<p>Hey everyone! I was admitted to MIT EA, and absolutely LOVE everything about the school--except for one tiny problem. I'm definitely going to be Pre-medical, and hope on majoring in physics. Getting into a great medical school is as important (if not more important) to me than where I go to UG and I'm really worried about MIT's notorious grade deflation and difficulty. I know premeds at any college are stressed, and am scared that I will go insane trying to keep a >3.7 (on a 4.0 scale) GPA At MIT. I know med schools admissions are much more of a numbers game than college admissions, and so a low GPA potentially could be a huge problem.</p>
<p>I'm looking for advice. Should I be this concerned? Or is premed at MIT really not any more difficult than any other school? I'm just a tad stuck on what to think :/ any help is really appreciated!</p>
<p>MIT is harder any other school with the exception of Caltech in terms of class rigor, work volume, and grade deflation.</p>
<p>It’s impossible to answer this question as to whether it will hurt you until you get into second year classes. At the very least, you get a free semester GPA-wise so you may be able to get some idea. The first semester at MIT is pass/no record and you do get some additional pass/no record classes later on to try out different majors. </p>
<p>If you have a solid background in physics (AP 5), you might want to try 8.012 first semester (the theoretical version). If you can get an “A” in that, you probably will be ok.
Don’t get overconfident though. A lot of the more well-prepared students blow off first semester.</p>
<p>The Careers Office used to publish the average GPA of applicants as well, and it was always within about a tenth of a point of the accepted average – there’s not a huge amount of selection for GPA going on among people who have made it so far as to be applying. (There is attrition among premeds at MIT, as anywhere – the data I’ve seen suggest that there are about 100 people who come in each year intending to be premed, and 69 applied in that cycle.)</p>
<p>Premed at MIT is tough, but most people who pursue that track are successful in their applications. </p>
<p>However, those stats are for people who got into any medical school, not just top medical schools. If you want to get into a top medical school, you have to be the very best, no matter where you are – if you are really top med school material, it won’t really matter where you go to school, because you will get a perfect or almost-perfect GPA or no matter where you are.</p>
<p>I would not put too much weight into which medical school you will eventually get into. Where you do your residency is much more important for your future medical career, and the competition for the most sought after residencies at top medical school is extremely intense. You are better off doing well at a mid-tier medical school if you are interested in high demand specialties such as radiology. </p>
<p>I any case, it will be extremely difficult to predict whether you you will get into a top medical school,wherever you go to college Acceptance rates are typically less than 5% at most medical schools. Even if you attend Harvard, less than 10% of premeds will get into HMS, so probabilities will always be low. Actually, MIT does really well getting its premeds into HMS and other top schools despite the grade deflation. The better the medical school, the less it uses a strict numbers driven admission process. If you look at the variance in GPA for admitted students at top medical schools it is huge. The top schools especially want a very diverse class. </p>
<p>My D is premed at MIT with a 3.5 GPA. This has not prevented her from getting interviews at top medical schools. Several schools specifically interviewed her BECAUSE of her strong research background which she gained while at MIT which is a big plus. They also did account for the severe grade deflation. She has also had interviews for top MD/PhD programs which are much more selective than regular MD programs. (Only about 400 positions nationwide). So, a decent GPA while important to get an interview is far from the only piece and may not even be the most important for admission. Once you get to the interview stage, GPA becomes irrelevant. </p>
<p>So, getting a 3.5+ GPA is definitely manageable at MIT which should give you several solid choices of medical schools. Admission to a top school will have a lot more to do with intangibles and other activities such as research. Note that it is increasingly common for premeds to wait several years after college before starting medical school. They may do TFA, do some research or work a few years. All of these activities will impact admission decisions. Average admission age at top medical school is now around 23-24.</p>
<p>So, if you really like MIT, go there! It is once in a lifetime opportunity that you may always regret if you don’t take it. If you want to go medical school later, you will get in.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be too worried about grade deflation because after all, you’ll be at MIT. There are tons of research opportunites with harvard med even as a undergrad, so that’ll give you some preference. You could potentially get recs from whomever you work with. </p>
