Hello everyone,
Please share your opinion and knowledge on the topic. Looking to apply to the aforementioned schools for either Biology or Psychology major with a Pre-Med track, also considering to apply to Kean for the Science and Technology / Biomedicine Option Degree Program. In the future considering either medical or dental school.
I understand that most important are GPA, MCAT/DAT scores and extracurricular activities to the medical and dental school admissions committees. However, I would like to make the most correct decision, knowing that I will most likely get accepted to all the colleges (most likely Honors Program-Rutgers is a possibility as well).
Would there be research and internship opportunities at TCNJ/Rowan/Kean as they are smaller NJ state schools?
How do science classes compare to Rutgers?
I think Rutgers is probably still the leader for science out of the NJ state schools. But TCNJ and Rowan are both gaining ground. The Rutgers Honors College and Rowan seem to be the most generous with financial aid (I believe the max TCNJ gives regardless of your stats is $6000). Rowan has beautiful new facilities as well. Rowan is also not so small anymore - I believe 15k or so at this point, but still small class sizes. Overall, admissions to TCNJ are more selective, but for engineering Rowan is getting pretty tough as well.
I wouldn’t put Kean in the same ballpark with either of the 3.
If you are looking at medical/dental school I’d see which gives you the most attractive financial package.
I know that Kean is not the most desirable school and was only considering it for their new Biomedicine track. Do you think medical or dental school would care where the student came from or more of their GPA and MCAT/DAT score?
Just from reading on here, it seems like GPA and MCAT/DAT is what is most important, but I don’t have any first hand knowledge. I saw your other post about Rutgers professors. I think you will get much more attention at a TCNJ or Rowan that you will at Rutgers. Rowan also has the new hospital that just opened.
Re: Kean - from all the research we’ve done, the people we’ve met and talked to - the Kean STEM programs seem to be really, really good. All the students we talked to were going on to prestigious PhD programs or medical schools. The “research first” stuff get you into research much earlier than most other programs we’ve looked at. But - it’s Kean… for us the issue is that it’s only a few miles away (literally 4 miles or so) and it would pain me to pay 13k/year for room and board, but I can’t have my kid commute to college. We’ve been saying since we learned about the program last summer “if only this program were somewhere other than Kean”.
The student body as a whole at Kean is not academically impressive, but the STEM kids we met were all 1400+ SATs (which means full tuition scholarship, even for the 5 years bs/ms program). They seemed to be like a school-within-a-school. I definitely have a bias against Kean since when i was in HS it was the place you went to when you couldn’t really get in anywhere else (or if you were going to become a teacher, in which case it was a really good school to go to)… and it’s not in a great town, surrounded by a lot of not great towns…
Anyway, I just really wanted to say that if I try to remove my biases, the programs themselves ranked ahead of a lot of the other schools we looked at (all over the country)… i just with they were somewhere else.