<p>Im starting to believe all the people telling me not to go to Premed at Berkeley. im seriosuly doubting whether to go or not. Comment on what my good friend sent me</p>
<h2>THIS IS A LETTER FROM A NEIGHBOR OF MINE WHO WENT THROUGH PREMED AT BERKELEY</h2>
<p>Hello,
I wished someone had given me this advice before I decided on going to UCB. As for myself, I graduated from Cal in May with a degree in Molecular Biology and am currently trying to apply to medical school, but most likely will have to reapply again, since I took the MCAT in August and applied to schools later in the cycle. I have a 34R MCAT, 3.6 GPA, a 3.5 BCPM, and have taken all my college classes at Cal, so I do not have a bias of being against Cal because I did poorly there. Hopefully, I would just like to give a true account of my experiences there, as well as explain my personal reasons for not doing premed at Cal.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>While UCB does have a great reputation, mostly based on its high US News rankings, that does not necessarily imply that it is a better school. I personally believe those rankings are skewed in the sense that they favor too heavily on admissions selectivity and professor credentials, and not enough on student satisfaction. Furthermore, according to what I have heard about the medical school admissions committees, as well as the people I know that have gotten into medical school, I do not think that the UCB or any school's prestige factor really matters. Obviously, if two people applied to medical school with identical stats(say MCAT=31, GPA=3.6), except one to UCB and the other went to Chico State, there will be favoring by the admissions committee towards the Berkeley guy since they understand that Cal’s undergrad program is more difficult than the Chico guy. Yet, what is hard for the admissions committees to quantify is how to select between the UCB and Chico applicant if they were identical in every way, except GPA (lets say, UCB=3.3, Chico=3.7). From my experiences, it seems like there would be a preference towards the Chico guy, even though, I believe that a person with a 3.3 GPA at Cal, can easily get a 4.0 at Chico.</p></li>
<li><p>When people say that Cal's premed program is competitive, they are not joking. Since all premed courses at Cal are curved, and most of the people there are smart and hardworking, this creates an environment where professors are forced to give extremely difficult tests just to generate a fair grade distribution. To do this, many professors create exams where they focus on the most minute details, and not on the important or essential concepts. For example, I knew a person that got an A in one of my bio classes, yet could not understand the concepts of cellular respiration, but knew all the protein carriers involved in the ETC mechanism. In addition, because of the competitive nature of the premeds at Cal, there is a lot of cheating at Cal. I remember one incident, where a student actually stole a professor’s computer right after class because he thought the exam was on it, and afterwards, the professor gave bogus threats to the class about how he had confidential NIH and CDC info on it. it is not unusually for students to try to hurt other students either by giving them wrong information, messing up their experiments, and etc. </p></li>
<li><p>UCB is a research school, not a teaching school, and for the most part, it seems like that research side is limited for graduate students there. What I mean by this statement is that many of the professors at Cal are there because of their research, and not their teaching ability, and thus, teaching for them is of little importance. While I have had some great professors at Cal, they were easily by the numerous professors that do not teach or just dont put any effort into it. I had one professor that would just come to class and make up his lectures on the fly, telling us to just read the textbook for the proper information. Furthermore, the premed courses at Cal are huge. I think the smallest premed course I had consisted of about 250-300 students, whereas my general Chemistry class had about 1200-1500 students. It can create an environment that makes learning more difficult.In addition, it is competitive to even get research experience at Cal, especially a position that doesn’t require you to do bull**** tasks like clean petri dishes, remove rat feces, and etc. I believe that this is because of the fact that there such a large supply of students that want to get research experience and limited number of openings available.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>4.Letters of Rec: While I was able to get great letters of rec from my professors, due to the fact that I did extremely well in their classes and was able to use that as a way to interact with them better, I can understand how its difficult for other UCB students to get letters of rec. Since the classes are large, it is hard to get a personal interaction with professor in class, and thus, one will be forced to go to a professor’s office hours to try to interact with them. Yet, even in office hours, many professors are either aloof towards students, or are being swamped by several other students that are in the same position as you.</p>
<ol>
<li>MCAT Preparation: Many people might argue that going to Cal will prepare you better for the MCAT, stating that UCB people have a higher MCAT avg than the other UCs, but I personally believe that is a bunch of BS. I do not disagree that UCB students have a higher MCAT average, but I do not believe that it is due to the education at Cal, but rather, it is just a correlation. As mentioned earlier, I think that the teaching instruction can be lacking depending on the professor. Personally, I believe that the reason why UCB students have higher MCAT averages is due to the following reasons:
A. Hardwork: To succeed at Cal, you must be hardworking, and I think that it instills in its students a work ethic that allows them to prepare for and succeed on the MCATs.
B. Selectivity: While the MCAT is based on premed knowledge, it is inherently, an intelligence/logic test, where one must incorporate their premed knowledge to solve passages related to subjects they know nothing about. Many people might disagree with me on this, and I do agree that there are many factors that can influence one’s MCAT score, as well as there are certain biases in it, but I believe essentially that it is an intelligence test. I am willing to bet that on average, people with higher SATs, will score higher on the MCAT, and since schools, such as UCB are selectively towards higher SATs, UCB’s higher MCAT average is more of an indication of its student pool, and less of its educational program.</li>
</ol>
<p>In the end, I am not saying that you cant succeed as a premed at Cal, because that is obviously not true, but you will have to put in additional effort, work that could have been easily avoided by going to an easier school or lesser UC. If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have gone to UCI, SDSU, or some other school, where I would have been able to have 3.9-4.0 GPA with less effort, which when combined with my MCAT, would probably have made me a strong medical school applicant, rather than just an average California applicant. If you decide on going to medical school and want to go to Cal, I would recommend that you take your premed courses either at a Bay Area JC or even at a lower tier school in the area, such as San Francisco or San Jose State. I know several UCB premeds that are doing that, and they will probably get the best of both worlds. These are just my opinions on my time at Berkeley, and I hope it can be of some assistance. </p>
<p>-Take care and good luck</p>