Interested in science and pre-med
Low ACT score: 27
[This post was edited for privacy.]
It takes a while to get over the sting, but try to love the school that loves you back. Bryn Mawr is a strong school, including in the sciences.
Bryn Mawr does seem to have significant pre-med advising services, including committee letters (which they will write for all pre-meds, which may be a good or bad thing compared to schools which are selective in whom they write committee letters for, depending on your point of view).
http://www.brynmawr.edu/healthpro/medicine/
http://www.brynmawr.edu/healthpro/statistics.html
You did not name your state university, so no one can really comment on its suitability. Are you somehow ashamed to name it?
How affordable are these two schools?
Personally , if it is affordable I’d run to Bryn Mawr which is very similar to your target schools – be grateful you got in and got a good financial package. As a Bryn Mawr student you will also be able to very easily take classes at Haverford if you feel you want to supplement any science coursework. If you really don’t like Bryn Mawr for whatever reason then go to your state school.
You should accept the waitlist spot at Smith and Wellesley but they would need to be affordable before you consider attending. Don’t expect to get in from the waitlist and proceed as if you those schools were out of the equation.
Stop sulking about the schools you didn’t get into and embrace the ones that accepted you and are financially do-able. Do you know how many people would give almost anything to be in your position?
For future posts, I’d use more paragraphs as that huge block of text is hard to read through.
Honestly, with your standardized test scores and writing ability, you’re fortunate to get in to Bryn Mawr.
And by alumni achievements, Bryn Mawr is an Ivy-equivalent just like Smith and Wellesley.
Plus, yes, if you need a more rigorous curriculum for some reason (my guess is that Bryn Mawr’s pre-med curriculum will be plenty challenging enough for you), you can take classes at Haverford, UPenn, and Swarthmore.
This is great advice. I know it hurts to get denied, but honestly I think that Bryn Mawr is a great college with very strong sciences. Have you had the chance to visit and see it for yourself? It’s a beautiful campus in a nice area, not far from Philadelphia. I’m familiar with Wellesley and Smith and I am not sure why you think they are so much better. In my opinion they are similar.
Thank you for the response! According to the teacher who suggested that I should apply to Wellesley, she said that Wellesley and Smith have a lot more funding and are better at in sciences compared to Bryn Mawr. Although they are similar in my eyes at first, I ended up ranking them based on the things my teacher said about each school. Plus, a few people have been showing me is the raking of the schools, which is making me feel like Smith and Wellesley are so much better. I’m planning to visit Bryn Mawr for the first time to see if I like the school. I don’t want to rely on these assumptions that I’ve in made to make my final choice.
@happy1, I’m looking at having to pay 17,000 a year which I’m not sure if I can afford. The waitlists is making me ask myself questions like “is this really worth it.” I won’t rely on my waitlist schools and focus on my state school and Bryn Mawr instead. The main part of my sulking isn’t about the fact I didn’t get in but the fact that I spent four years of my high school not building my resume like other kids. I only pursued Chinese which interests me a lot. This is my first ever post so I’m sorry if its hard to see. Thank you for the response!
@ucbalummus.
What do you suggest I should do at Bryn Mawr (Assuming that I go there) if I want to have better chances of getting into med school?
I chose to not state my state school for privacy matters ( it isn’t like Penn State where are like 90k people attending) but it is very affordable. In the past four years, the school continues to cut down the engineering and science department programs. Half of students in my school, who are offered decent scholarships choose to not go there simply because of its decision to cut down so many things. Many who are offered full ride like I’m choose not to go there but instead out of state since there aren’t that many state universities in our state to choose from. Thank you so much for your comment!
@Aroundhere Thank you so much!
BMC is a great school and does an excellent job with pre med students. This is THE place to do a post bac pre med program, and that cannot / does not exist in a vacuum. Congrats!
You have learned a great lesson for life; pay attention to what resonates with you. There is a difference between actions having consequences and doing things because you think it’s what others want.
It’s time to let go of the regret about how you spent the last 4 years and embrace the opportunity you have. A great opportunity!
By any measure, Bryn Mawr is rich. It has a greater endowment per student than some universities you may have heard of named Columbia, Cornell, and Georgetown (among many others).
Just because Smith and Wellesley have a greater endowment per student ratio doesn’t mean they are immeasurably better. Princeton has a much bigger endowment per student than Harvard. Does than make Princeton much better than Harvard?
And how do you know you would have done better if you hadn’t concentrated on Chinese as much as you did? As I mentioned, given your test scores, I would not have expected you to get in to Bryn Mawr or any other elite private. It’s possible that being so good at Chinese as a non-native speaker was what got you in and if you had spent your energies elsewhere, you would have been shut out everywhere.
How much can your parents pay without borrowing? You can only borrow ~$5500/year, so if your parents can’t pay much you need to focus on affordability.
If you tell posters what state you’re in they can help you compare the programs. Some schools deflate GPA which isn’t good for med school applicants. There are some very knowledgeable posters here who can give you good advice about which might be better.
Bryn Mawr is more academic and less preprofessional than Wellesley and less political than Smith. It is also an academic powerhouse. And it’s certainly not comparable to a local public university that is cutting its science offerings.
I realize you don’t know what a big deal Bryn Mawr is, but you’ll feel silly once you understand what an amazing gift it is that you got in and were awarded a good scholarship. Read the description in the Fiske guide, the insiders guide to colleges, Princeton review 's best colleges. Please contact them to see if they can help with visit costs, and go spend an overnight there.
And congratulations!
For medical school specifically, the usual pre-med things that apply no matter what college you go to:
Admission to Bryn Mawr is a real blessing to you. Don’t thumb your nose at it. Look at research regarding the percentage of students that go on to get PhDs and such. BMC is right up there, especially when comparing % of students and not total students (since BMC is so small). Your teacher you refer to actually went to Smith, so she’d have a natural bias. BMC belongs in the same discussion as Smith and Wellesley for sure.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19805310/#Comment_19805310 is a specific post in an interesting thread from last year that compared all sorts of rankings for LACs in STEM areas. Notice the company BMC keeps on this list. I’m sure you could find similar data for med school somewhere, but i haven’t looked for it.
Do an overnight at Bryn Mawr to see how you mesh with the other students.
Wow, I am amazed you are upset at being accepted to Bryn Mawr. It is an excellent school. You are lucky you were accepted. Please stop feeling sorry for youself. You got in!
I would be very happy to send any of my kids to Bryn Mawr! You’re done great and you’re going to be fine!
LOL. There is a lot of sisterly rivalry between the grads of those colleges. Of course your teacher says Smith or Wellesley over Bryn Mawr! If she were a Bryn Mawr grad, she’d put BMC and Wellesley over Smith unless you were hell-bent on studying engineering. In any case, you were accepted at only one of those three, so if you are interested in small, selective, women’s colleges, it behooves you to visit BMC and crunch the financial aid numbers very carefully with your parents while remaining on the waitlists for the others.
If after all of that you are still unhappy with your options, take a gap year and reconsider your application list. Med School admissions is heavily numbers-based (GPA, MCAT scoe, etc.) and the name of the college or university you graduate from barely matters at all. Your own cheap home state public U almost certainly has a decent pre-med program and may be your best option overall if you want to save some money to pay for that eventual Med School you hope to attend.
I totally thought of sisterly rivalry too!
However, if the state school is cutting science programs, it’s probably not good for premed. In addition, it’s hard to imagine it could be as good for science as BMC due to the college 's status and endowment.
I think that, since OP 's sole criteria seem to derive from her teacher, she may not realize what an elite university she got into.