<p>Hi I am a sophomore in high school and have began my college search. I am pretty set on medical school but obviously before that I have to get through undergrad. Just as an overview for what would be a good match for me, here is just some of my stats.</p>
<p>SAT: I havent taken the sat yet but i expect it to be 2000-2200
AP: I am in only one ap class this year but will be in 5 next year. Hopefully will get a 4 or 5 on the ap chem test.
GPA:3.92 unweighted/3.98 weighted
I don't know much about my SAT IIs or anything yet so I dont have much else to post here as for stats.</p>
<p>ECs
varsity cross country
varsity tennis
internship at mayo clinic
Jazz band
nothing super spectacular.</p>
<p>Anyways thats not really what my question is...
I want to go to a college that will have pretty small classroom sizes where I can get one on one time with the professor. I just dont think I will do well in general chem with 300 other people in the class. I also don't want it to be some ridiculously hard liberal art school that I will get like a 2.6 gpa in. However it should also be a place that adcoms will still respect. Obviously it should have good premed advising but with no screening.</p>
<p>I want to go to a really good college but subtract the majority of that cutthroat lifestyle I have heard so much about with premeds. I have a lot of time so I just wanted to get an idea of where a good place to go would be. </p>
<p>And please...don't correct my grammar, i know its terrible...idc im not writing an english essay if i know how all of you CC overachievers are...</p>
<p>Regardless of where you go, you better be the top 10% of your premed class. You will be competing against the best across the nation… Med school admissions is RIDICULOUSLY hard…and competition is intense in medical school. </p>
<p>I have zero idea why you wouldn’t want to opt for a school that screens. To be honest, if you can’t get through intro level courses or even the premed advisory board at your own school, there is literally ZERO chance that you will be admitted into a med school, seriously. lol</p>
<p>You will have competition anywhere you go with premeds. If you can’t handle it or do not look forward to it, it is very hard to succeed.</p>
<p>i said a school with no screening…I am pretty confident in my abilities of being in the top 10 percent and I do realize how difficult it is…So get off your high horse and give me a few options…seriously i wasnt looking for a lecture on how difficult premed is. I know its really hard, I was just looking for someone who might give me some valuable insight on a great school to go to. We all get you go to Harvard (since you live in cambridge…). I knew it was a stupid idea to put this to CC. Just a bunch of Ivy league students who stalk this website to insult people who havent achieved everything they did academically.</p>
<p>Don’t go to Johns Hopkins or Harvard… They are really competitive schools. They are the schools that will get you into the best med schools.</p>
<p>High horse? Dude, be grateful that I’m telling that the average acceptance rate into a top 25 medical school is 1-2%… which is 5X harder percentage wise to get into a top 25 med school than Harvard or MIT… Even top elite schools like MIT can’t guarantee an acceptance in a top tier med school. Vast majority of students are lucky to even received a single med school acceptance. </p>
<p>Pls embrace competition… You’ll need it in med school :d</p>
<p>I’m just warning you of the challenge ahead. BEWARE! lol Good luck in school.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter where you go, and you should focus on schools that you like. Take the med school question out the equation and simply ask yourself “is this a place I can be successful at?” - whether that’s as a pre-med or if you decided to change your major to underwater basket weaving. </p>
<p>It is exceedingly smart decision to recognize the problems of small schools that screen their pre-med applicants, a situation that at best is only a minor positive (glowing committee letter), usually admissions neutral (I’d rather have three good letters of rec from people who actually know me than 1 fantastic committee letter), and at worst puts you in a direct conflict of interest with your goals and those of the screening committee who desire to keep their acceptance rate high. Certainly if you’re a 4.0 student with a 37 MCAT, a committee isn’t a big deal (or if you’re a 3.2 student with a 24 MCAT), but what if you’re a 3.4/32 - still competitive but not great in the overall scheme of things but not a sure bet, then what happens? Bottom line, med schools should decide who gets into med school, not committees of undergraduate professors. Kudos to you for realizing the problems they represent at such a young age. </p>
<p>Again, focus on places where you’ll be happy and best able to succeed in all aspects of college life (academically, socially, emotionally and physically) and do your absolute best. Doing well will secure your future.</p>
<p>Also, I don’t know where this idea of “top 10%” comes in…most people who start out as pre-meds as freshmen simply do it because they don’t have any better ideas. It’s not a matter of being in the top 10% - it’s a matter of being in the right field to begin with. The attrition rate is high for sure, but I promise you, I know a lot of people who were smart enough to be great doctors but either didn’t have the persistence to weather a bad grade or two (or 4), or realized they were a better fit for something else.</p>
<p>You honestly think committees stocked with preprofessional advisors ranging from former Deans of admissions of arguably pretty prestigious med schools and former medical school advisors, present clinicians, and high powered research faculty members is inadequate to tell you whether or not you can get into the schools you are applying to.</p>
<p>Dude, you won’t get into med schools if you circumvent the advise of your advising committee.</p>
<p>It’s almost equivalent to saying “weeder classes” shouldn’t exist because it’s a useless weeding factor… and that former Deans of Admissions sitting on advising boards don’t know any better than med school faculty. 10K students applying for 100 spots… Screening boards should be an easy obstacle compared to 10K students applying for 100 seats in med school. If you think screening boards are a challenge… Chances are you won’t get into medical schools. That simple.</p>
