Hi,
I’m a rising senior in a private school in Ohio. I’m looking to be a pediatrician. I know that undergrad doesn’t matter for medicine, but I have to get a good GPA, recommendations, and MCAT scores. I want to go to places where I can get good scholarships. However, I want to go to a school which is challenging and smaller. My academics are great, along with my test scores. My extracurricular are average, but I have volunteer and research in my resume. I have looked at OSU, but I thought it was overwhelming. I am still looking around, but I need some suggestions of where to apply. Thanks!!!
“I know that undergad doesn’t matter for medicine”
The name on your diploma may or may not matter. The education and support you receive there does.
Browse this online list for some possibilities: “The Experts’ Choice: Colleges With Great Pre-med Programs.” You will find a range of schools throughout the country, some with excellent financial aid. Many schools not included could also be great for you, but this is at least one place to start.
I looked on the list and there are many colleges which I have considered applying! This helps me see which colleges will be good for me! Thanks for helping! I really appreciate it!
What are your stats and how much can your family pay each year?
Since you want a smaller school that gives merit, consider ones like Rhodes College, U Dayton, DePauw, but we need to know what your stats are and how much your family will pay first to give better recommendations.
Any good school is going to have good premed prereqs courses. Do look to see if the school has an active prehealth office, student prehealth orgns, etc. Also check to see if the school holds Mock Interviews, Committee Interviews, and write Committee Letters.
I just checked the stats from my son’s med school, and each year, the entering MS1 class comes from 55-60 different undergrad schools…and this is just one med school.
So, really, across the nation, the med students are coming from hundreds of undergrads.
Holy Cross in Massachusetts has GREAT pre-med program.
Most good colleges will provide more than adequate prep for med school and med schools don’t care which undergrad institution you attend. It’s about grades, test scores, and for state med schools, your state of residence. Just make sure you complete the pre-reqs - any decent school will have pre-med advising which can tell you what those are. Just don’t go into debt.
LACs are particularly good for pre-meds who find large schools overwhelming. The smaller classes and close faculty relationships reduce the sharp elbows phenomenon and give you a better shot at a great committee letter. You can do research anywhere. Ditto medical-related volunteering.
Which LACs? The midwestern LACs are generally less preppy than the NE and southern ones. There are LACs that are more artsy, granola, alternative/hipster, or intellectual. They can be urban, suburban or rural. Some offer merit aid. It all depends on what kind of environment brings out the best in you - also known as ‘fit.’
I had a 34 on the ACT and a 3.97 GPA unweighted. I have taken all honors and APs offered to me in high school. I will mostly likely qualify for NMF. Hope this helps, @mom2collegekids!
I have looked at Kenyon and College of Wooster for LACs. I fell in love with Kenyon, but I am worried about costs, GPA, and entrance into med school. College of Wooster was not for me.
@2016paws
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I had a 34 on the ACT and a 3.97 GPA unweighted. I have taken all honors and APs offered to me in high school. I will mostly likely qualify for NMF. Hope this helps
fell in love with Kenyon, but I am worried about costs, GPA, and entrance into med school.
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Have you had your parents run the NPC? Or do you already know that your family will be expected to pay more than what they will or can pay? What have your parents said about paying?
What is your worry about entrance into med school?
If you’ll likely qualify for NMF, then be sure to apply to a few schools that give huge merit for NMF…those can be back-ups for you.
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give you a better shot at a great committee letter.
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^^ This is why it can be important to want to be a high stats student at your undergrad. You want the LOR (recommenders) to think you’re fab and you want those who write the Committee Letter to think you’re fab.
I also don’t recommend attending a school that has 300+ juniors applying to med school. Not only are those schools less likely to write CL’s, but even if they do, I can’t imagine trying to snag great LORs from profs who are being approached by 300 other students.
Don’t pay much attention to claims that XX% of med school applicants get into med school. That stat means little/nothing to you unless that % is low. All schools weed their premeds. If the % is low, then look to see if the school is in a state with “too many premeds” (like Calif). BTW…an OOS student should think twice before heading to Calif as a premed. You might as well cut your chances in half.
But getting back to how a reported high acceptance rate can be misleading…
For example ~ School A has 500 frosh premeds
by the end of frosh year, only about 300 will still be premeds (lowish Gen Chem or Bio grades**)
by the end of soph year, only about 200 will still be premeds (lowish Ochem or Physics grades
by the end of junior year, after seeing MCAT scores, there may only be 175 premeds
(** many frosh premeds “shoot themselves in the foot” by loading up their first semester/first year with prereqs or second majors and then become overwhelmed. )
175 apply to med schools and maybe 150 get accepted (for a variety of reasons). That’s an acceptance rate of 86%. This means that 86% got accepted to at least one US MD school. (as of now, most schools only track that stat. At some point more may track the DO school acceptances. I don’t know of any that include caribbean acceptances)
The 25 who didn’t get accepted to at least 1 US MD school likely had some “flaw,” such as: BCMP or cum GPA issues, MCAT issues (either too low or unbalanced), didn’t get great LORs/CL, inadequate medically-related ECs, had a bad app list, poor interviewing skills, and/or their their AMCAS application was subpar.
That acceptance rate number, 86%, doesn’t really tell a high school senior what HIS chances are at that school.
