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Doing better in highschool means that you could probably get a juicy scholarship from an average private school.</p>
<p>Pushing yourself in high school and pushing yourself at Cal don’t necessarily equate to the same outcome. On paper, you can study your ass off and you get the A. Reality, this might not always be the case.
More or less, your UG school does weigh in on grad school decisions I would hope. But comparing a 3.5 from a state to a 3.0 from Cal, the person from state might be picked over you (there really is a lot more factors than GPA, although med schools are kind of gpa whores…) Would type more, but gotta get to classsssss.</p>
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<p>I have to agree with flutterfly…Berkeley is not worth it if you’re not in here for the crazy stuff as a academic school.</p>
<p>I see what liquidmetal says, in that there is a lot of junk you have to do to get into med school aside from study the crazy stuff, but you can fulfill med school requirements at a ton of places – when you’re coming to Berkeley, might as well see the madness it can offer. I think frosh should be figuring out what they want to do more than coming in predisposed to avoiding anything but the shortest path to what they <em>think</em> is their goal.</p>
<p>Flutterfly: Sorry for putting you on the spot there. You’re obviously very smart, but I’m sure as you know, there are a lot of people who don’t do nearly as well as you in MCB. And congratulations on a paid research position, that’s pretty impressive. </p>
<p>Yes, people should study what they are interested in, I agree. But there are cases where short-term interests clash with stronger long-term goals and desires.</p>
<p>Short-term interest: 4 years of undergrad in a major you know you won’t do as well in (GPA-wise). You may learn loads and gain more from college, but your GPA takes a pretty big hit (3.8 –> 3.5). </p>
<p>This conflicts with the long-term interest of being a doctor. It’s really sad and stupid that med schools work that way, because its tough, medically-relevant majors like MCB that really make the best doctors.</p>
<p>Well, I’m just saying they shouldn’t be completely opposed to MCB and other “hard majors” without ever trying it… so many freshmen I know were so freaked out in the very beginning of the year that all of them thought they were majoring in NutriSci/PACS/media studies and thought me and the few EECS/Chem majors were crazy and insanely smart. And now a lot of them are trying to catch up and take the science/math prereqs because they spent all of their freshman year trying out all these classes for random easy majors.</p>
<p>That is pretty funny that there were people who were intentionally taking easy majors. Every single person I’ve talked to has said to take it easy, as it seemed most people were being too ambitious (20+ units first semester, etc…), not the other way around.</p>
<p>The only thing I dislike is that I don’t think I will have enough time to do everything I want. I love physics, biology, chemistry and engineering, and if I could I would take all of the higher level courses in all of them but you can’t do that in 4 years. It seems that the breadth requirements are actually preventing me from getting more breadth in math and science, but as long as its challenging then I ought to be happy.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t want to take an easy major so that I could become a doctor, I’d want to take the most challenging major that prepared me the most so I could be the best doctor (Excepted more likely phd than md, for me). But, if the OP really wants to be a doctor and doesn’t think he will be able to reach his goal with a difficult major then it is probably in his interest to not go with MCB. That isn’t something that everyone would do or understand, but it seems that it might be the best choice if being a doctor is the most important factor. Whatever you choose, good luck.</p>