Transfer to Northwestern or Stay at Carleton College

Transfer Students
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Apparently I talked to a lot of senior’s and juniors at Carleton and transferring to Northwestern from Carleton is a nearly guaranteed admissions if there’s a gpa that’s somewhat decent (like around 3.5 ish). I was wondering whether I should transfer for pre med, Carleton’s pre med is already strong being at around 82 percent of pre med student’s at Carleton making med school

Northwestern seems to feed in the same rate as Carleton, however, I’m wondering if it would be better in that standpoint? Thank you for your help.

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If you are happy at Carleton College, then stay; why mess with a good thing ?

If unhappy due to an unfixable reason at Carleton College, then transfer.

Unfixable reasons include such things as unavailable major, location & size of school or angry ex boyfriend/girlfriend present on campus.

P.S. Are you seeking better internship or shadowing opportunities ? If so, then this is a valid reason for transferring. For example: I often suggest particular schools for those interested in pursuing a career in a specific area of medicine based on internship opportunities in that specialty.

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There is no general reason I am aware of to prefer Northwestern to Carleton for pre-med. As I am sure you are aware, your overwhelming priorities are to get the best grades possible and the highest possible MCAT score. If you are on track at Carleton, I would not see there being a good reason to transfer to Northwestern, including because of the inherent risk of getting off track.

Now, if you had some OTHER compelling reason, OK. But if it is generally going well at Carleton, congratulations and carry on.

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You haven’t indicated a reason for transferring. Are you happy at Carleton? Med school officers won’t prefer one name to another. They will care about your GPA, MCAT, and experiences. I don’t see any advantage to transferring based on what you have written here, but maybe there is something you haven’t shared with us.

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Carleton is 82%. NU is similar.
Why would you ask thus question ?

What is wrong at Carleton ? I mean anytime you go somewhere new you are starting again - socially - and there’s a cost to that.

Btw schools likely have higher rates because they have ‘better’ students to begin with. Not because the schools are better for med school admissions per se.

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Can u share details on the Carleton premed acceptance rate? Does that include MD only? DO too? Students who have done post-bacc or SMPs? Students who were admitted to MD/DO school, regardless when they graduated Carleton? Does Carleton provide committee letters and if so, do all students who want to apply to med school receive them?

Big picture, It’s very easy for schools to selectively share these type of data. If you are going to compare across schools, you have to make sure the numerator and denominator include the same things. If you don’t know the answers to the questions I posed, you need to do more research.

IMO it is difficult from both Carleton and NU to make it thru to med school. As others have asked, is supposed med school acceptance rates the only reason you want to transfer? Probably doesn’t make sense.

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With a transfer acceptance rate at Northwestern of somewhere around 13-14%, I find it difficult to believe this statement.

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Carleton College reports a 95% retention rate; therefore, about 27 students do not return. Only some of these 27 will apply to Northwestern University as a transfer student.

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This is an extremely high acceptance rate for students going to medical school.

Do you have the opportunity to get some experience in a medical environment where you are? With an 82% acceptance rate to medical school, I would think that this almost has to be possible, and common.

Like other people responding to this question, I do not see any reason to transfer. You are already at a great school. You are already at a school with an exceptionally high acceptance rate to medical school. I see risks in transferring. I do not see any reason to transfer, unless there is something major that you are not telling us.

If you are currently just starting at Carleton, then plan to work very hard in your classes and plan to keep way ahead in all of your work if there is any way that you possibly can. Both daughters had majors that overlapped with premed classes, so I have heard lots of stories about how tough the classes are going to be. Do not rush to take the hardest classes (such as organic chemistry), but instead make sure that you are very well prepared when you do take them.

“Congratulations and carry on” sounds exactly right!

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I was barely paying attention to this on our Carleton visit, as my S24 has like zero pre-med aspirations, but as I recall there is a hospital and some important clinics and retirement facilities in Northfield where the pre-med Carls tend to volunteer during the term, and then they do all sorts of stuff in the summer. And there is a lot of help placing in these opportunities.

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This. Unless you have some good reason for transferring…why?

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First cut will be done by software looking at your GPA, Science GPA, MCAT score. Your university won’t even factor in.
Then they’ll look at your courses, clinical experiences, volunteering with populations different from yourself, ability to communicate in a language your patients may speak, research, paid work, leadership, etc, and way at the bottom, university, where Carleton ranks the same as Northwestern. As a result, the risks are high (loss of adviser and professors who’d write recommendations or suggest opportunities) for zero benefit.
Btw: Doesn’t Carleton offer a term in Chicago where you’d get an internship and a class on an aspect of the urban experience? And i read about their Mayo clinic summer experience/internships.

