<p>Hello guys, I've been wondering about pre-med prestige at various universities and LACs I intend to apply this. Can you rank them in order from best to worst?</p>
<p>*Tufts University
*College of the Holy Cross
*Colgate University
*Boston College
*University of Pennsylvania
*University of Washington St. Louis
+Any other notable small LACS with a prestigious pre med/science facility.</p>
<p>Thanks in advance!</p>
<p>dental especially!</p>
<p>I’m not sure that there is a meaningful way to rank them - all of these schools send students to medical school every year, and all have very good pre-med/pre-dental programs. I don’t even know what “pre-med prestige” means - medical schools don’t particularly seem to care about the “prestige” of your undergrad’s premed program. So you could conceivably get into medical/dental school from any of these schools if you do well, and should probably select based upon other factors.</p>
<p>Pre-med/dental programs should be gauged by how good they are at getting people into medical and dental school. But how to do that is the question, as often it is a function of the students who attend a school rather than what the school does for them. That said, you need to make sure the school you choose has a good pre-med advisor, one who can guide you through from day one, provide good advice along the way, and match you to schools you have a good chance of getting in to. Sure, you can do this yourself, but it’s a lot easier not to have to reinvent the wheel, same as it is for getting good advice in HS to get you into college.</p>
<p>Another thing you’ll need to do is make sure you’ll enjoy the school you attend - happy students tend to do a lot better than unhappy students. And that includes picking a major you’ll be happy in.</p>
<p>Finally, realize that a lot of pre-med/dental students change their minds along the way for a lot of reasons, from discovering they really don’t want a medical career, discovering they don’t have the grades, to finding a new passion they want to pursue. So having other possibilities at a school other than a pre-med track is probably a good idea. Yes, you can transfer, but that’s difficult, also check how easy it is to transfer within the school.</p>
<p>How successful you are in applying to med school depends on what you do in college and not some magic the college has with regards to preparing students for med school. So if you want lists of “top 20” someone will supply it, but I doubt such rankings are that meaningful. There are hundreds of colleges that can give you the opportunity to be a strong med school candidate.</p>
<p>One thing to avoid is placing any importance into acceptance numbers. Some schools boast incredible rates, but it boils down to one of two things. Either they start with great students (think Stanford, etc) or the school weeds out students. Look out especially for the “committee letter” which small schools with average students coming in wield like an axe to prevent all but the strongest applicants from applying right out of college; to no surprise, they often boast 90% or better med school “acceptance” numbers for their undergrads.</p>
<p>There is an excellent online handbook at Amherst I recommend you read to get an understanding of the process and what really matters
</p>
<p>Oh, one more thing. Pretty soon a regular poster will chime in to recomend Holy Cross, like he does with every post mentioning medicine.</p>
<p>You should know that Holy Cross will only write a favorable recommendation letter to medical schools for its top students. Applying without a strong letter is futile, so in effect Holy Cross controls who applies to med school. Consequently this lets them advertise a high med school acceptance rate. To the kids who paid $200K to attend Holy Cross and were then blocked from applying to med school, I guess them’s just the breaks…</p>
<p>prestigious pre med/science facility.</p>
<p>?</p>
<p>what is a prestigious pre med facility?</p>
<p>Anyway…you should choose a school where your stats are well within the top 25% of the school.</p>
<p>UPENN, Tufts, Holy Cross, WashU.</p>