<p>Does anyone know the details? Please share.</p>
<p>It’s a healthcare epicenter. Hospital complexes on campus (as in, it is literally across from the library and borders 2 dorms on opposite sides of a path running through campus) and all around metro. Atlanta, essentially runs Grady and Atlanta Childrens, CDC on campus. etc. Generally solid at producing medical discoveries and technology and extremely good at drug discovery. Basically, similar reasons to JHU. We attract roughly the same amounts (except that they have a higher percentage b/c they have 2400+ less UGs).</p>
<p>Also, UG natural science courses tend to put emphasis on medicine/healthcare. The place just has lots of success in the healthsciences and its scientific research is more geared toward that than normal “intellectual” like discoveries.</p>
<p>We’re ranked in the top 20 of the U.S. News List and, quite frankly, pre-meds tend to be among the most prestige aware.</p>
<p>True, many of the other top 20-25s are also pre-med/pre-prof. factories, they just have things like engineering and other auxiliary schools to soften the blow/mix it up. The only way this can be softened at Emory with its current structure is if it changes admissions scheme or makes the b-school 4 years instead of 2 (that way, it’s enrollment could increase dramatically, but I don’t know if I would like that either. Option one is better).</p>
<p>I’ll add to this that Emory has been this way for literally decades. Before the Woodruff Gift, Emory was a high quality Southern, Christian private school that drew students primarily from the Southeast. Emory wasn’t in the business of doing research and producing future Nobel Prize winners. It was in the business of preparing students for (graduate school and) productive careers. As a quality private University with only a moderate endowment and high tuition, it attracted many wealthy families, whose children naturally looked toward lucrative professions, such as becoming physicians and lawyers. Anyone who interacts with alumni from the 70s and before might note just how many successful physicians and lawyers have come from Emory. It seems like that’s all anyone did after graduating!</p>
<p>Despite monumental changes, I don’t think the reputation has changed too much to this day. Emory built a reputation (no matter how deserved, but that’s neither here nor there) on being a great university for pre-professional students. Only recently (since the late 80s, 90s) has Emory attracted the type of students who aims for a PhD at Harvard or medical school at WashU. The typical Emory student from 40 years ago would look toward a Masters from Georgia Tech or MD from Medical College of Georgia for their postgraduate education. </p>
<p>Mind you, this is what I gathered from interaction with quite a few alums and their comments about how Emory has changed. I feel that it’s accurate enough to claim as truthful, but it’s certainly my understanding from anecdotal evidence. I won’t be upset if any of yall correct me.</p>
<p>That actually sounds fine to me dgeball. There has been an increase in those pursuing PhDs (particularly at other prestigious schools) and yes, there has been an increase in the number of students getting into prestigious prof. programs. I have friends on both spectrums, so you sound about right. However, the prof. school mania still overshadows regular grad. school mania especially when you consider the sciences. Admittedly, people like Dr. Ram and Dr. Soria have been trying to attract or get people interested in more “scholarly” activities either by the design of their courses or programs they have created. </p>
<p>And I think you’re right, southern privates tend to be giant pre-prof. bastions. Even Duke (and maybe Rice w/its huge STEM scene w/engineering), which we can say definitely has broken away from it to a large extent, has remnants of this tradition.</p>
<p>A couple things to note:</p>
<p>a) any top university which costs over $50k/year will be have a good chunk of its students coming from upper middle class to wealthy families. And since a good chunk of those come from parents who are doctors, the parents will often have the most influence in encouraging their children to pursue similar careers.</p>
<p>b) when you have to pay up to over $50k/year on school, you’ll often need to go into a lucrative field to make that money spend on education (and possibly massive loans associated with it) a worthwhile investment, hence a high demand for fields such as law, medicine, and business (with the latter 2 making up about 1/2 of emory’s undergraduate student body). </p>
<p>c) The best people will always want to expect the most financial reward, no matter what they do for a living.</p>
<p>d) and specific to Emory, in addition to the above reasons, many come in as premed because of Emory’s large affiliation and with biomedical research (and large amounts of funding associated w/ it) , its med school also one of the top in the national, Emory Healthcare being by far the largest healthcare profvider in Georgia, and its connection to other key institutions like CDC.</p>
