Look at Hobart and William Smith in upstate NY.
There is a temple across the street with strong community involvement and participation (college and community) as well as an active Hillel.
There seems to be a strong health sciences program/ pre med/ pre health with many internships and programs in nearby medical facilities.
There are merit scholarships available.
Dual Credit automatically applies, AP is accepted individually by the student whenever (or even never sometimes). Entering with too many DC can actually be a bad thing, especially if student wants to switch majors at some point.
Iâm in Texas, and a big trend is to major in something other than pre-med, when applying to Med School. Business degrees are very popular with Med School admission, of course with pre-med required classes. Thinking âout of the boxâ can make a candidate stand out.
Iâd also suggest your daughter study hard and retake SAT & ACT. Applying test optional, when others are submitting high test scores, may not be the way to to go. A high test score can only help.
At most places pre-med isnât a major. Itâs only relatively recently that Iâve seen it anywhere, but not places kids from our schools go to. I have no idea what med schools think of the major itself.
Pre-Med as in Allied Health, Public Health, Biology, etc, medical-ish type majors. Animal Science & Zoology are also other popular majors, as well as Business, that many at my daughterâs university are majoring in, applying to Med School & Dental School. Business especially, because the doctors have a business foundation, to run their practices.
But âout of the boxâ things will make one stand out with admissions committees.
@WayOutWestMom could you address the above post? Thanks
Adcomms really, really donât care what major an applicant has. They only care that applicants have completed the required pre-reqs. (Assuming the specific med school still has pre-reqs. Many med schools have moved to competency based admissions. UCLA, UMichigan, Duke, Creighton, Einstein, USC, etc. See MSAR for the full list.)
Having an âout of the boxâ major wonât help an applicant stand out. My daughtersâ med school classmates had a wide variety of undergrad majors including forestry, Italian & enology, theology, music theory, physics, mathematics, gender studies, English lit, Spanish, communications, sociology, history, business, computer science, and various flavors of engineering, as well as the more common biology, chemistry, biochemistry, neuroscience, BME, and public health.
BTW, the allied health sciences are typically a poor choice for most pre med hopefuls. Even adjusting for the fact the allied health science majors have lower average MCAT scores, allied health science majors still have the lowest acceptance rate into med school of any group. (see: https://www.aamc.org/media/6061/download?attachment)
Majors with highest acceptance rates are humanities majors and math majors.
Business may not be especially useful for future doctors. Today most physicians are salaried employees of large group practices or corporate management groups and do not run their own businesses. Solo and/or small group practices are going extinct left and right.
Also students who are enrolled in the College of Business need to check to see if their university will allow non-arts and science majors to cross-enroll in CAS classes. (Some will; some wonât.)
Colgate! The place is amazing. Definitely go for a visit. she will love it!
Colgate will be too expensive.
Most Colgate students get financial aid. They are generous. You may qualify for a grant. They donât do loans.
The OP said they will not qualify for FA. They can use the NPC if interested. .
The OP posted that they wonât be eligible for need based aidâŠand I would bet that this student wouldnât get sufficient merit aid at Colgate to bring the cost down to the price pointâŠwhich IIRC is in the $25,000 a year range.
The OP posted â We will not qualify for financial aid. (Did it before with older kid).â
Seconding: âpremedâ and âallied healthâ majors are the worst majors in terms of outcomes â âpremedâ because a student is supposed to be able to handle BOTH the premed pre-reqs AND a major, so if the students make it to the interview stage theyâll have to prove they didnât do this as a âshortcutâ, and Allied Health science classes tend to be easier than the classes for science majors.
In fact, at some colleges allied health science majors have a completely separate science track. Medical schools do not accept the allied health science version of pre-reqs as fulfilling admission requirements. Prospective pre-meds must take the same science classes as those taken by physical/biological science majors.
Is Muhlenberg still on your list? I think she has a chance for decent merit there. They are strong in pre-med and 30% of the population is Jewish. WRT Wooster, while there is a certain percentage of Jewish students (canât remember the exact number), there is no employed Hillel director so how active it is depends on the students running it. When my dd visited, it appeared to be small but active which would have been enough for her. By the time she arrived on campus, those students had graduated and the group was small and disorganized with few activities. In terms of bats, they seem to be in the old, unrenovated dorms in late summer and then they fly south once it starts to get cold. It is definitely an issue. The goal is to renovate all of the dorms but it will take time bc they have no space to put students to take a dorm out of commission to renovate it. In terms of parties, yes there are parties, itâs a college. But there are people who do not party. The reality is that there are not as many things to do on campus as they say there are. Hopefully that will improve once the student center reopens. The new(er) science building is amazing and sciences are the most popular majors. If your dd considers going there, I would try to talk to a lot of students who are there currently who do not work for admissions.
Thanks for sharing this. This confirms my suspicion about Wooster. Admissions is definitely over sale. It is big red flag.
Yes Muhlenberg is on the list, but we had no chance to visit yet.
Just came back from our trip to PA. We visited Dickinson, Muhlenberg, and Ursinus. We will visit Gettysburg soon.
Whole family loved both Dickinson and Muhlenberg. Ursinus (a bit too small to DD taste but close to Philly) will be good safety and will be replacement for Wooster. Denison and Wooster were removed from the list.
We also thinking to eliminate Tulane, and Furman and probably Elon since there are so many good options in PA closer to home. Juniata probably too far in the country too. We will continue visit and cut the list.
As of right now (we did not visit all schools yet), we came up with the following list. I hope it should give DD good chance to get some scholarships. Most schools are test optional for 2023, but SAT may help to get scholarships in some. DD will have 3 chances to take SAT (June, August and October) and we will figure out to submit them or not. Unfortunately she was very sick on school SAT day⊠Taking SAT in May during exams is a bad idea.
Safety: Ursinus
Match: Dickinson, Gettysburg, Union, Rhodes, Muhlenberg, Hobart and William Smith, George Washington, UMD.
Reach: Washington and Lee, Case Western, Univ of Richmond, University of Rochester .
Itâs a fine list - but again and I canât go back 450 messages, werenât you trying to score a very inexpensive price - like $30K or less?
Unless you have need, youâre not going to hit a low price, even with scholarship - especially with those schools as only the reach schools meet need.
What was your budget again?
We are trying to get half tuition.
Oh that may be possible. I remember beating UMD cost wise was the goal.
It wonât be possible at your reaches (50%) nor GW unless you score the Johnson or Weinstein at W&L. Not sure about the others.
Definitely read the chats on the other schools to see what type of $$ people are getting bcuz applying to schools where 50% canât happen is time wasting and will lead you to spending more than you want unless you are willing to accept that if need be.
I know you spent a long time developing the list but if you absolutely must get 50%, then applying to schools where itâs impossible is dangerous.
Given UMD is brutally hard to get into now, do you have an alternative in state school as a back up ?. Or again Iâll throw out Bama as itâs cheap - cheaper than UMD most likely. You asked b4 why send my kid to a school with big classes? Thatâs UMD and GW. So u r doing UMD to chase a price point so y not a Bama or AZ which will be even less. Bama has the McCullough Medical Scholars. I put the link below.
Good luck.