<p>Btw why be a physics major and go into med school? I think bio and/or chem would be the best preparation?</p>
<p>Thanks for all the really helpful responses, everyone! They definitely are reassuring. Mollie, I didn’t know MIT had such a high medical school acceptance rate! For some reason I thought it hovered around ~70%, so I’m glad I’m wrong and that it’s actually 94%. Good news all around. </p>
<p>@gethenian, I want to be a physics major because I love physics! As a physician I’ll be studying biology and chemistry for the rest of my life, so I might as well take advantage of the opportunity that college provides to study another subject that I love, but that I know I don’t want to dedicate my life to. If that makes any sense :P</p>
<p>Well, the 94% is for those who apply straight from undergrad. Those who apply after graduating or after graduate school at MIT have a lower acceptance rate, presumably because, for some percentage of them, there were weaknesses in their applications that caused them not to apply straight from undergrad in the first place.</p>
<p>MIT isn’t an easy place to be a premed in terms of the workload, but does have a few advantages over most top premed programs, as I see it. The school ethos is collaborative and cooperative, and working hard is prized and seen as a worthwhile endeavor. There also aren’t many obnoxious “typical” premeds who only care about memorization and grades. But you do have to be aware that it’s not an easy row to hoe.</p>
<p>Sort of, but not really. I wonder what percentage of Harvard medical students could major in physics at MIT and get a 4.5 or above. My guess is like less than 5%. There are really smart medical students out there, but let’s just say that as a currency intelligence is worth a lot more in fields such as science and engineering than in medicine–at least as far as admissions is concerned. If you can get a top MCAT score and a near-perfect GPA from Stanford in biology, for instance, then you have topped out of the smartness requirement. Being “the best” in terms of who would be the smartest and most competent doctor does not help you. The rest is all ECs and your personality. It seems like they look for the beauty queen type.</p>
<p>As for the 94% med school admission rate from MIT, a better marker would be to look at the GPA of people who expressed interest in med school when they came into MIT–or maybe the GPA of these people in premed classes at least. I’m sure some people who got hosed never end up applying. Such statistics don’t exist, of course.</p>
<p>To refute cellardwellar’s point, getting into the best residencies does depend somewhat on the ranking of the med school you went to–not just board scores and med school grades. </p>
<p>There are certain advantages to going to MIT for smart people interested in top schools. For one, it is easier to gain leadership positions in ECs (although it is also harder to spend time in them because we actually have real classes to take.) There is occasionally some recognition of the grade deflation, as I know a few people who ended up at top 5 med schools with horrible GPAs (although they got rejected everywhere else.) And it seems like there are certain research niches in which MIT-trained scientist/engineers seem to have become popular among top med schools. Bioinformatics is one. </p>
<p>This is a meandering post, and I’m not sure what it necessarily should mean to the OP. You could major in physics at Stanford, it would be a ton easier, and have similar med school results to people at MIT with the same major. </p>
<p>Btw, do course 8X (for premeds) people still have to take Junior Lab? Stuff like that can hurt your GPA if your really not on top of things. My opinion is that because you want to go, you should go. If it looks like you’re going to be a “B” student or worse through 3 semesters at MIT, you may want to consider transferring. It’s not like you are locked in for 4 years.</p>
I absolutely agree – when I say “the best” I mean more like “the best at being a premed”, rather than “the smartest”. Something like a single-minded determination to get a great GPA, participate in the precisely correct mix of extracurriculars, volunteer the exactly appropriate number of hours in the correct places, for many people. </p>
<p>I do know a number of HMS med students who went to MIT as undergrads, and none of them were/are typical premed robot types. But they are all very smart and motivated, and getting a high GPA at MIT wasn’t much of a stretch for any of them. I don’t know how typical they are of HMS students in general (some of whom have been in my grad school classes and who, as a whole, frequently make me want to barf).</p>
