps case in point?
Beyond that, I think it’s a matter of fit. I think there are students who thrive in smaller classes with more direct contact and attention from faculty, who are perhaps more successful at an excellent LAC than they would have been at a large flagship U. In reality there’s a lot of competition to get into med school, whether one experiences that high-volume competition directly or not; and some may indeed thrive in settings where being able to see where they stand in a larger peer group further motivates them to excel. In reality, none of us has our own control group, so whatever we feel about whether we chose the best setting for ourselves is speculative, and most people end up feeling that they made the right choice, whatever that choice was.
The observation that most med students come from larger institutions is accurate… but then, that reflects that there are more students at larger institutions, overall. That doesn’t mean that LAC students are disadvantaged, just that there are fewer of them. They could still have a statistical advantage, even while being in the minority, or it could be wash - I don’t have the data to say, and there’s probably no trend there strong enough to predict the individual case, anyway.
I do think Pomona could be a fantastic destination for you. You associate it with the word “tiny” but it definitely doesn’t feel as small as a more isolated college of similar size, because the Claremont Consortium has around 7000 undergraduates in the combined five colleges, which (unlike the 5 College Consortium in MA) are genuinely adjacent and walkable. Cross-registration isn’t a high-effort option requiring shuttle buses and strategic scheduling; it’s normal and built into the shared registration portal - when you search for classes, the offerings of all five schools come up. Everything from the daily schedule to the finals schedule is synchronized. Of the five schools, Pomona has the least need for the larger consortium, as it’s the largest of the five colleges and has the most balanced and complete offerings in its own right. But nonetheless, the consortium is there, and most classes will contain a mix of students. (My kid at Scripps, for example, is in a major based at Pomona, has taken classes at all five colleges, and meets students from all five colleges in her classes, regardless of where they’re based.) The downside of playing the EDII card at Pomona is that the odds are just as long as they’ve been at Northwestern, UChicago, et al… but maybe there’s no harm in long odds at this point since you’ve got a great default plan.
If you’re seriously considering EDII to Bowdoin, I would explore questions around transportation and access. Do you have a car, and/or will you be able to afford one at any point during undergrad? Bowdoin isn’t like Swarthmore, where you can hop on commuter rail and be in downtown Philadelphia in half an hour. Getting between Bowdoin and downtown Boston and/or Logan airport is more than a two hour drive. Will you be able to get to the shadowing opportunities you need, and so on? There may in fact be good answers to those questions - I’m not saying there aren’t - but make sure before submitting a binding app.
We’ve all been beating the ED drum because the priority has been to make sure you have full-ride aid to an excellent school. That goal is met now, so the bar to go EDII has been raised - there’s no need for further ED apps unless one school stands out as your absolute first choice.
We haven’t discussed Tufts much lately - seems to me that it has a lot of the attributes you’re looking for - it has more of the LAC-like qualities than some of the bigger research U’s you have been interested in, but it’s still a heavy-hitter as a research U and has more of those attributes than your LAC’s do… plus it’s in Boston which is one of the top medical communities in the world. And it has EDII. I guess if Tufts resonated with you enough to be an EDII candidate, it would have come up more by now… but just putting it out there since you seem to be expanding your list of possibilities.
Not sure OP should get distracted by more reaches. He still has work to do, to match himself.
Someone you know on an LAC campus will have a car. The school will run busses to Boston at breaks. And not as many kids are running off to the next major city in their free time.
Well, OP has a choice to make at this point. He can focus on “matching himself,” or he can decide that UIUC is his match school, and that he’d choose it over other potential match schools anyway, and thus he’s just going to run more reach apps up the flagpole and be happy with UIUC if the reaches don’t work out. Either approach (or something in between) is fine. Stopping now and going all-in for UIUC is fine. OP now has complete freedom to use his energy as he likes, and he has earned that freedom!
Re: Bowdoin, looks like only 40% of students overall have cars, and first-years aren’t allowed to have them unless they have extenuating circumstances. This letter summarizes transportation options quite well. https://www.bowdoin.edu/dean-of-students/pdf/first-year-car-exclusion-letter-2019.pdf It’s true that even urban-adjacent students rarely “run off to the city” as often as they think they will. Serious premed students may pursue shadowing opportunities at major medical centers in the city… but then again, OP has a major city to go home to in the summer, so access during the academic year may not be all that important.
@mindfulmom I definitely agree with you on Pomona (and I shot myself in the foot for not applying to them last year when I was a DACA).
Pomona’s integrity really shows especially for signing the AMICUS that urged the Supreme Court to protect DACA students - fun fact: not a single Ivy League institution signed None of these schools either: UChicago, Northwestern, WashU, Johns Hopkins, Emory, Stanford, MIT, and etc. It was a little ironic since these “big name” institutions were, at least on news articles, advocating for DACA (or at least said they were).
Thinking about that, I think I might have to hold off on Bowdoin for some of the reasons @lookingforward said since a lot of mobility would mean accessible opportunities outside the school.
Also, I have a cousin (close cousin, aunt’s cafe that I work at) that went to UIUC for biology and just graduated and is taking the MCAT. I will probably change majors to biology/biochemistry since I’ve realized how important it is to maintain a GPA.
That said, I’ve been narrowing down my EDII list and it’s this at the moment:
Swarthmore
Pomona
WUSTL
Case Western
But hey, if I get into UChicago EA…whew. Thinking about it, I think UChicago is really one that an essay can make or break it (well same with other top institutions, but you know what I mean!). So hopefully I wasn’t culled in the first round already.