<p>Which colleges should I consider applying to in order to maximize my chances for success in premed curriculum and in med school admissions?</p>
<p>So far I have UCLA, USC, WashU, UCSD, UCI, so far.</p>
<p>Based on what I heard about grade deflations (MIT, CalTech (i think?), Princeton are examples), and cutthroat atmosphere (like Harvard, UC Berkeley, etc.), and grade inflations (like Stanford and Brown), I am thinking to applying to schools with more grade inflations, but I am not sure how to approach this matter. My only goal is to get into a university ranked somewhere among the best in the nation, then at the same time be able to get a 4.0 GPA and a high MCAT score to have the fundamentals for med schools admissions (ideally).</p>
<p>Which colleges should I apply to? And which colleges should I stay away from (for the purposes of helping me get into a good med school) due to any cutthroats, HUGE grade deflations, etc?</p>
<p>I heard Brown and Stanford are good choices, but I am not sure about how to approach this matter, I don't want to end up in a SUPER-cutthroat atmosphere...</p>
<p>Can anybody help me with this matter here? Which colleges would match what I need?</p>
<p>Not Berkeley and CalTech, that’s for sure. Depends on what you want to major in. I’d say UCSD for biology and bioengineering, and it’s not ultracompetitive. I hear Stanford’s not cutthroat, but I’m not sure. MIT isn’t as cutthroat as Cal Tech, but it’s still pretty tough.</p>
<p>If you are smart, you would not attend UCLA, UCI, or UCSD. All three of these schools are over crowded in the science department. Many people there want to be doctors. All three are just as competitive as Berkley for science simply because the desire and cuthroatiness exists, heavily. Further, they are all over populated. Many people cannot graduate in 4 years because they cannot get the classes that they want, or their grades weren’t high enough and they either switched paths in life or retook classes. I strongly advise against those UC schools, because you are just the same as every other pre-med student, which is a lot. Great schools, but overpriced and deathly in my opinion.</p>
<p>You don’t have to major in the sciences to go pre-med. In fact, I feel it’s better to major in an easier and more practical major like economics and take the premed reqs at the same time. The competition in the biology major can be pretty cutthroat.</p>
<p>Out of all the schools on this list, which ones are cutthroat (especially premed programs), in your opinion?</p>
<p>USC
UCLA
UCSD
UCI
WUSTL
JHU
UChicago
Brown
UPenn
Columbia
Cornell
Dartmouth
Duke
MIT
CalTech
Northwestern
Rice
Vanderbilt
University of Notre Dame
Georgetown
Carnegie Mellon University</p>
<p>Don’t forget that medical school is expensive, so you may want to give consideration to minimizing cost to minimize debt and maximize savings for medical school tuition.</p>
<p>I would like to inquire, which schools listed above are very cutthroat in atmosphere (important for premed success), since I want to apply to schools without the super-cutthroat atmosphere.</p>
<p>I am a senior in high school, and I am trying to narrow my selections so I can well begin my college application process…</p>
<p>Yes, it is. You are asking about your chances of success at top colleges, including your ability to get a 4.0 GPA at one of them. Your idea of “cutthroat” will most definitely be influenced by your experience in high school and how easy it is for you to get perfect grades.</p>
<p>The only opinions we would have on the “cutthroat-ness” of each school would be on schools that we have attended. It’s hard to tell how cutthroat a school is without having attended it, and taking one or two opinions on the “cutthroatness” for a school generalizes far too much. For schools in the same ballpark, how cutthroat it is will dpeend on you like sally305 said.</p>
<p>IMO, if you succeed at one school, you would probably have succeeded at another school that was in the same “tier, ballpark, level, whatever” as the first.</p>
<p>I think that many schools that have a LOT of pre-meds attending will have a certain cut-throat atmosphere simply because many schools limit the number of As for the pre-med pre-reqs to weed out the students who don’t have what it takes to go to med school (or to continue in a tough STEM major). </p>
<p>I think “family pressure” can also lead to a cut-throat atmosphere. If a student has a family who expects/demands that the student go to med school, then the pressure to get the As will increase.</p>
<p>I actually will have at least a 4.1 weighted GPA / 3.8 unweighted GPA upon graduating from senior high school.</p>
<p>I come from a very competitive (and a bit cut-throat) public high school with certain grading regulations in mind:</p>
<ol>
<li>Only selected Honors courses are weighted.</li>
<li>ALL AP courses are weighted.</li>
<li>No weighting of grades in the freshman year.</li>
<li>Very few people earn 4.4 GPA and up, and a 4.3 GPA puts you in the top 5% of your class (I think).</li>
</ol>
<p>If you can afford it, I second the recommendation that you go with a LAC. The smaller class sizes and close faculty and interpersonal relationships that students develop tend to mitigate against ‘cutthroat’ behaviors and result in better, more personalized letters of recommendation. There is also less tendency to use ‘weeder classes’ grades on a curve to ‘thin’ the ranks of the pre-meds. And frankly, you want a LAC where you are likely to be in the top 25% of the class - not one where are you get in by a hair.</p>
<p>S attended Grinnell, a midwestern LAC, where the sciences are excellent, the largest intro science class is 24 students, and they don’t grade on a curve. His organic chem class went out together for Chinese food every Thursday and when the group next to his botched their lab results, he and his partner shared their results (with the profs permission) because that’s the culture. And if someone got sick, no one would refuse to share his/her notes, unlike at some schools where one person’s A means someone else has to get a C. This sort of environment is much more supportive of pre-meds than the one you’ll find at most large universities on your list.</p>
<p>Not sure of every single of them but the UCs have nasty curves and competition, I think Brown has grade inflation (correct me on this), Penn is one of the more relatively grade-deflating Ivies (-____________________________________-), Cornell and Chicago are notorious for grade deflation and I think MIT and Caltech are too, don’t remember much about ND but I remember that they have a med school acceptance rate at ~85% which is about Penn’s rate too.</p>