Why would anyone go to a prestigious college?

Parents Forum
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<p>@lorem hahahaha made my night :slight_smile:
Realistically, any higher level schools are a no go for me with my stats :frowning:
Still, I just couldnt find any justification to go to an ivy UG. Concerning grad school</p>

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<p>OK, one more thing. This isn’t your life goal. Your life goal is to be a doctor. If your life goal is to get into an Ivy med school, then I don’t want you as my doctor, or anyone else’s doctor. </p>

<p>Keep your eye on the prize. Med school is a means to an end. It’s not the end itself.</p>

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<p>Life goal, short term goal, misuse of a term. My fault. My dream i guess you could call it</p>

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<p>Holy cow. 80 posts and not one mentioned weeding.
The issue is not how many kids a college got into a med program. Last time I checked, those figures are actually how many got into one of their top 3 choices. Even if this has been modified, no one tells you how many kids started with pre-med intentions and how purposely the number can be pared down, in the first few years.</p>

<p>Choose a school that works with pre-meds cooperatively, rather than brutally weeding down to the small number who have endured. (Anecdotes abound; have you asked this question on one of the pre-med forums?) Only a small number will get faculty endorsement- you want to be in that group. </p>

<p>So many say it’s MCATs that matter- but you want to get to that stage. </p>

<p>As for grad school, your relationship with profs will be key. Obviously, middle of the pack may not get you the prof attention that a superior student can. If you go this route, you will have to both commit to working your butt off and to building relationships with key profs. You will want to see if your potential grad school interests are matched with ug profs specializing in those areas- not just teaching, but researching and active in their broader academic community. This may or may not be the case at your local U. So, you have a little homework to do. Good luck.</p>

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<p>No pressure from us for STEM ,Lorem. Dad and GF were engineers so maybe came naturally. GGF was doctor, grandmother was biologist.S1 was a great student in HS so physics or engineering made sense. S2 was very low key ,plenty of B’s in high school. Said he wanted to major in engineering. I didn’t get it. Thought he couldn’t handle it. He’s proven me wrong.</p>

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<p>Some interesting data for Yale. </p>

<p>[Application</a> Resources and Materials for Allopathic Medicine | Yale Undergraduate Career Services](<a href=“http://ucs.yalecollege.yale.edu/content/application-resources-and-materials-allopathic-medicine]Application”>http://ucs.yalecollege.yale.edu/content/application-resources-and-materials-allopathic-medicine)</p>

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<p>“What is the point of going to an Ivy League vs. a state school?”</p>

<p>Perhaps the family has done some research on the chosen major and found out the top programs are at those Ivy and other top tier schools. Maybe the student wants to major in a field to learn the material and become a scientist/researcher, not just to get into med school/ grad school.</p>

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<p>I am so sick of people trotting out the story of Curmudgeon’s daughter. Be honest: it is highly unlikely that the undergraduate experience at Rhodes compares to the undergraduate experience at Yale. She’ll never have that. I’m not saying it was a bad choice for her: her goal was medical school, she is obviously highly accomplished, and it undoubtedly made sense not to pay what the family would have had to pay. But attending med school at Yale is not the same thing as being an undergrad there.</p>

<p>As to the OP’s question, some people want their undergraduate experience to be highly stimulating and think that they will accomplish this best by attending a school where all of their classes will be filled with other elite students and the school offers tremendous academic, financial, and other resources. Many, if not most of them, do NOT live in a state where the state schools are able to provide this. Some people do not go to school strictly for vocational training.</p>

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<p>Actually I meant feeling like an underachiever for going to Harvard and not being world famous, sorry I wasn’t clear! </p>

<p>Believe me I feel like an underachiever all the time! As for bragging rights, My Harvard degree is on my professional website, but otherwise in real life I never tell anyone where I went to college, and in fact I’m often one of those annoying people who when asked says Boston and only drops the bomb when pressed. </p>

<p>Of course you go to Harvard because you think you’ll get a better education there. Whether it’s worth it is of course up for debate, but one of the perks is that you really are surrounded by amazing people. Some of those amazing people of course also go to state colleges as endless threads on CC will tell you.</p>

<p>BTW my nephew was rejected by MIT and got a Goldwater at Rice. I tend to think Rice had something to do with it. :slight_smile: Not that it’s easier, but that there was a more personal touch there. He was invited to work in a lab during freshman orientation!</p>

