This is a very old thread,sorry! i just have some questions that hopefully someone can answer. I am a junior in high school right now and am very passionate about medicine. That being said, I am interested in applying to Fordham.
Is there a difference between Fordham University and Fordham College at Rose Hill? If there is, where one should I apply to coming right out of high school?
What should my schedule look like in order to prepare me for medical school?
I am seeing all of these, post graduate, post baccalaureate programs. Will this be a part of my four years at Fordham or is this something else completely?
Thank you so much! :D
My daughter is currently a junior in high school. I am curious if anyone is able to jump start this older thread and revisit the topic of research that @gswami touched upon earlier. Since his posts were from 2011, I am wondering how the research opportunities on campus (and off campus) have improved for pre-med track undergraduates?
@Winky1 Research is not easy to come by for premeds here. Many aren’t currently involved in research, and the ones who are have had to find it on their own at external sites rather than at or through Fordham. Premed is really not very strong here and advising is lacking greatly, which leads to pretty much no information about research and about applying for research internships being distributed to premeds. Anything that premeds are involved in are things we’ve had to find on our own, and if we need help from our premed advisor about applying or basically anything we may have questions about, she is unavailable to help.
@EmB1997 Thank you so much for your response - so you are currently at Fordham on a pre-med track? What is your major? You’ve made me think of more question for you! Is there only 1 premed advisor? What about clinical experiences? @gswami had mentioned that those were easier to come by at Fordham, but his comments were from 2011. How do you go about finding your own research? I am curious how you’d made those connections on your own. Thank you for the info. Also, my daughter is interested in studying neuroscience, so any info. about that major is welcomed.
@Winky1 Yes, I’m currently on the premed track; I’m a natural science major, which basically consists of the 4 required premed sciences along with science electives like genetics and biochemistry. At Lincoln Center, there is only one premed advisor, and she’s the one in charge of everything from lifting registration holds to writing the required committee recommendation letter for students applying to medical school. Clinical experiences are very scarce and are again found through individual students finding them on their own rather than through the advisor or the school. I got my certifications in ekg, phlebotomy, and emt, so I get clinical experience through working at my job, but usually most students don’t get much clinical experience because there’s limited exposure to it via the school. As for getting involved in research, we pretty much google research opportunities and places we can get involved and figure out the process of applying and whatnot on our own. I’m from nyc so almost all of my friends from high school go to schools in nyc where there’s more advising and resources for premeds, so they share their information with me too. Some students who aren’t from here try to do research at their home state when they go back for the summer, so that’s also an option.
As for the neuroscience major, I have quite a few premed friends who are neuroscience majors and they have some issues with a lot of the current professors (over the past few years, new professors have replaced older ones for a lot of science classes). Scheduling for all science majors, including neuroscience, is really tough. I don’t know too much about the quality of the classes themselves as I personally have not gone through neuroscience classes myself.
Truthfully, I don’t recommend Fordham for premed. For business and the arts? Definitely. For sciences? Not at all. I am transferring out because of how poor the science and premed department is, as are some of my fellow premed friends (two of us are sophomores, one is a freshman). My friends who are premed juniors and seniors here consistently say they wish they had transferred out because of how bad the department and advising is. There’s students who are now at risk for not getting their committee letters on time because of the advisor never being available. Students also don’t get their registration holds lifted on time because of the advisor again almost never being available. Asking for advice or help leads to a dead end with no answers and it’s extremely frustrated. The premed community here shrinks every semester not because of their grades not being good enough, but because many students are fed up with the professors, advisor, and department being the way that it is.
Wow. Thank you for your frankness, @EmB1997! My daughter is interested in the Rose Hill Campus. Would there be any reason to think things could be different at Rose Hill? I commend you for taking control of your situation and transferring. My son is a freshman at Ohio State. He is studying molecular and cellular neuroscience there, and he’s got lots of resources through his dept. and the Biological Sciences Scholars program that he’s a part of. While OSU is a huge school, the resources are there if a student is the type that will seek them out. He volunteers at a hospital close to campus, and just interviewed for a part-time student research assistant position. So I am not used to the resources not being there for a student. Seems bizarre to me and would be very stressful for the student. Please let me know if you think Rose Hill would be more promising for the pre-med track. There is a chance my daughter may be a National Merit Semi-Finalist/Finalist, and I know that Fordham has generous NMF scholarships available, although I think they are competitive. Fordham made her list before I even knew of this possibility. She visited in the fall with another family.
@EmB1997 you have given me so much to consider. If both campuses give such poor support to pre-meds, I couldn’t sent my daughter to study there in good conscience.
