I am currently a high school sophomore looking for some advice on what match/safety schools would be good for me. I am very interested in pursuing Bioengineering and going down a Pre-Med track and hopefully will end up getting accepted to an MSTP program in the future. I’ve listed my stats below:
Demographics:
Middle Eastern male
Washington State resident
Upper-middle income
9th Grade Schedule:
Wind Ensemble
Honors English 9
Honors World History 1 and 2
Honors Chemistry
AP Calculus BC (5, AB subscore 5)
IB Spanish SL
10th Grade Schedule:
Jazz Band
Wind Ensemble
Honors English 10
Honors World History 3 (semester)
Leadership (semester)
AP Physics 1 (taking Phys C Mech test)
AP Computer Science Principles
AP Spanish Language
Taking Calculus 3, Differential Equations, Statistics and Health at a Community College
Extracurriculars:
iGEM (an international synthetic biology competition) bronze medal
JSA, President and Founder
Math Club, Vice President and Founder
Part of my school’s ASB (we don’t have official positions yet)
Got a scholarship to a programming academy in SF summer before 9th grade, have published an app to the iOS App Store
I am also planning on taking the Math Level 2 and Physics SAT II tests and the AMC 12 next year.
My reach schools will be MIT (dream school), Caltech, Stanford and Johns Hopkins for Bioengineering. I have identified UW Seattle as a match school, but I would be greatly appreciative of any suggestions on what additional safeties/match schools could be based off of my interests and stats.
@Aryakhan81 Take a look at Worcester Polytechnic Institute for biomedical engineering and biology/biotechnology programs. UMASS Medical School is close by.
Thank you very much for your help! I will be sure to look into it! I’ve also come across Rice University for bioengineering and Georgia Tech – do you think these would be match or reach schools given my stats?
Reach. Rice is a reach for everyone, and GT bioengineering OOS is too. (I personally know a national merit finalist who probably could have gotten into GT for most majors, but was rejected for BME.) Both are well worth having on your list - they just need to be in the reach category. (In the case of Rice, it’s especially a reach in the RD cycle, as they fill almost half the entering class with binding Early Decision.)
Pitt could be a good safety - great for bioengineering, and rolling admissions so you can apply early and get an acceptance nailed down in the fall. (We could split hairs about whether it’s a safety or a match, but once you’re accepted, it’s a safety!)
Also check out URochester and CWRU. Both excellent BME schools that also have fantastic non-major music opportunities.
Note that UW Seattle Direct to College of Engineering admission is more competitive than the school overall.
Washington State University also has biomedical engineering.
Will your parent contribution cover both college and medical school, or will choosing a lower cost college allow for more money to pay for expensive medical school?
@ucbalumnus My parents have offered to pay for undergrad. I was planning on attending an NIH-sponsored MSTP program, where you get both an MD and a PhD and your medical school costs are already covered. I’ll have another talk regarding this as the time draws nearer.
Any type of engineering plus pre-med is a not a good combination. Med schools are highly focused on undergrad GPA and MCAT. These two things comprise about 80% of the decision making process into med school admissions.
Going into a grade deflating major like engineering will make things tough. It won’t be impossible, but just know in advance that you will be facing an uphill struggle. Much more so than the loads of biology majors from grade inflating schools who cruise towards a 3.8.
^ although no one “cruises” to a 3.8 in college, even with grade inflation, it’s true it’s MUCH harder to get a med school worthy GPA with an engineering major. In addition, if you can’t get into med school, bioengineering is one of the rare fields where a Master’s degree is required. Finally, biology has very low job prospects and bioengineering is the most competitive major right now beside CS, so finding an alternate major is going to help you tremendously in the safety search.
MD and MD/PhD programs are generally reach to high reach (pre-meds who apply usually apply to a dozen or few programs; most get shut out, and most who do get in get only one admission). So you should not plan on getting into any specific MD or MD/PhD program, particularly any that are free or cheap which will be the most competitive to get into. If you get into an MD program, expect to see costs of $400k or more – any lower cost (e.g. in-state public) is a bonus, and getting into a free one should be treated as success beyond your wildest dreams.
According to http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf (figure 3 on page 4), natural sciences (of which biology is the largest category) tended to have slightly lower grades than engineering as of around 2006.
However, engineering major requirements tend to be more voluminous than the natural sciences major requirements, so there may be less ability to cherry-pick elective GPA-boosting courses for engineering majors than natural science majors.
A safety school has to meet three criteria. 1) It has to be unconditionally affordable (most likely your state school). 2) It has to be something with a greater than 60% of admissions and 3) It has to be a school you’re actually serious about.
If I were you, I would take a scholarship. We don’t know how long this economic apocalypse is going to last.
The affordability of in-state publics varies by state. Residents of (for example) Pennsylvania are less likely than those of many other states to find their in-state publics affordable. Check net price calculators.
60% admission rate is not a reliable indicator. The real criterion for admission should be 100% admission rate *for the student in question/i.
I think that it is hard to figure out what would be a safety for you, until you finish your Junior year, Your GPA could down, and your SAT could end up anywhere between 1400 and 1600.
This summer is a good time to look at colleges, and to check out colleges of different cceptance rates from your high school. It is, however, too early to be thinking of colleges in terms of “safety”, “match”, or even “reach” (though there any many colleges which are a reach for anybody, no matter what their SATs and GPAs are).
If you continue the same way that you have done until now, most colleges with acceptance rates of over 50% would be safeties, as well as some colleges with lower acceptance rates, depending on what your high school’s acceptance rate to that college loos like).
So I’ve been hearing that BioE would be a hard major to get a strong GPA in (or even get into). I’m not sure if this is the best place to ask this, but do students who generally get As and A-s continue to get similar grades in college? I would assume there is some correlation.
Also, does it look more impressive for medical schools to get a higher GPA at a less prestigious university or a lower GPA at a more prestigious one?
There’s an algorithmic cut off that doesn’t even take into account your university. Just GPA, Science GPA, and MCAT. That’s it. Not the major, not the university’s ranking or prestige. If you have a 3.5 from UW or JHU or in Engineering, nobody knows it’s your university because you don’t make the first cut, period.
If you make the first cut, then your application gets to human eyes. There, your volunteer and paid experiences in many environments (especially underserved ones or those different from the one you grew up in), the classes you took, your statement, etc., all come into play to decide who among the first cut applicants get to move to the interview stage.
On average, college grades are lower than high school grades. Probably most high school students who go on to college had HS GPA of 3.0 or higher. But college students’ GPAs range from 2.0 to 4.0 (with some lower and flunking out for academic reasons).
At the super-selective end of colleges, most incoming frosh have 3.8-4.0 HS GPA. But even those with the highest average college GPAs like Brown or Harvard have average college GPAs in the 3.6-3.7 range.
Of course, individual students may have college GPAs better or worse than their high school GPAs.