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I am aware of Carleton students who have interned at the Mayo Clinic during school breaks.

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To be honest I wanted to try out biomedical engineering and go to med school in that pathway but Carleton doesn’t have an engineering faculty

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You can’t transfer into Engineering because ABET prescribes a sequential path. In addition, grades in engineering are usually lower than in other subjects which is an impediment for med school.
So you’d have to start the engineering sequence from scratch (quite impractical) and choose Engineering is what you want rather than med school.

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You can transfer into engineering at Northwestern and many other schools. However, it does require having taken sufficient transferable preparatory courses before transfer in order not to be (too far) behind in the curriculum’s course sequencing. Such preparatory courses would include calculus, multivariable calculus, calculus-based physics, and general chemistry.

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I would check about transferring and expecting to finish my whole degree in four years in engineering.

You don’t have to major in bioengineering to apply to medical school. You need to take the required courses for medical school applicants…and You need a great GPA, a great sGPA, a great MCAT score, great LOR, and if selected, a great interview.

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My two cents is you are looking toward that upper-class stage of college where you have to start getting pretty serious about choosing your next step. A lot of people struggle with anxiety and doubt at that point, some make big changes (I did), and so on. But it is an inevitable product of the fact that college is going to end and something is going to come next.

OK, so do you want to go to medical school or be an engineer? To be very blunt, I think you need to have an answer to this question by the time you are a junior. Not that no one ever jumps off those tracks into something else, but both of those tracks are extremely hard ones, many more people start them and leave them than come to them later, and it is just going to make things way harder than necessary on you if you try to keep both of those options open during your junior and senior years.

OK, so if you want to go to medical school, I think the obvious answer is to stay at Carleton. We laid out the logic why above.

If you want to be an engineer, you could look at transferring, although that will be tricky. You could also, though, look at a 3-2 (or 4-2, 3-3, 4-3) program, or just a masters in engineering not part of such a program at all:

Carleton’s preferred partner for the formal dual-degree programs is WUSTL. WUSTL’s engineering school has a robust dual-degree program:

https://engineering.wustl.edu/academics/dual-degree-program/index.html

According to their FAQ, as long as you do their course requirements, achieve a 3.25 GPA (both generally and in math/science), and are endorsed by Carleton, you should be admitted. I finally note WUSTL is particularly strong in Biomedical Engineering.

However, if you look back at that Carleton page, they say a lot of people start off thinking about these dual degree programs, and then opt for a normal graduate engineering degree instead. And in fact, I note a lot of people will express skepticism about these programs, including because they take at least an extra year, possibly two.

But that is because really doing engineering right takes time and focus, and again it is tricky to transfer from a college without engineering and complete an engineering degree in four years anyway. So at this point, I am not sure a 4-year engineering degree is even a realistic possibility.

As a final thought, Carleton has excellent advising, including dedicated advisors for both pre-health tracks and pre-engineering:

So, these are the people who you should really be talking to. They will do the best job explaining your options, helping you evaluate pros and cons, and then executing on whatever you decide to do.

But again . . . I think even if they are not quite as blunt about it, they will probably in their own way make clear that you should likely be choosing between those tracks, not trying to stay on both.

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I’m not sure you meant to be that literal… I didn’t mean legally because no, no one will bar this student from applying to transfer so of course OP can do it.
However a student who started as a premed at a LAC is highly unlikely to have completed the 1st year Engineering sequence at a University known for its “Engineering First” curriculum.
There can be some overlap and some classes could transfer indeed but OP would not be able to jump straight into Jr or even Sophomore Engineering without the Engineering core sequence (I think it’s 6 courses that weave together math, physics, CS, and Engineering, might be more.)
Even transferring into Engineering is difficult at a university with a more typical Engineering curriculum; in fact, most posters here typically say that if a student wants to major in Engineering or something else, they’re better off starting in Engineering then switching to the something else because transferring into Engineering is so much more difficult than the reverse.

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The issue I think I’m reading here is that carleton doesn’t have an engineering major. This student seems to want both the option of a degree in engineering and being able to apply to medical school.

Carleton doesn’t have an engineering major…I believe that is the issue.