What to look for in a BA/MD or BA/DMD program

[GregoryPence]

<p>Many students and parents examining such programs ask the wrong questions. Most programs use the offer of admission to the professional program as bait to make parents pay many years' of expensive tuition. So ... the first question you should ask is,</p>

<ol>
<li>Do people who qualify for admission generally get scholarships? If so, do they cover out-of-state tuition? Housing? What about National Merit Finalists?</li>
</ol>

<p>The next question concerns what students in the program think about their choices. So the next question is:</p>

<ol>
<li>Does the program allow you to contact current students?</li>
</ol>

<p>Next, many people look at the reputation of the medical school, but in some ways, that is secondary. The more important question concerns:</p>

<ol>
<li>How well does the program prepare students for medical school? Is the program creating high MCAT's such that its graduates can enter ANY medical school? If the program is doing well, its graduates will not coast into its own medical school but be sought-after by every medical school in the country.</li>
</ol>

<p>Lastly, everyone needs to ask:</p>

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<li>Who actually teaches and mentors students in the program? Recruiters and Admission officers go away once you get on campus. Who teaches students? Is their a freshmen learning experience? Required intensive seminars? By full professors? Medical faculty? Or just grad students? Is the Director a professor or merely a staff person (this matters a lot in writing recommendations for medical school and big scholarships like the Rhodes).</li>
</ol>

[MiamiDAP]

<p>As a parent of Medical student who has been at one of the bs/md for UG portion, here are my answers and points of consideration:</p>

<ol>
<li>scholarships are usually awarded by UG and Med. School. All of UG that my D. applied to gave her Merit Scholarships. Most of applicants to BS/MD are very top caliber students and will gualify for Merit awards in UG. However, some UG’s have better Merit packages than others. Med. Schools have Merit awards bu they are rare. They mostrly depend on applicants stats (college GPA and MCAT score). One have to be of caliber 4.0/38+ to get any which is extremely rare.</li>
<li> All current students are accessible during interviews. They give presentations and talk one on one and mix in informal settings with applicants.</li>
<li>program is not preparing for Med. School, it is responsibility of a student. Many (all?) programs allow all majors (languages, music, English, business…) and many students have combo of major(s)/minor(s). It mostly depend on accelerated/non-accelerated anture of the program.<br>
Reputaion of Med. School is NOT a major consideration. ALL American Medical Schools are good and many applicants even consider DO schools very highly (they are correct in this). All bs/md and regular route are happy to get to one school. It is awesome to ahve choices, but they are not critical in your future. The critical is to have A spot in Medical School, one spot usually is enough to make anybody very happy and feel accomplished.</li>
<li>UG prof’s are teaching UG portion and as far as I know MD’s are giving lectures at Med. Schools. S. has never had a single class/lecture taught by Grad. Student.<br></li>
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<p>Few considerations that were extremely important to my D. when she was choosing her bs/md out of 3 that she was accepted to:
a. Accelerated vs non-accelerated. D. wanted to have normal UG experience, she choose non-accelerated. This UG happen to be a perfect fit. D. had the same exact experience as everybody else on her campus, Greek, job, un-related minor, trip abroad and many other college events …We have met others during D’s interview process that wanted only accelerated program for their specific reasons.<br>
b. Does program allow to take MCAT and apply out or program accepts into Med. Schools w/o MCAT? There are people with different preferences. My D. wanted to be able to take MCAT and apply out, while there are plenty of others who do not want MCAT. D. ended up applying out (the only one in her program), because her program allow her to do so while retaining her spot. She was accepted to 3 more Medical Schools and ended up choosing the one outside of her program.</p>

[LisaNugget]

<p>I’m currently a student in the Early Medical School Acceptance Program (EMSAP) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Acceptance into EMSAP grants you conditional acceptance into medical school given that I maintain a 3.6 overall GPA, 3.5 math/science GPA, and acquire an MCAT score of 28. As an EMSAP student, I just thought I’d put in my two cents to make sure all the bases are covered…</p>

<p>Some very important things that I took into consideration when applying and later when deciding where to go were things like the in-state to out-of-state ratio of accepted students, tuition rates / UG scholarships, and how prepared the program will make me for the MCAT and, of course, medical school.</p>

<p>Since I’m from New York, so that makes me an out of state student. There are a few programs in New York, but of course there are also many good programs outside of New York. When I was applying, I was nervous about whether or not schools outside of New York would place a preference on students from their own states, leaving scarce spots for the students applying from the 49 other states. Looking through programs in the AAMC’s Medical School Admissions Requirements book, they had a table for each program showing numbers for in-state/out-of-state applicants and in-state/out-of-state accepted students. This allowed me to determine approximately whether or not certain programs did place greater weight on their in-state students (even private institutions seemed to display in-state preference). UAB’s EMSAP showed promising results that they had a fair balance of in-state to out-of-state students accepted into the program.</p>

<p>UAB is a state school, so I was initially concerned about tuition and about scholarships not applying to me. However, UAB has a National Merit Finalist Scholarship which applies to both in-state and out-of-state students. If you are a National Merit Finalist and have put UAB on the National Merit Scholarship application as your first-choice school to put the scholarship towards, UAB will be notified of this indication and will grant you a full tuition, required fees, and housing (up to 15 credit hours/semester) for all four years. Here’s the link: <a href=“Error 404 | Not Found”>Error 404 | Not Found;

<p>This scholarship is a really great deal. Once I got into EMSAP and I knew that I only had to pay about $1K/year, it was a clear first choice.</p>

<p>One more big idea to take into consideration is how well the program will prepare you to do well on the MCAT and then in medical school. This isn’t just about what classes to take. It’s also about whether or not the director knows what he or she is doing and which teachers to refer you to. It’s also about whether the director takes that extra step to help each of the students in the program to meet important people in the professional school. Every little thing helps. It’s what you put on your resume to show medical schools that you’re not just another boring pre-med who slept through undergrad, taking the same pre-med classes and going to the same old pre-med organizations. With EMSAP, the director guides us to the professors who will make sure we have to study in such a way that when the MCAT rolls around, we know our biology and organic chemistry so well, we can get a 38 (true story – one of us really did get a 38 on the MCAT… he also has a 3.99 GPA).</p>