I was curious to know where do JHU undergraduates apply after doing pre-med, public health, or engineering at JHU?
Since JHU is so strong in medicine, where do people who apply to medical school and where do they get accepted?
Does anyone know the percentage of how many JHU undergrads get accepted to Harvard or Stanford medical schools?
This is somewhat of an obtuse question, but this is what anonymous forums are for, right? A few factoids to keep in mind: the average age of students entering medical school is 25, the average student applies to over 20 medical schools, many students go on to graduate school, post-bac programs, working jobs etc. before attending medical school and many students need to apply in multiple cycles before they are accepted. All these factors (and others such as when in the cycle did you apply?, how was your interview?, when did you return secondaries? etc.) make it difficult and meaningless to keep track of students who get into specific medical schools. Just about any statistic you would find (if they even exist) would be comparing apples to oranges since there are so many factors beyond an undergraduate program that impact someone’s eventual acceptance in medical school. Keep in mind that most medical schools enroll 80-150 students in a class, so maybe 200-300 students are accepted at any given medical school. Furthermore, every medial school I know of explicitly states they value diversity, and when you only have 80 students in a class you can bet that they are looking at much more than where you attended undergrad, MCAT and GPA when determining whether you are accepted. Beyond the similarity in diversity though, many medical schools are serving specific communities or focusing on certain medical specialities (e.g. primary care) and so, for example, the best medical school applicant in the country (whatever that means) applying out of state to UC Davis will never get accepted, never. Basically there are so many factors involved in med school acceptance that tracking such detailed statistics, like what you are requesting, is plain silly.
What this means is that people with undergraduate performances that meet or even exceed a med school’s average metrics are very likely to be ultimately rejected since there are so many factors beyond undergrad performance that matter, and that the competition is fierce and value for diversity is significant. Schools do often report how many students get accepted to medical school (any medical school), which is a much more fair analysis since qualified candidates will typically get accepted somewhere, but keeping track of specific schools is a futile effort that really doesn’t tell you much about an undergrad program unless they have a linkage program. Even then, when Hopkins reports these numbers (whatever the most recent stats are), I still take them with a few grains of salt. Who’s to say it was the Hopkins’ name and Hopkins’ experience that got a student accepted as opposed to the (potential) years of efforts after graduating and plethora of other factors?
What I can tell you is that I personally had friends at Hopkins who were accepted at JHU, UCSF, Stanford, Harvard, etc. (all the most difficult schools based on metrics), but many of these friends didn’t even have the highest metrics, etc that were accepted to these programs (I talk about grade deflation below, lol). What they each had was some unique factor that members on the application committee advocated for when reviewing the file. You think undergrad acceptance committees value diversity when they are creating a class of 1000s of students? Think about a medical school when they are trying to create a diverse class of 80 students where 70% of applicants are biology (or biology- themed) majors! There are specific niches that need to be filled (we need some research-experienced guys, some primary care people, some people with public health interests, etc.).
Find comfort in the fact that students at JHU are very competitive in being accepted to medical school. Find comfort in the fact that it is a small school and so there aren’t 10’s of thousands of students applying to med schools with JHU on their resume. Find comfort in the fact that the pre-med advising is top notch and does write a committee letter on your behalf (something many schools do not offer and should be something you look into for any school you are considering for undergrad) Lastly, find comfort in the fact that JHU is rigorous and grade deflation is well known and considered in the application process. I had a graduate school professor who previously served on the Keck Medical School application committee, and he outright told me they used to put Stanford and Harvard applicants in a separate stack when it came to comparing GPAs due to grade inflation being such a huge problem in the 90s and early 2000s. Grade inflation is a bad thing because there is no way for hard-working students to differentiate themselves, and once that reputation is established it is hard to break. Schools will know that the average GPA for a ChemBE at Hopkins is around a 3.2 (sometimes lower…) and they will not be blind to that.
As a final note, the specific medical school you attend (in terms of rankings, metrics, etc.) is not as important as you might think. Of course you want to go to a school that you will be happy etc., but beyond that everyone graduating from medical school, be it the top ranked program or not, is still a doctor. Determining specialities and your success as a physician is much more reliant on your performance on standardized exams in medical school as well as your residency program placement. These are much less reliant on specific medical schools (of course there is some correlation but less than you would imagine) and are more dependent on the individual’s efforts. When you start comparing medical school curriculum, their pass rates on standardized exams and their residency placements you’ll see that there really isn’t a significant difference, especially when you compare the significant differences in metrics for acceptance between them.
