I am trying to decide where I want to apply. I am planning on doing pre-med and also taking a lot of public health/policy courses and nutrition courses.
Schools I am considering applying to:
UW, Cal-Poly, Pepperdine, UCI, UCD, UCB, Case Western, GWU, UT Austin, NYU, Georgetown, Emory, and Vanderbilt.
I know the list is extensive and all over the place in terms of difficulty but I need to apply to safety and reach schools so keep that in mind.
What is your budget? More importantly how much can you afford for university without taking on any debt at all? If you are seriously considering being premed, then you should try to avoid debt for undergrad if you can. Saving college dollars in quantity for medical school is a good plan if you can do it.
I see from another thread that you have a strong high school GPA, and that you are in-state in Oregon. The University of Oregon can prepare you very well for medical school and for the MCAT.
I would expect that U. of Oregon should be a safety for you. However, you are going to find that premed classes there are a lot tougher than you might expect. You also should understand that you need to be approximately in the top 1/4 of your class to have a good chance at medical school. Being even higher up in your class would be good. Thus there is nothing wrong with attending a university where with hard work you can reasonably expect this to happen.
I don’t think that you want to go to a school where you are likely to be in the bottom 1/2 of incoming students if you are planning to try to maintain a medical-school-worthy GPA in university.
I know budget is a big thing to consider, but for now I am just trying to look at the schools purely from an educational standpoint. For a lot of reasons I am not looking to go to UO, but I understand where you are coming from. Wouldnt med schools take the university into consideration at least a little bit? For example being in the top of your class at UO is very different from being at the top of your class or even middle range at Emory.
“Wouldnt med schools take the university into consideration at least a little bit”
From what I have heard, the university really doesn’t matter much at all as long as you are at a good school. Harvard or Stanford might give you a small boost, but with the emphasis on small. Based on what I have heard, being in the top 20% at OU will give you a good chance for medical school, while being at the 50th percentile at Emory would not be so good. Of course your MCAT scores, LORs, and experience volunteering in a medical environment will also be critical.
Neither of my daughters are premed. However, they both have or had majors which overlap significantly with premed requirements. As such they are in quite a few premed classes. You are going to find a very large number of very serious, very smart, and very competitive students in premed classes at any good university. OU definitely counts as a very good university (so does Emory). The quality of other premed students there, or at Emory, or at any of probably at least 200 other schools in the US, is going to surprise you. I have also heard multiple reports of midterm exams with a class average between 40 and 50. This is the class average for a group of very motivated students. It is the students who pull off an 80 on these midterms who are actually likely to be headed for medical school.
Supposedly, medical schools do an automated sorting of applicants by GPA and MCAT score to determine whose applications get read first by human readers. Those not in the first group (above the cutoff GPA and MCAT) may not get read at all if the class is filled from the first group (rolling admission).
Only if your application gets to human readers could college attended possibly be an influence. But even then, it is usually not considered a big influence, if your college is a reasonably respectable four year school (a state flagship qualifies). Of course, lots of other factors matter once your application is read by a human.
As someone who has worked in healthcare for decades and has numerous friends who are doctors and other health professionals, I agree with the other posters. Medicine is so absurdly competitive and brutal that it makes very little difference where you went to school once you make it (become licensed and board-certified) because so few kids with dreams of being a doctor actually do. The vast majority of doctors I know went to med school overseas because of cost considerations or because they are immigrants, and they have perfectly successful careers. I understand that putting a prestigious name on your CV sounds very appealing, but the reality is that no one will care. I know people who went to tippy-tops for their pre-med or med school, and they refer to it as unnecessary suffering and wish they had gone to easier (and cheaper) schools. Even the lowest-ranked programs are very tough and competitive and you will have to work like a dog to survive, regardless of how bright you are. As others said, when you apply to med school, a 3.6 from your state public will weigh higher than a 2.8 from NYU. Your goal should be to earn the highest grades you possibly can and do very well on MCATs. Your secondary objective should be to obtain your education at the lowest possible cost because you will not be making real money for a very long time and those med school loans will pile up, so don’t add undergraduate debt to them. That doctor salary won’t seem so high when your student loan payments are $2000-3000/month. If someone offers you a full ride for the pre-med, you take it and run.
The UC’s provide virtually no financial aid to OOS students so unless your parents can be full pay you need to take them off your list.
As other posters have said, the key to med school is GPA + MCAT, then your LoRs and experience. To get standout LoRs you need to be seen as a standout in your cohort.
I completely get why a high achiever wants to go to away to a better ‘name’ college. But this is the first of a bunch of crossroads where you have to start making tough calls. What do you want most? how sure are you of that?
If you are 100% certain that med school is your path, talk to your parents about money now. If they have $55K / year for college, will they have that for med school also? If they have $220K saved for college, and you go to a college that is $25K/year (such as UUtah), can you have the balance for med school?If so, and you choose OHSU med school, you could graduate from college and med school without debt. This is a gift to future you beyond what you can imagine. To get a sense of it ask the next youngish doctor you meet about debt.
If you think that you might be one of the very large % of students who change their mind about their career path in college, then focus on picking colleges that 1) you can afford w/o more than $20K in total debt (the most you can take in your own name) and 2) are places that you think that you can really bloom. It will help you if you stay on the med school path (we all tend to do best if we are in a place that suits us), you won’t have terrible debt and either way you will have had a good 4 years.
Seriously, I don’t think that there are many people who would be equally happy at Pepperdine and NYU. Emory, Georgetown, GWU will have large cohorts of very determined classmates who are gunning for med school. You will have to work hard to stand out in that crowd. Of course, that might may suit you really well! but learn more about these schools, and figure out the fit for you.
