My daughter has done really well at high school:
Valedictorian, 4.85 GPAa, 1550 SAT, 35 ACT, lot of extra curriculars, high schol badminton team etc.
She got regents scholarship with UCSD (We live in San Diego btw) and decided to go there. She also applied for 7/8 year medical program with FAU. Initially she got waitlisted and they called to say she got admitted.
What are some pros and cons about going to 8 year medical program at FAU vs doing bachelors at UCSD, followed by a medical school.
She has to be away from family for sure as we live in California. In terms of cost, since she is a national merit scholar, FAU gave a full ride to tuition and boarding (gave another 2 k for allowance). Her med school cost would be some what high (around 60k but 25k if you are florida resident). Since we had a florida prepaid plan, she might qualify for 25k per year tuition.
what are some cons about going to FAU ? It’s not as highly ranked but does the rank matter. What about her residency chances in California or does she have to pretty much hope for a residency outside CA ?
Tuition at UCSD would be $100k (20K break due to regents scholarship).
Any thoughts.
http://fau.edu/medpipelines/ says that “Students in MedDirect and Wilkes Medical Scholars are expected to finish each undergraduate semester with a GPA of at least 3.7. Single semester GPA’s lower than 3.7 will trigger an automatic review by the Committee for continuation in the program.” Note that needing each semester GPA to be 3.7 is (after the first semester) more stressful than maintaining an overall GPA of 3.7. There are other requirements to maintain the admission into medical school.
FAU medical school cost of attendance for non-residents is about $100k per year ( http://med.fau.edu/students/financialaid/cost.php ), which is probably the typical expectation (regular pre-meds like she would be at UCSD cannot count on being able to have a choice of medical school, since most get 0 admissions and those who do get any usually get only 1).
Since FAU is less expensive (UCSD would only be able to match the combined undergraduate + medical school cost if she got into a lower cost medical school, like an in-state UC, but those are very competitive), your question would be, is UCSD as a regular pre-med worth $100k more than FAU with the express lane to medical school that is easy to fall out of?
The other thing to consider is if she decides not to go to medical school, or does not earn a high enough GPA and MCAT score to make it worth applying to medical school, which would be better for her backup plans (including consideration of cost differences)?
Thank you. Considering her work ethic (having taken lot of AP courses and being a medium range competitive high school) and her intelligence, we expect her to maintain 3.7 GPA. One other thing is the family connection which is quite important to us. Are we losing her as part of the family assuming we stay in California. We lived in Florida for 16 years and have lot of connections there. Going back to Florida is financially not a wise choice (assuming we get paid lost more in California and more job options), do people ever come back to their families after 7/8 year stints ?
Just the fact that we might lose her, makes us cringe. UCSD is only 10 miles away and expected to see her every few weeks if not weekends. Ofcourse family time, does not compensate for the fact that she has to put a lot of effort in maintaining GPA at a tougher school, decorate her resume for college apps and get a really good MCAT score.