Hiya, these are my top 2 options and am looking for some external opinions on the matter. Please help!
I am not a fan of 7 year programs. A former poster, kristin5792 talked about how the 7 year kids at her state’s medical school routinely underperformed relative to the rest of the group (worse scores in class, worse scores on licensing exams, and thus worse residencies - potentially not even being able to enter the field of their choice). Saving one year of your life in exchange for permanently altering your career trajectory doesn’t seem like a good deal to me.
Additionally, if you were good enough to get accepted to medical school as a high schooler, you are clearly above the average pre-med, and therefore I think your odds of coming out of Yale med school acceptable are good. Additionally, should you for any reason change your mind about medicine, now you’re graduating from Yale, not BU.
A lot of people disagree with me, citing the competitive nature of medical school admissions given that the majority of applicants do not end up in medical school (and that’s not even factoring in the kids who start out pre-med and drop off prior to the application stage). If you look at the data the AAMC releases, you’ll see that with high GPA and MCAT, it’s very, very likely you’ll get admitted somewhere. In my opinion, if you are capable of getting in to Yale, you are capable of putting yourself in a position to get into medical school.
In addition to all of that, remove the medical school acceptance and just compare Yale vs. BU, which school would you rather be at? I think if the answer is Yale, then you go Yale.
@iwannabe_Brown Thanks for your input!! I assure you that if I do indeed turn down Yale for BU, I will be even more motivated to stay at the top and work really hard to get into a good residency since I know exactly what a life-changing opportunity i would have turned down to attend BU. The saving one year aspect really is not part of the consideration for me so much as the security of being into a top tier medical school that, in all likelihood, i may not get into even after attending Yale. In other words, I would not be able to forgive myself if I turned down a med school as good as BU to go to Yale but still ended up at a med school lower in caliber than BU 4 years down the road!
You mentioned permanently altering my career trajectory…Would you mind elaborating a bit on what you mean by that?
As for changing my mind about medicine, that is not part of my consideration as well since at this time, I will not try to factor in cop-outs and contingencies in my pursuit to being a top notch physician some day. You also mentioned the AAMC data however i believe it does show to some extent the extremely difficult and unpredictable nature of med school admissions. After all, BUSM regular acceptance rate is cited as 1-2%!!
Dont get me wrong, i am not contesting you for the purposes of calling you out, rather, I am trying to use arguments on both sides of the case to help me make my own determination. Thanks again for all your help and advice!!
Clearly Yale. You can get into medical school after undergrad but you can’t get into Yale.
It’s a tough question, but if medicine is your chosen field, I’d recommend attending the BU program. Two siblings entered and completed shortened college/med school programs(one at BU) and both did very well. Both got the residency desired, and both later obtained Master’s degrees from Ivy League schools to further their vocations and avocations(one at Harvard, one at Columbia). Both knew they wanted to be physicians so it wasn’t much of a decision.
So while this appears to be the minority opinion, if medicine is what you want to do, why take the chance? Attend BU.
What I mean is that if you follow the trajectory of many of kristin’s accelerate MD friends who underperformed in medical school, you could miss out on getting not just the specific program that you want, but the specialty you want. In other words, you might be going to school right now thinking you want to be an orthopedic or plastic surgeon, or maybe you want to be a dermatologist or radiologist but you don’t perform well enough in medical school because you burn out a bit from the condensed curriculum, or you come off to the residents/attendings as less mature than your classmates who are all at least a year older than you (and a good chunk if not the majority will be more than a year older than you) such that you’re less competitive a residency applicant than you would have been if you took the traditional route. Bye bye orthopedics, plastics, derm, and radiology. You may literally not be able to get into those specialties. Now for the next 60 years of your life you’re practicing your 2nd choice specialty.
Yes, it can be somewhat difficult to predict precisely which medical school a given applicant will wind up in, but let’s contrast that number with the following numbers: 90.4, 87.1, 83.5, 78.6. Those are the percentages of applicants with GPA/MCAT splits of 3.8+/39+, 3.8+/36-38, 3.6-3.79/39+, 3.6-3.79/36-38 who got into medical school. Being a high schooler qualified enough to be admitted to medical school means you’re not an average student. Odds are much better for you than others that you will rise to the top and be in those groups that are very likely to get admitted. BU is a great medical school (they all are) but it’s not an exactly an upper echelon school. I don’t think you have to worry about sacrificing a large degree of medical school prestige by attending a different medical school especially given the caliber of student you’ve already demonstrated you are.
It’s your life and your decision. I wish there was more data about the accelerated programs but I suspect there isn’t because it isn’t good. These programs are designed to poach top tier students away from top tier undergrads (and top tier med students) in exchange for a guaranteed medical school admission. Notice the overwhelming majority of top 20 medical schools and undergrads don’t have these programs, and the ones that do are all 8 year programs (trying to squeeze this in before a timepoint and it’s not clear from a cursory search how long UT-PACT is, which is also brand new and hasn’t even had it’s first class finish med school yet).
None of these averages really say anything about you (who knows you best). BU’s program might be better paced than Kansas so burn out is less of an issue, I don’t know what you want to do in college so maybe the guaranteed admission gives you freedom to enrich yourself in some way you couldn’t have before. Some people are simply more willing to take risks (e.g. I turned down a guaranteed admission spot at JHU undergrad to hold out on the WL for Brown). You gotta do what feels best for you.
@iwannabe_Brown - UT-PACT is 7 years and the first or second batch enters medical school this year. It is one of cheapest medical school tracks available to public in Texas (undergrad is almost free due to large merit scholarships covering room and board at UT Dallas) and interestingly enough many of the students choosing this option are physicians’ children.