Actually the 2.8 and the 3.6 are in the same boat - save for exceptions neither passes the first cut.
If you are from Oregon do not apply to California public universities because 1) no financial aid and 2) it reduces the odds of making it to med school since pre-meds are mtire competitive in California due to how many excellent students there are and how few California med school spot.
Generally, drop out of state public universities.
Run the NPC Whitman, Lewis and Clark, UPuget Sound, UOregon, then look for supportive, collaborative colleges.
What about UW?
If you do not have residency in whatever W state UW is in, paying higher out-of-state tuition would mean less money left to pay for medical school. However, one of the UWs (Wyoming) has an out-of-state list price only a few thousand dollars more than Oregon in-state list price, so if you can get its Rocky Mountain scholarship or WUE tuition, that may make it more price competitive if you really want to go out-of-state to a UW school.
More than the undergrad college’s prestige, you want to check how cooperative vs competitive a college is with premeds. Many actively weed out premed hopefuls. It can be brutal.
There are no clear, current figures I know of. But older reports suggest 80%+ of freshmen who want med school get weeded out of their dreams at some colleges. This isn’t just being top 20% but the stem depts actually making things more difficult.
Just curious- why would a school do this? And how would I find out if they do…
“Just curious- why would a school do this? And how would I find out if they do…”
I am assuming that you are asking why a school would have weed out classes for premed students.
The best answer that I can give is that when I go to see a doctor, I want a doctor who is very smart, and who was able to survive weed out classes. I do not want to see an oncologist or cardiologist who barely made it through freshman biology because the class was too tough, nor do I want to see an oncologist or cardiologist who breezed through really easy classes for eight years.
Also, of all of the students who start university thinking that they are premed, most give up on premed before they get to the point of applying to medical schools. Of all of the students that apply to medical schools, the majority do not get accepted anywhere.
One daughter started off freshman year of university in “biology for biology majors”. The first mid-term had a class average of between 40 and 45. There is a good reason for this. Most of the students in that class think that they are premed. However, most will never get to the point of applying to medical school. For those who are not going to make it to medical school, the sooner they start to think about other possible careers, the better off they are. In particular, if they change their major during their freshman year they are still likely to graduate in four years. If they decide during their senior year that biology is not for them then they will have a problem, and might graduate late. As such, I see it as a favor to the freshman students that they made the first mid term exam this difficult.
In terms of which schools do this? As far as I know every university that has a good premed program does this. That is what premed is.
Which brings me to another point. You have very strong grades (from another thread). You could think of this as opening up the possibility of attending a “prestigious” university. However, even at that prestigious university the majority of students are not going to ever make it to medical school. Also, if you are the #1 top student in your high school, then you might be average or below average at a really top university. There is another way to think of this. If you attend a very good university but one that is affordable and that is not the highest ranked that you could get into, then you are going into university very well prepared. If you attend your in-state flagship, then you will indeed be stronger than the average student who goes there. However, you will be very well prepared to do well in very difficult premed weed out classes. You might be one of the tiny handful of students who get an 80 or better on that weed out mid term where the class average is 40. Those are the students who are probably headed for medical school. However, you will need to go into university knowing that you will have to work hard regardless of where you attend. Also, your premed classes will be full of students who are very strong and very serious about their education.
Pre-med is very tough, but there is no objective data for the 80% figure listed above. It’s simply a made-up number designed to frighten prospective pre-meds. Same with the claim that a 3.6 GPA “misses the cut”, as there is no evidence that a GPA of 3.6 is automatically screened out.
Here are the numbers from AMCAS, which collects the information from US accredited medical schools; take a look at all the tables and you’ll get a good sense of how competitive things are. It is tough, but it is doable. It’s up to you.
https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/
Thats very helpful, thank you!
It’s not just Biology classes that weed our potential premeds. Chemistry, Physics, and any flavor of Mathematics destroy GPAs.
My kid is a Biology major at WashU doing premed. His GPA is 3.75 after sophomore year and that will not make the cut for most of the Top 20 medical schools. He claims that his GPA is barely at the average of the typical premed there.
He has some interesting stories of his fellow classmates getting poor grades on Biology and Chemistry midterms and how their premed dreams were pretty much dashed. His roommate for junior year is a premed and the likeliehood is that he will be a pirate (think of the Disney movies and you will understand the reference) since his GPA is barely over 3.0.
@bernie12 is the Emory expert and can elaborate more on science classes there.
And about post #14, unless you’re URM, you better have a high GPA/MCAT to even matriculate to medical school. The 3.6 might work if you’re African-American, but if you’re Asian or Caucasian, good luck.
And the objective data which supports this assertion is…nothing, apparently. Everyone agrees it’s tough to get into medical school, but you offer no evidence that a 3.6GPA will get the candidate automatically screened out.
Here’s a novel idea; instead of non-factual opinions, let’s see what the actual numbers show:
From AAMC, applicants/matriculants by race/ethnicity
https://www.aamc.org/download/321498/data/factstablea18.pdf
And again, no proof from anyone, including yourself, that 3.6GPA get automatically screened out.
“there is no objective data for the 80% figure listed above”
I made this number up based on knowing a very small handful of students who did get scores in the 80’s on exams where the class average was 45 or less. I was thinking of three specific cases. However, these students got an A+ in each particular class. You do not need all A+'s to go to medical school. You do however need a lot of A’s, and “a lot of A’s” is going to require hard work in premed classes.
As others have said, it is not just the biology classes that are tough. Some students find math hard. Some find physics hard. Organic Chemistry is famous for being difficult. One student I know referred to organic chemistry as the most difficult B- that they have ever seen. One B- will not keep them out of medical or veterinary school. However, they needed (and got) multiple A’s to offset that one B-.