@Winky1 No problem at all! I really wish I had known these things before attending but it’s better late than never. As for the Rose Hill campus, it’s pretty much the same deal in terms of professors and classes, not 100% sure about advising though. This is my second semester taking chemistry lab at RH (it’s only offered there) and the labs are really in terrible condition. The equipment is often broken and there’s not enough materials for everyone to use even though my class isn’t very big this semester (about half of the students from my chemistry class dropped it after the fall term b/c of the professor). I recall there also being another person posting in some of the Fordham threads about her daughter’s extremely negative experience with premed at Rose Hill. I made a thread about answering questions for prospective students and I believe the post is in there, if I’m not mistaken. RH and LC both are very weak in premed and the sciences.
I’m really happy to hear that your son has so many wonderful resources and opportunities at OSU! That sounds ideal honestly. That type of support and those resources from the school are truly invaluable. Fordham allocates its energy and resources to other departments, with the sciences being at the bottom of the hierarchy. That’s why there’s amazing departments for business, the arts, and of course theology, which all have great professors and opportunities for those students.
Oh, one thing to note is that when your daughter goes on a tour of the school, they might tell her that Fordham students have an 80-85% acceptance rate into medical schools. I was told this on my tour as a prospective student and I still hear tour guides telling prospective students the same thing when they show them the science classrooms. This statistic is based on the fact that by the time senior year comes around, a majority of premeds do not end up applying to medical school. Let’s say for example that there are 100 premeds in a senior class. Only about 10-15 may end up applying to med schools. This is for a variety of reasons, as many seniors have not been able to do research, get clinical experience, or Fordham’s scheduling caused them to take classes in their senior year that are usually taken earlier on in other schools since they’re tested on the MCAT (biochemistry, for example). The there’s also so many students whose GPAs are not high enough because of grade deflation here, which is an extremely big problem at both campuses, I believe.
@Windy1 I will try to answer some of your questions. My daughter is a Psychology Major and did prehealth for three semesters. She initially wanted to do Neuroscience, but here’s the problem…you have to apply to this, you can’t just “declare” it. And the requirements are pretty tough.
It was towards the end of freshman year she decided she wanted to go into Neurscience after taking a course that really delved into it and she fell in love with it. She knows the parts of the brain, their functions, and she found her calling. So, she took classes over the summer to meet some of the requirements (plus they also met requirements for Psych) but you need to have a MINIMUM of a 3.0 in the sciences in to order to be accepted into the program. Even though my daughter had A’s in her other required classes, Bio and Chem killed that chance. She’s not stupid. She loves those subjects, but when a test was on the life cycle of a fern and the chem tests are made so that it is impossible to pass, that’s a problem. Her friend who is prehealth at NYU took one look at her test that she got a 66 on (and she was very proud of that 66 considering the class average was a 50) and he said it was impossible to do all of that work in only 45 minutes. Plus one question was from a chapter they hadn’t even started.
Research?? You have to find them on your own. My daughter has NO research experience. And when she did find a research opportunity that was perfect for her, it didn’t fit into her academic schedule. Plus most of them are unpaid.
Whenever someone asks about Fordham for prehealth, we just don’t recommend at all. It’s great for everything else, but not for science. The Psychology department is great. My daughter’s advisor is great, they’ve been together since my daughter initially wanted to do prehealth. And many of the Neuroscience courses overlap with Psychology, that’s why you can’t major in both.
@EmB1997 and @MomTheChauffer are the ones who filled me in because of their first hand knowledge. I am a Mom and I was on the look out for my daughter who is a junior in high school now. EmB1997 is from NY, so perhaps she would know about your school options. Good luck!
@5678abc - More along the line of the sciences. Fordham is a tough school, no bones about it. If you are in the business school you are golden. Internships galore. The only other area of the college itself we have a problem with is the language requirement, which is ridiculous. Gabelli doesn’t require a language. The only area exempt from the foreign language requirement are those going for a BS, unless you are a psychology major. But the sciences has a lot of grade deflation.
@5678abc It varies within each department but I know for sure that professors in most, if not all, departments are specifically told by admin to limit the number of A’s and B’s in their classes, which in some cases can lead to grade deflation depending on a variety of factors. It’s definitely an issue that’s probably at its peak in the science department and not as much of a problem in other departments
Grade inflation or deflation depends on how well a student does in the class. The high school grades are not easy to maintain in college level because of a variety of factors, including course load, support system, having to take care of personal stuff, time management…College experience is different than HS, totally. I cannot think how an administrator can request a professor to inflate or deflate grades or whether the professor would comply with such a request.