<p>daiviko:</p>
<p>It’s advise that you better know now… I’d rather you suck it up now than to have to learn the truth when your advisor tells you to do TeachForAmerica for pursue apply next cycle because you were not adequate enough for medical school. </p>
<p>Phead it’s not necessarily about whether those people are qualified (but you and I both know that not every school with a committee has one composed of high powered individuals intimately familiar with medical school…think outside your own personal experiences with the committee at your own school), it’s about the fact that they don’t hold the keys to med school admissions. Med school admissions are not a cut and dry, black/white thing…maybe you charm the pants off of some interviewer some place or strike gold because a school really values having an extremely high GPA over a great MCAT score and gain an acceptance (to use an example from dental schools - the University of Nebraska College of Dentistry has had the highest incoming class GPA 11 out of the last 15 years - Harvard Dental is usually 2nd - because their acceptance model places much higher importance on GPA than DAT score…have a 24 on the DAT, but a 3.3 GPA and you’re not going to Nebraska). Things happen in the application process, undergrad schools shouldn’t prevent you from at least trying (and definitely not actively hinder your application by giving marginal recommendations). </p>
<p>It’s useful to think of this in terms of sensitivity and specificity. No medical lab test is perfect, no test will catch 100% of the true positives and ignore 100% of the true negatives, you’ll always have false positives and false negatives. As a clinician, knowing the sensitivity and specificity of a lab test is important for interpretation of lab results. Want to make sure that a positive test results means you really have disease (no false positives = more specific)? Raise the threshold of what constitutes a positive result…at the expense of lowering the sensitivity creating more false negatives (have the disease with negative test result). Alternatively, if you want to make sure you catch every possible person with a disease so they have a positive test result (better sensitivity is no false negatives), you’re going to decrease the specificity and have way more false positives.</p>
<p>Applying this concept to pre-med committees is the same thing. By definition they’re not perfect, they’re not infallible. They’re never, ever going to accurately recommend all the students who will get into med school and not recommend all those who won’t. But what do they advertise? That 100% acceptance rate for recommended pre-meds…they set the bar for recommendations high enough to catch the sure things and leave out the ones where there’s any iota of risk of not gaining acceptance. The committee letter is a highly specific test result, but it’s not very sensitive. Thus every single year they’re going to tell a group of students “we don’t think you’re capable, don’t apply”, when those students would have gotten in with 3 solid letters from faculty that knew them well and a smart application strategy. The committee could adjust their recommendation strategy and try to be more sensitive - they’ll do everything they can to make sure that if some school would accept you, that you’ve applied there, you’re prepared to interview well, and so on…but that would mean they’d have to take the risk of not having that 100% acceptance rate they get to brag about to incoming pre-meds.</p>
<p>Really, that’s what it comes down to: those students who have a chance at med school, but are at risk of possibly not getting accepted. If you’re an over the top amazing candidate, a committee doesn’t really matter, and the glowing committee letter isn’t going to be much different than what you would have earned on your own. Similarly, if you’re a candidate that has no shot, unless you’re delusional, the committee’s rec isn’t going to be a surprise.</p>
<p>If you want one of the best places to go for pre-med and you don’t want to spend a fortune, look at University of Pittsburgh-Oakland(main campus)
their pre-med is connected to the UPMC’s and if you make it through near the top, you are basically guranteed a spot in one of the BEST med schools in the country…</p>
<p>Phead, I am 120 percent aware of the difficulty of med school admissions. I have done my research, I realize that it’s possible I may end up doing something completely different because of the admissions process. I am not some kind of genius who can get into Harvard or something so Harvard was really never an option. I am just looking for some good schools that will offer me a good chance at premed based on the criteria in my original post…thats it. Thanks for all the other suggestions</p>
<p>Hoe2getrice, why do you post a list of schools not go to? Because of the level of competition? That is a bit of what I got from reading previous posts…</p>
<p>^ my post was mostly sarcastic. The OP made a point of saying non-competitive pre-meds, and my point was that just about every top pre-med school is competitive.</p>
<p>Every top school will be competitive, and it’s true that a lot of people get out in top schools. But, as others have said, most people getting out of premed do so because they’ve found something else, not because they couldn’t cut it as a doctor. I don’t know why you would want to limit the opportunities for med school by going to a less competitive school…ie. Duke has an med school acceptance rate of 85%, twice the national average. They even have a slight advantage to get into Duke Med, #6 med school in the nation (about 10% of last year’s premed seniors went there, vs. an overall 2-4% acceptance rate). Why? Because a top undergraduate school prepared them well for the next level.</p>
<p>If it’s cutthroat you’re concerned about, I got into and visited Duke and WUSTL, both schools known for premed rigor (WUSTL especially). I can tell you that their students don’t seem about to kill each other over some degree. Of course there’s competition, but it’s not necessarily bad. They’re all in it together.</p>