That’s a good plan. You’ll have time to get a feel for the various departments and choose an academic program that works for you.
Other threads have dealt with undergrad “prestige” in med school admissions. This one is older: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/818574-prestige-of-undergrad-for-med-schools-esp-interested-in-hearing-from-curm-p1.html
This one is recent: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/1751733-does-the-reputation-of-your-pre-med-program-affect-your-chances-of-admission-to-medical-schools-p1.html
The documents in post #11 (in the recent link) provided by @WayOutWestMom are useful. Here they are again:
1.) https://www.aamc.org/download/261106/data/aibvol11_no6.pdf Check out Figure 1 for a summary of the application data important to med school admission officers.
2.) https://www.aamc.org/students/download/267622/data/mcatstudentselectionguide.pdf Look at Table 1 for a similar summary of the above. Table 2 will also be useful to you. It cross references GPA, MCAT, and med school admission success. You can see how significant MCAT and GPA will be to your success.
The threads above seem to indicate that undergrad prestige matters somewhat, but other factors matter much more. MCAT and GPA are probably paramount, then you can see that experience in healthcare/community/leadership, letters of rec/evaluation, and personal statements are also very important. Selectivity of undergrad institution seems to have more importance to private med schools.
Maybe you’re at a slight disadvantage in terms of undergrad prestige/selectivity, but there is no reason why you can’t make up for it in a number of other ways. Choosing a rigorous (enough) program of study to balance GPA/MCAT, earning a high GPA, preparing very well for the MCAT and scoring highly, are much more important than undergrad prestige. Look at those numbers in Table 2 above. If you have a GPA of 3.40 to 3.59 and an MCAT of 30 to 32, you have roughly a 50% shot at getting accepted to at least one med school. If you can somehow raise your GPA to 3.60 to 3.79 and your MCAT to 33 to 35, you’re now at a 77% success rate. An enormous difference.
Attending Princeton over U Arizona isn’t nearly as potent a factor as hard work (culminating in a higher GPA/MCAT) when it comes to med school application success. Not even close. Ahhh, but what if the Princeton student works as hard as you do? Well, fortunately, all things are never equal: there are dozens of ways to get the drop on the Princeton student and ensure that your admissions profile is as good as you can make it, and quite possibly better than vast numbers of applicants from more selective schools. If you want proof of that, check out the top right box in Table 2. As the commentary reads, “eight percent of applicants with UGPAs of 3.8 or higher and MCAT total scores of 39 or above were rejected by all of the medical schools to which they applied.” Wow. Those applicants must have serious deficiencies in their overall admissions profile if they can’t make it work out when they’re in the highest GPA/MCAT bracket. In other words, even some of the highest test performers – possibly at some of the nation’s most selective institutions – can be outplayed in a number of other ways.