<p>I need help making a college decision. I've narrowed down my college choices between Tulane and LSU. I'm planning on doing premed. I've been accepted into LSU's honors college and I recently visited for Spring Invitational. I got a full ride there and it's only 3 hours away from my hometown. Also, I've gotten so much credit from LSU from placement tests and AP exams that I can skip 2 years! However, everyone I talked to there that is from my old school told me it's very easy to get As. I'm worried that if I go to LSU, I'll just try enough to get As but not actually learn anything, which will screw me over when I start to take the MCAT.
Tulane, on the other hand, is a very good school. It's academically a lot better than LSU. I got a scholarship from there, but I'll still have to be $21,000 a year. It's 5 hours from my hometown and I will get some credit from my AP exams, but not nearly as much credit as I will get if I go to LSU. I feel like if I go to Tulane, I will actually learn and be challenged which will probably not happen if I go to LSU.
Also, will where ever I go for my undergraduate years affect my chances of getting into medical school? So, if I go to Tulane and do well, will I have a better chance of getting into medical school than if I go to LSU and do well?</p>
<p>As a Tulane alum, I never though I would see the day when I would consider advising someone to go to LSU! The world is a strange place. Just to start, distance from home should not be a factor, I don’t think. You won’t be going home that often once you acclimate at either place. Also, I could make it from Tulane to LSU in 70 minutes when I had to make the trip. So really not that much different anyway.</p>
<p>Unless your family is so well off that the $21,000 per year is not very meaningful, a full ride is really hard to pass up. Especially since you are planning on med school, which of course is very expensive. If you went to LSU and could convince your family to take all or a substantial part of what they would have paid for Tulane and put it into an account for when you go to med school, that would be a very good situation. So from the financial side it is kind of a no-brainer.</p>
<p>As far as your other concern about the academic environment, if you have read some of my other posts you know that I thing a huge part of what makes one school “better” in that regard than another is the quality of your classmates. I think there is little doubt that you would find yourself more challenged and working harder at Tulane. However, since you are so aware of this, and since other than the required pre-med courses it sounds like you can start with upper level courses at LSU, in their honors program, maybe you can make sure you are challenged to a greater degree than you otherwise might be.</p>
<p>In other words, meshing those two points, college is a value proposition like anything else. There is no doubt that most $75,000 cars provide a lot more features than a $25,000 car but that we cannot all afford the luxury auto. Yet both will reliably get you from A to B, so it just depends on how much value those autos represent to you relative to your ability to afford them. The same applies to colleges, with the additional benefit that you have a lot of control as to how much you get out of any school, even if you have to take some extra steps to insure maximizing the features available from some. </p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with LSU in terms of the quality of the professors and how you can be fully prepared for the MCATs. At the same time, at LSU you are much more likely to get large lecture courses taught by grad students, many of whom will be foreign. So you might have to take more initiative to insure you get everything out of the subjects being taught. You will learn, but certainly you might have to challenge yourself to some degree. Hopefully you can take honors courses in things like chemistry and biology. Look into that. Presumably that would raise the competition level.</p>
<p>As far as skipping two years, being premed makes that a little harder, since you cannot place out of chemistry courses. You have to take freshman and organic chemistry, so that’s two years right there. Then there is biology, physics, and it is a good idea to take an advanced math course like stats, assuming you are placing out of calc. Then of course you have to complete whatever distribution requirements they have along with the courses for your major, whatever you decide that might be. You should really consider staying at least 3 years, and you also might want to take a semester abroad, also highly recommended.</p>
<p>If you take a lot of higher level classes, make great grades and do well on the MCATs, it really doesn’t matter if you go to LSU or Tulane. They both have their own med schools, of course, so that works in your favor. But if you have your sights set on Harvard, Johns Hopkins, those kinds of very top med schools, it depends much more on the quality of your transcript, test scores, recs, and other activities you have undertaken than which of those two schools you attended.</p>
<p>In summary, if money is not really an issue, choose Tulane. If you think that the overall LSU environment would really be a poor fit for your personality, then choose Tulane. But if the money is important and you are reasonably disciplined and adaptable, then LSU makes more sense I think.</p>