Overall, go to an undergrad where you will perform well and be happy. Seize opportunities when they are made available to you and be an individual in all your endeavors (leadership roles, recognition, etc.). If there is one important factor in selecting an undergrad institution that will benefit you in being accepted to medical school it is a well-established and supportive pre-med advising office that can help you with the complex and laborious application process.
A few corrections: average age entering medical school is currently 24 according to AMCAS (though it continues to go up) and average student is applying to more than 15 schools (which is also increasing).
@NixonDenier Thank you so much for the detailed and informative response! I’m foreign to the medical school process, but your response helped shed some light on the process. Do you mean diversity takes place via major, geography, and race? Also how is neuroscience at JHU?
Since you did graduate from Johns Hopkins would have you have any advice on the supplement? I’m not sure wheter to talk about life guarding, swimming, or community service working with children. It’s hard to decided between these.
Howdy, no worries. I wish someone had told me many of these things while I was in the application process. That being said, student doctor network is a great forum where better minds that my own can address many of the med school-related questions you may have.
Diversity includes all of these factors. Sometimes geography is discriminated against, meaning schools like UC Riverside, which was recently created to address the medically underserved populations in the Inland Empire, are only looking for students with ties to Southern California and who intend (whether they do or not is beyond their control) to practice in the area (and hopefully as primary care physicians, who are desperately needed). Each school to some degree is unique in the applicants they accept, and this is why it’s unheard of for applicants to get accepted to every school they apply to, regardless of stats and ECs, etc.
As for the supplement, it depends on the picture you’ve already painted in your primary application. What were the main themes of your personal statement and your three most significant activities? These are the responses the committee will likely retain (I can’t expect them to remember or keep in mind all 15 activities you listed). You want to convey in the sum of your application that you are passionate about medicine (and understand what it entails), that you want to work with people/serve people and that you are an interesting, unique person. A school like Hopkins (like many) are interested in serving minorities and medically-underserved populations (they’re based in Baltimore, so of course). Depending on your other responses you want to make sure you convey the aforementioned points and reinforce them in your secondary. If you feel you didn’t address one or more of those points adequately in your primary then focus on them in the secondary. As for which activity, depending on your experiences you can make any activity reflect any values/experience depending on how you describe it. Maybe you connect life guarding with public health and how after school programs kept at-risk youth out of gangs, and created a safe environment. Just remember to write something you don’t think anyone else (or few others) will have experienced and remember that the details will make your statements memorable and will convey passion and genuineness. Needless to say this basically goes for college applications as well (different focus but same idea of hitting the major themes you want to convey about who you are as a person).
Simply put, Hopkins neuroscience is awesome. If you intend on studying any of the sciences then I don’t understand why you wouldn’t attend a research university. I have science-oriented friends who attended schools like Dartmouth or Princeton which, while phenomenal universities, have limited research opportunities. This made zero sense to me. They were competing for limited lab positions and internships and many were forced to come to schools like Hopkins during the summer for research opportunities at Hopkins or the nearby NIH facilities (I can’t even tell you how many Dartmouth students I met during the summer). Research not only reinforces what you learn in class, but it exposes you to the mindset you’ll need for any career in science and will remind you of why you were interested in science in the first place. Hands-on experience solving real-world problems while making professional connections, padding your resume, and learning current techniques using modern equipment can only be feasibly achieved while conducting research. If you don’t conduct research as an undergraduate science major you’re missing out on a big part of the experience, and Hopkins did an excellent job providing more than ample opportunities for students to get involved (besides, they require it for most majors - it’s a research-driven institution).
Beyond that, the program is well organized, flexible, staff are supportive, classes are interesting and diverse, teachers are open to new topics (we launched two new courses at student request my senior year (let alone faculty interest in starting other courses). Introductory courses are large with 100+ students (there are three intro courses you’re required to take), but once you get into your junior and senior years we had classes range from 10-25 students. Resources available to students are significant and constantly increasing (have you seen the state of the art teaching labs they recently built? Boy am I jealous). Neuroscience is a popular major offered at more and more schools, but I have yet to meet anyone else who completed a neuroscience program that has had a better experience than me while I was at Hopkins. Hopkins has its faults, but when it comes to the neuroscience program, I only have praise. The only complaints I remembering hearing were regarding how tough the program could be, then again, its neuroscience at a premier institution, what were you expecting? The other issue was the state of some of the teaching labs which were over 30 years old, but that has since been addressed with awesome new facilities.
Just a few nitpicky corrections to otherwise very informative posts…
Looking at undergraduate enrollment is highly misleading. JHU has an enormous number of med applicants, far more than its size would suggest. Hopkins had 390 med school applicants last year, approximately half as many as Berkeley with 769, UT Austin with 733, and UF with 760 – although Berkeley, UF, and UT Austin are 5, 6 1/2, and 7 times larger, respectively. Some large public universities such as UMD College Park, Rutgers, Penn State, and UNC Chapel Hill actually produce fewer med school applicants than Hopkins.