The Director of the PreHealth Advising office at my son’s undergrad was very confident that any of his applicants who had at least a 3.6 cum/BCMP GPA and a 30 MCAT (now there’s a new score system) would have an 85% chance of acceptance. Those who wouldn’t be accepted would have one of the flaws listed above.
there are schools, like Holy Cross, that strictly control who can be premed and who can apply to med school by controlling who will get a CL and/or who will be “officially premed” at that school. Perhaps @par72 can elaborate on that.
The words, “premed program,” are so misleading. Pre-med isn’t like an “accounting program,” engineering program," or “nursing program” where there are unique classes for those professions. I think when high school students say that they want a good “premed program,” that they think they’re looking for a school that will prepare them for the MCAT or that will “feed them” into a top med school.
BTW…all 141 US MD schools are excellent. This country and each state has a vested interest in making sure that these schools are excellent because they’re educating future American doctors. The cost to educate each med student is over $100k per year. We don’t have any “so so” or “not so good” MD schools here in this country. To borrow @pizzagirl 's words: The education at US med schools is flat. They all teach the same things. The student gets himself into med school, not the undergrad. To get accepted to any one US MD school is an achievement. No one is “too good” to attend any of our country’s med schools. Going to a “top med school” is not important unless the student intends to go into academic medicine (MD/PhD).
Undergrad schools do not “prepare students for the MCAT”. That is NOT their job. Those BCMP classes are taken by other STEM students. They are basic lower-division classes that are staples at every univ. Nothing special.
And even at smaller privates, those lower-division Bio and Chem lecture classes will often be LARGE (50+ kids sitting in a lecture hall. The labs will typically be smaller, but the lectures will be large). The exceptions are the few schools that guarantee that no class will have more than 20-25 kids.
Furthermore, all schools, even top schools, will have “good profs” that teach those classes and “lousy profs” that teach those classes. That’s one reason why students often resort to websites like Ratemyprofessor to sort out the best “teachers”.
Med schools don’t care what you major in, and they don’t care about double majors, extra minors, etc. Major in a subject that you love and will excel in…English, math, music, whatever.
U Miami and Tulane. Great for pre med. Avoid the UCs except maybe SB and all the big state schools. Miami and Tulane are good for pre med because they’re not so big that you are just a number but big enough to get research opportunities at the Medical Schools there. Basically, look for a small-medium research university with a medical center on campus.
Tulane has about a 70 percent acceptance into med school. Vanderbilt is also 70 percent but Vanderbilt students are overall higher caliber than Tulane students. What does that say? Better shot at med school at Tulane. Even UCLA only has about 50-55 percent and students there are very smart. Really bad for premed.
How are schools like Northwestern and UChicago for pre-med? I know that it is extremely difficult to get a solid GPA there and they are really expensive for undergrad. Loyola University Chicago is nearly as highly ranked, but is the pre-med program there good?
@2016paws, Do you already know that need-based aid is unworkable for your family? If you’re not sure, then, as mentioned, run the individual colleges’ net price calculators. This will give you a good idea of whether you qualify for enough need-based aid to make it workable for you. If need-based aid doesn’t work out, then you need to move to merit aid which is often a different list.
If you liked Kenyon, then you might look at Williams, Middlebury, Hamilton, Colby, Bowdoin, Grinnell, Carleton. Smith and Mt. Holyoke if you are female. Some of these offer both need and merit aid, some only need, so run the NPCs first and see how your need-based aid comes out.
You have the grades and scores to get into any of these schools, but your extracurriculars, essays and recommendations will also be important.
Megametahead, mom2collegekids just explained why those acceptance rates at Tulane are bogus. Any school can have a close to 90% acceptance rate if they weed hard enough. That’s not the measure of good ‘pre-med’ advising.
And the key data is provided by the AAMC for perusal at your leisure:
https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/157998/mcat-gpa-grid-by-selected-race-ethnicity.html
The only other data that matters is med school specific, starting with whether they take out-of-state students (many state medical schools don’t). If you are a resident of Louisiana, you are in great shape because the state medical schools won’t accept students from elsewhere. If you are from CA, you are almost forced out of state because they have so many more applicants/seats. It’s not that LA schools are better at pre-med advising than CA schools.
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How are schools like Northwestern and UChicago for pre-med? I know that it is extremely difficult to get a solid GPA there and they are really expensive for undergrad. Loyola University Chicago is nearly as highly ranked, but is the pre-med program there good?
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did you read what I wrote above?
Anyway…Loyola Chicago HAS A MED SCHOOL, so do you really need to ask if going there as a premed would be good??? Do you think that they bother to have a med school, but then have lousy Bio, Chem, OChem and Physics classes for undergrad? If you want to become a doctor, develop your critical thinking skills.
Is your question about NU and UChi concerned with GPA there? Well, you might want to read some posts from a mom of a UChi graduate who didn’t get even one MD med school interview because her GPA was a 3.5 and her MCAT was solid. She applied to (I think) over 20 MD med schools and didn’t even get an interview. Do you think they may now have second thoughts about having sent her to UChi when if she had gone to - uh - IU or Purdue or Ohio State or Alabama or Iowa, etc, she likely would have graduated with a higher GPA and would have gotten some interviews? My own son, who went to Alabama, only completed 6 med school apps (I know, too few), but he did get 3 acceptances, so it worked out.
UCSD has a biology program. Also look at some of the higher ranked LACs like Haverford, Bowdoin, and Davidson.
This student is OOS for UCs (and deadlines have passed).
Virtually no premed should go to a UC as an OOS student.