Which University Is better for Pre-med: UC Berkeley Or MIT?

[bladeknight]

<p>I really would like to go to berkeley, but i have heard that taking pre-med there is really difficult and a lot of people do not get in to the top 20 medical schools like UC San francisco. The reason i want to go to berkeley is because its in california, where I live and I love the institution, but I might have to go to MIT if the pre-med program in berkeley is not good. Does berkeley have a good pre-med program to allow you to go to medical school? Also, are their teachers good for pre-med?</p>

[bluedevilmike]

<p>I discussion of Berkeley can be found in this [url=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/283354-list-good-85-matriculation-premed-programs.htmlthread[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/283354-list-good-85-matriculation-premed-programs.htmlthread&lt;/a&gt;, starting with post #17.</p>

<p>Wow, I’d forgotten what a terrible thread this was. I’m going to give you clips from it so you don’t have to read the whole thing.</p>

<p>

They’re large, competitive schools with literally nonexistent advising, a disproportionately premedical student body, and in UCB’s case, no nearby academic clinical facilities for patient exposure. Research at those places is phenomenal but hard for premeds to access relative to a smaller school. Add to that that students there tend to be obsessed with remaining in the highly selective UC system for medical school.</p>

<p>I grew up in Berkeley, and the plurality of my friends were UCB premeds.

</p>

<p>

When nationally about half of all those are who apply to med school are rejected from all schools to which they apply, and given the overestimation of self-reporting by the uc schools, UCLA and UCB may actually be at or BELOW the national rate. How on earth can it be rationalized that these are good places to be premed when schools like Duke, Penn, Cornell, Columbia, JHU, etc. churn out rates well in excess of 80% or 90% in getting students of similar ability (in UCB’s case) into med school

</p>

<p>

I just did the math. For top-ten admissions, we [Duke undergrads] not only beat them absolutely, we more than triple them absolutely (65 in 5 years vs. 44 in 2005, or 13:44). Remove [UCSF’s] state residency [advantage] from the equation – i.e. remove UCSF – and Duke quintuples UCB per year (8:42). [This is despite being about 1/6th the size, so really we are performing 30x better.]

</p>

[theslowclap]

<p>I suggest you don’t do premed at either. From what I’ve heard, they are both extremely difficult places to be premed.</p>

<p>From the looks of it, many people in these threads took a big crap all over Berkeley premed. I have to send that movement. Bowel, that is.</p>

[liquidmetal]

<p>I just posted a thread on the Berkeley forums about this. Berkeley is junk for premed. Poor advising, limited clinical opportunities within transit time of UC Berkeley, and worst of all horrendous bell curves. </p>

<p>But really, tis not Berkeley’s fault. The medical school game rewards those who choose easy colleges and easy majors. The MIT or UC Berkeley EECS student who gets a 3.5 will have to have a stellar MCAT to get into a mid-tier med. school.</p>

<p>In life, you’ve got to play the game. Even if you’re smart enough to get into MIT or UC Berkeley don’t count on getting a 3.7+ as a given. That’s the first step to failure. Why cripple yourself by competing for a smaller percentage of A’s with a higher quality student body?</p>

<p>FYI: I am a Regents scholar at UC Berkeley and was waitlisted at MIT, and I have just under a 3.6 at UC Berkeley. While I hate how others game the system, I give you this advice b/c it pains me to see brilliant engineers forced to go to low-tier med schools mostly because of their grades.</p>

[somemom]

<p>I am not sure that MIT is any better/easier on the GPA than Berkeley! You can go to Berkeley or MIT and get an amazing education, but yes, it will be very difficult to earn a 3.7+ GPA, a really stellar student can easily get B+/A- grades that feel perfectly respectable yet drag down ones GPA.</p>

<p>The advising for pre-med at Cal is cookie cutter and should probably be ignored in favour of CC! It is possible to find and get to know profs well enough to get strong letters and have amazing learning experiences, but maybe not by the end of junior year since it is those upper div classes with a prof for the 2nd/3rd time that really allow one to develop a relationship with a prof outside of class</p>

[bluedevilmike]

<p>MIT is much more difficult than Berkeley, if the numbers from pre-law students are any indication. MIT’s about three standard deviations harder than the mean, while Berkeley’s about half a standard deviation harder than the mean.</p>

[liquidmetal]

<p>While I agree that Berkeley as a whole is far easier than MIT, theres a high chance this student might choose an engineering program if he goes to berkeley (since he’s applying to MIT). </p>

<p>Berkeley engineering is significantly more difficult than other majors on campus largely due to the graduate ranking of the program and the quality of undergrad admissions. Most engineers I have talked to manage easy A’s in breadth requirements in other non-science departments. While not as insane as MIT, Berkeley engineering is sufficiently insane to hurt your medical school chances.</p>

<p>Most pre-law students I have met hail from humanities majors at Berkeley, which are not considered very difficult and grade quite easily. So its not totally accurate to take the pre-law admissions and extend them to pre-med at a university, which punishes its students in science classes.</p>

[bluedevilmike]

<p>MIT students also have a pretty high probability of being engineers.</p>

[sakky]

<p>

FYI: I am a Regents scholar at UC Berkeley and was waitlisted at MIT, and I have just under a 3.6 at UC Berkeley. While I hate how others game the system, I give you this advice b/c it pains me to see brilliant engineers forced to go to low-tier med schools mostly because of their grades.

</p>

<p>

While I agree that Berkeley as a whole is far easier than MIT, theres a high chance this student might choose an engineering program if he goes to berkeley (since he’s applying to MIT).</p>

<p>Berkeley engineering is significantly more difficult than other majors on campus largely due to the graduate ranking of the program and the quality of undergrad admissions. Most engineers I have talked to manage easy A’s in breadth requirements in other non-science departments. While not as insane as MIT, Berkeley engineering is sufficiently insane to hurt your medical school chances.

</p>

<p>I believe you’ve hit upon the key strategy: if you want to maximize your chances of med-school admission, don’t major in engineering, whether you’re at Berkeley or at MIT. Major in something easier, like one of the cheesy humanities or social sciences if at Berkeley, or, oh I don’t know, management at the Sloan School if at MIT. {Granted, while Sloan management is no walk in the park, it’s certainly far easier than and perhaps surprisingly has roughly the same starting salaries as engineering.} </p>

<p>You should probably also seriously consider taking some, or even all of your premed requirements at a different school entirely, i.e. at an easy community college. To be sure, med-school adcoms may not like the fact that you took your premed courses at a different school from where you got your degree. But what do they really dislike? Taking those courses at your home school… and getting bad grades. As I’ve always said, the game is rigged such that you are better off not even taking a difficult class at all than taking it and getting a bad grade. Sad but true.</p>