Only Cornell has more med school applicants among private universities. Duke and Emory have approximately the same number as Hopkins.
Princeton is at least as strong as Hopkins in the sciences, so color me skeptical. (Program reputations rest primarily on research output.) Hopkins may offer specialized biomedical opportunities that appeal to some students, but I doubt most science majors at Princeton are suffering from a lack of research options. Note that all Princeton undergraduates are required to complete a senior thesis (i.e. a rigorous research project) for graduation, something few other colleges require.
The neuroscience program at Princeton is still up and coming. The new neuroscience institute building at Princeton has existed for only a year and a half.
Thank you for pointing out that the undergraduate enrollment is misleading when discussing numbers of premed applicants - this is true. As a percentage of students, Hopkins has one of the higher number of med school applicants (with many well-qualified at that), but I would also point that only the absolute number of students (as opposed to a ratio given total student enrollment) truly matters regarding what we’re discussing. For me, as a California resident, the number of JHU students applying in-state to UC medical schools was a very small number (especially when compared to the sheer number of UC undergrad applicants applying in-state to UC med schools, though of course not in the “10,000’s” as I hyperbolically stated). I’m sure this helped my application stand out, and, in my mind, I was alluding to this fact, though I didn’t state this caveat and instead wrote a misleading statement. I stand corrected.
As for my comment on research opportunities, I stand by my claim that Hopkins offers more research opportunities than even a great university like Princeton could offer. I never meant to say that Princeton’s or Dartmouth’s programs aren’t great (maybe even better?, I’m not sure how to compare them), but I will argue that there are more research opportunities (especially when it comes to the sciences and engineering) than at either of these other universities. While I haven’t counted the number of job/internship openings, I was always taught to simply follow the money when it comes to understanding what an organization focuses on and values. When it comes to research spending, Hopkins spends over $2 billion a year, compared to Princeton’s $250 million. Hopkins is spending more than $800 million more per year than the next closest university (U of Michigan - Ann Arbor) and about 75 schools are consistently spending more than Princeton (overall, not per student). You can definitely make the argument that Hopkins has a much larger graduate student population compared to Princeton (total enrollment is about 21,000 for Hopkins vs 8,000 for Princeton), but even that adjustment doesn’t account for the differences in spending per capita. Hopkins has a big research industry, so you could also make the claim that more of these funds are going into labs that are unwilling to accept undergrad students, but honestly, I have yet to meet a lab that turns down free labor, especially motivated labor that wants to learn and get a publication.
http://mup.asu.edu/research_data.html
http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/colleges-with-highest-research-and-development-expenditures/
From what I experienced undergrads had an easy time getting research positions at the graduate schools, in fact (now that I recall) I had more friends performing research at the School of Medicine, School of Public Health and Applied Physics Lab than at the undergraduate campus. This doesn’t even include the opportunities that the NIH offers, which is based in Bethesda, Maryland, but has significant research centers (NIDA, NIA, NHGRI) at the Bayview Medical Campus, just 30 minutes from the Homewood Campus.
I don’t mean to pick on Dartmouth and Princeton, it’s just that my anecdotal encounters were with students from these schools who worked in labs with me in Baltimore over the summer, and this is what they told me. I don’t know why they would lie to me. I even met a psychology/neuroscience professor over dinner once who conducts research at Princeton, and she confided that she wished she could host more students in her lab since so many of them were wanting to conduct research in the field and she didn’t know where to direct them. This was over three years ago, and maybe the new neuroscience building you mentioned was partly built to help address this need for more lab space.
I didn’t mean to suggest that students at Princeton and Dartmouth are “suffering,” they surely aren’t, but I just can’t imagine these schools offering more research opportunities (even saying slightly less would be misleading) in the sciences than Hopkins. When hands-on experience is becoming more and more valued in the workplace, I think it’s important that potential students (especially STEM students) take this huge factor into consideration. It is often overlooked. The last thing you want is to be just starting in an area of research your senior year, on a topic you’re not particular thrilled about, since it was too competitive to get into a lab your freshman or sophomore years. Furthermore, many people would say you need more than a year in a lab to fully understand what is going on and to make a meaningful contribution. For those of you who intend on conducting research in undergrad - start early!
Anyway, thanks for the back and forth and for balancing out my pro-Hopkins raving. I’m an anonymous poster, those of you entering the sciences, or academia in general, should trust nothing I say. My profile pic should have alluded to that…