<p>If you want to go to Med School you’ll find a way. There’s a guy at the YMCA I go to that is attending one of the Caribbean med schools because his MCAT scores weren’t good enough for US. He’s a smart guy. He’s interning in a local hospital. He’s pretty sure he’ll get a job at the end of it all.</p>

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<p>Anybody who’s worried about what his GPA in college will be isn’t Harvard material in the first place. Just sayin’.</p>

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<p>I do not have any personal knowledge about pre-med programs and med schools, only what I’ve gleaned from CC over the years. My conclusion is that college is, indeed, treated by pre-med types as vocational training. Apparently, the party line is exactly as OP presents it: go to any easy undergrad to get top GPA for med school. Also apparently, all of the required courses are the same across all colleges, so it doesn’t matter where you took O Chem, only that you got an A in it. This came as a surprise and disappointment to me as a patient and admirer of physicians, that the pursuit of excellence in general knowledge about life/world is not a priority in their education.</p>

<p>I do have personal knowledge of two HYP undergrads who chose humanities majors, and are now working on post-bacs at “easy” colleges to prep for med school applications.</p>

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People I have heard of who did this were usually people who decided they wanted to go to med school too late to satisfy the pre-med requirements in their regular college. There are plenty of pre-meds at HYP in humanities majors.</p>

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<p>Thanks for the clarification, Hunt. My knowledge about pre-med is extremely limited.</p>

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<p>Here’s the thing, happy: a bizillion smart kids enter college thinking they want to be doctors. Lots of them change their minds. You might too. Make sure the school you choose can get you all the other places you might want to go besides med school. Should you be really sick of school after 4 years of college, then you might decide to find a good job. In that case, an Ivy degree might be way better than a state school degree.</p>

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<p>And not only that, but you might have actually ENJOYED four years of intellectual growth and broadened intellectual horizons that will enrich the rest of your life! Education!! What a concept!!!</p>

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<p>But why? If your goal is to be doing hands-on patient care, there’s no difference in how you look at throats or diagnose diseases or prescribe medications based on the med school that you went to. Your reimbursement won’t be any different either. I think you’re overly dreaming about “Ivy med” as though it’s magical, and not understanding that medicine is a VERY “flat” field. All US medical schools teach pretty much the same thing, and all the students are generally completely overwhelmed :slight_smile: There is no magic that goes on at Harvard Med that doesn’t get taught elsewhere. Now, if you’re interested in academic medicine and / or public health, that might be a different story, but if you really just want to be a doctor and treat patients, there’s no difference in the work or the pay.</p>

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<p>As with anything, some physicians are quite into general knowledge about life/world and others are just deadset on let-me-get-my-requirements-checked-off-since-I-want-to-go-to-med-school. I don’t think you can generalize either way.</p>

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<p>It’s amazing this same old debate has so quick a response. Even overnight.</p>

<p>As far as med school acceptance-I don’t know about splitting it out by college, but in general you can see tons of statistics about med school acceptance rate on the AAMC site. You don’t have to rely purely on anecdote. They even split it out by race if you are inclined to start another long thread. ;)</p>

<p>Here’s a sample -
<a href=“https://www.aamc.org/download/270906/data/table24-mcatgpagridall0911.pdf[/url]”>https://www.aamc.org/download/270906/data/table24-mcatgpagridall0911.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>THere are around 29K students with 3.8-4.0 GPA accepted to med school. With a reasonable MCAT (over 30) they appear to have an 80%+ acceptance rate. I can’t imagine they all went to the Ivy League undergrad. In fact it would be impossible. Where they did attend, of course I do not know.</p>

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<p>so it doesn’t matter where you took O Chem, only that you got an A in it. And, the chances of that A
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<p>OP posed a hypothetical about Harvard vs public, later admitted the stats may not be there. I didn’t see this as about intellecual or academic curiosity, but about practicality- which is valid. </p>

<p>And, Rhodes is no cakewalk. Nothing wrong with a post-bacc. And nothing wrong with gong to the best school you can get into and afford- for the unique growth there. And, plenty of pre-meds take plenty of addl courses outside science. And, not everyone breezes through organic.</p>

<p>And remember, % admitted doesn’t speak to the culling that goes on at many colleges.</p>

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Of course, many people don’t hack it through pre-med and a rare few make a 3.8 to 4.0 GPA. However, IF you can do that, and if you can do reasonably well on your MCAT, you have a pretty fair shot at med school.</p>

<p>The OP asked what his/her chance of being admitted with a 4.0 was. Although they obviously don’t tell the whole story, the statistics presented on the AAMC site are of far more value than all the anecdotal story-telling in the world.</p>