<p>e) About 1/2 of Emory’s incoming freshmen who are premed won’t be premed by the end of junior year (when med school applications are due), either because they bombed an intro prerequisite class, got a mediocre grade in a prerequisite class and have a feeling that premed will only get impossibly hard later on, or find interest in other fields. And keep in mind even among those that end up applying to med school, at Emory only about a bit more than 1/2 (56% in 2010, to be exact) will get into at least one med school.</p>
<p>a) this is somewhat true, but seems more true at Emory. What about sons and daughters of politicians/icons of various sorts (as will be addressed below)
b) I believe when all is said and done, those two are only a little over 1/3 (I just took the amount of apps. for these two and multiplied by 4, so this is likely an overestimate). When you throw in pre-law, it still doesn’t hit 1/2 (I think they say that 46% pursue some post-grad opp. after Emory, thus 1/2 cannot be merely pre-med in pre-bus. Unfortunately many peoples’ peer groups are skewed toward those naturally. Mines has a nice mix, however is skewed toward that). </p>
<p>c) That is true, but that doesn’t explain why Emory attracts a weird amount of those that want to make law (this one is questionable anyway), medicine, and business the career in which they intend to maximize financial reward. You’d have to explain why LACs and places like Chicago have students/alumni that are likely doing better than many at Emory even though there is more academic/career diversity. Perhaps students coming to Emory overestimate the glamor of these three fields and expect them to automatically be lucrative. Unfortunately, we know it doesn’t work that way. </p>
<p>It is questionable why we aren’t producing more professors, renowned researchers, or more high profile politicians, or presidents for that matter. I suppose one reason for that would be the political apathy on campus. However, it’s interesting that that still continues to exist despite direct ties to people like Carter and several other politically polarizing figures. Why are many of the UGs here disengaged from from these happenings and initiatives on campus (and then many will complain that we don’t have enough awesome speakers, intellectual attractions, etc. We have far more than normal, yet many choose not to become interested in this scene despite complaining of its lackthereof)?</p>
<p>d) Of course this is true.</p>
<p>I think some of this could be remedied by merely encouraging more undergraduates to participate in more of the intellectually oriented events on campus. For example, when Sole’dad O’brian shows up, we shouldn’t need outsiders from metro Atlanta to fill more than 1/2 of the seats at events like that or any sort of intellectual event. At other schools, the majority (even if soft majority, around 1/2-2/3) would be students. If more UGs took this scene serious and complained/lied less about its non-existence (I’ve been going to lots of these events since frosh year, and plan to continue. Whether it be a science lecture, a talk on religion and law, whatever), I promise that interests of the student body would broaden and less people would limit their coursework and EC interests to their “tracks”. It’s amazing the number of students coming into/applying to places like us that are still in HS asking stupid questions like: “Should I continue with this language or social science courses?” because they’re pre-med, pre-bus., pre-law and know they won’t help fullfill pre-reqs for those (not like pre-law has pre-reqs). Basically, they are already in HS gearing APs and core courses toward a “track” in college. To me that’s weird and shouldn’t happen that much. The reality is, regardless of your future “track”, knowing more of a language and understanding some political science or history will make you a better doctor, lawyer, or businessperson and just a more interesting person in general (it would probably be astonishing to see the amount of lawyers that can’t carry on a conv. about history b/c they spent time in UG merely getting the A and not retaining or being legit interested. They just “got by”). </p>
<p>Since when is taking courses only about fulfilling requirements as opposed to actually enhancing some skills for the field of interest itself? These are people that Emory should NOT attract in droves and reality is it still does, just lesser so than in the past. </p>
<p>If you are going to be a good/effective pre-professional and future professional, you should at least realize that your learning and skill set should not be one-dimensional and thus you should realize the possible value of learning things that are outside of the field of most of your “track” and pursue it. Other than business, tracks are pretty simple and flexible anyway. There is plenty of room to get reqs. done and add other skills and experiment some. Instead, we say: “I’m pre-med, I must be a science major, and even my GERs should be science like.” Epic fail!</p>
<p>Again, my problem is not that there is a heavy pre-prof. scene, it’s the short-sightedness and lack of creativity of many. It’s their approach (which again, likely explains the success level of pre-meds. Emory is doing its job, I don’t know about them).</p>