<p>I don’t get why med schools are so obsessed with numbers. Oftentimes, it seems like those numbers fail to actually prove who is best. Just 'cause I have a 3.9 GPA does not make me smart (especially if I majored in an “easy” field or went to a “easy” school). I hate the idea of playing numbers game and feel that everyone should be able to pursue what they want without having to make those particular choices for grad school or fearing a class that will lower their GPA. I prefer the graduate schools that focus more on the person, their research experience and what they can bring to the school, and less on the GPA and test scores.</p>
<p>Also, of note for MIT, I’m not sure if MIT suffers so much from grade deflation (i.e. only a small percentage of people get “good” grades) as it does from simple difficulty. I know many MIT classes are on curves, but I’m sure those curves still allow for an ample amount of As and Bs. If anything, it’s the MIT curriculum (which is more advanced than many of its peer institutions) that lends to the atmosphere and perception of difficulty. Simply put, the amount of effort I have to put in to get a B in an MIT class would equate to an A in the flagship state university back home; however, there isn’t a lack of As at MIT (correct me if I’m wrong). Also, MIT students focus on sciences/engineering, fields that normally have lower grades than non-science fields, leading to generally lower GPAs.</p>
<p>To expand on my advice:
Study hard for the advanced standing exam in physics, then take 8.012 and 8.022 even if you pass out of intro physics. 8.012 and 8.022 are the theoretical versions of mechanics and E&M, and are a better clue of what you are in store for in advanced classes. If you can get A’s in these classes you are probably capable of getting a good GPA.
Physics does take time, but it’s not like engineering where you bang your head on the wall to get some machine to work or decoding. It’s more like gestalt. If you can get underneath the subject matter, then it all starts to make sense.</p>
<p>As one of the few MIT CC’ers that have defected to the Evil Empire, I hope you realize your responsibility to let them know that they make you want to barf.</p>
<p>Really? From what my friend tells me (she is currently at MIT, I may possibly be joining her next year) it seems like the grade deflation, or at least the grading curve, isn’t that bad (her claim was that “unlike somewhere like Cornell, at MIT you don’t feel that you need to kill your classmates to get a good grade.”) However, it is probably true that its peers are inflated, hence, relatively, it is deflated (though, I think there should be a different term for this because that’s not how I define inflation/deflation, maybe grade-exchange-rate or grade-equivalence-rate or something to that effect). </p>
<p>BTW, to get a frame of reference, at Princeton the grade-deflation policy is to reduce A’s per department to under 35% of grades given, does MIT award less As than that?</p>
Yes, and sometimes it’s a lot less than that, like 15%. The mean was the B/C line or slightly above (60% got B or above) in my major classes. Or at least that’s what it was like 10 years ago.<br>
At some peer schools it’s like half A’s, half B’s. You don’t see that at MIT, except in some humanities classes.</p>
<p>gotcha, good stuff to know, and thanks for the info.</p>
<p>Honestly, if the mean grade is a B in a class, I’d be happy. I guess I just feel that I won’t be too worried about grades in college; I’m the idealist who simply wants to learn the material well regardless of the grade. I mean, if I learned something but ended up with a C in the class, I don’t think I’d be upset. Plus, with Mollie as an example, getting a B-ish GPA at MIT can still land you in some exclusive grad schools, depending on your field.</p>
<p>MIT does not have a specific rule that states that only so many students can get an A in a class. It can be 50% of the class or it can be zero. There is little if any grading on a curve, so your grades are not dependent on the performance of others in the class. In that sense premeds don’t compete among each other for grades. If you do A level work, you can get an A. It is just that what constitutes A level work at MIT is generally very high. My D took an advanced neurobiology class last semester and nobody got an A and only five got a B in a class of 30. It was just a very hard class and the professor set the bar very high, probably unreasonably high. No adjustments were made to the grades. She took another graduate level class taught by a Nobel Laureate. It was very challenging but she felt the grading was much more fair. It is actually not uncommon for MIT students to take certain premed requirements classes at Harvard. My D took Orgo II at Harvard last year and there were at least 20 MIT students in the class!</p>
As a physician I’ll be studying biology and chemistry for the rest of my life, so I might as well take advantage of the opportunity that college provides to study another subject that I love, but that I know I don’t want to dedicate my life to. If that makes any sense :P</p>