Yale vs. Duke vs. Emory Premed

College Search & Selection
1

My daughter is deciding to apply ED to Yale, Duke, or Emory for premed as she loves all these schools and they all have amazing programs with ample opportunities for medical school. Could anyone please talk about their time at these schools in regard to studies, environment, and overall experience? I have a couple of questions:

  1. Is it difficult to make mostly As/How is the grading at these schools?

  2. Are there enough research opportunities/how difficult is it to find opportunities at these schools?

  3. What is the overall culture at these schools (How competitive/collaborative are they?)

  4. Any other info about premed

Thanks for all the help

2

I’m guessing you know but Yale has SCEA (single choice early action which is not binding and does not provide the same level of boost to an application as ED) not ED.

3

For a less competitive environment, consider Brown University & Rhodes College for pre-med.

4

Based on my and S’s experience (as I am interpreting them) for Yale. Neither of us were/are premed but we both have taken STEM courses:

  1. A’s are not easy, but not impossible. It also varies by class/professor. The course guidebook has a lot of student input on the difficulty of each class.
  2. There if you are aggressive about it. Must say it has been relatively easy for D at a selective LAC who is in STEM to find and realize research opportunities. Because there are no grad students, it opens up more paid opportunities for undergrads when we are talking funded grant research for LAC prof’s.
  3. Very collaborative. in my day, we routinely shared notes and helped each other. Same for S who is in various study groups. This is not to say that kids are not grade conscious or there are not cut throat types, but I think some pressure is off because they know they will come out with a Yale degree.
  4. Completely anecdotal to my experience, but I don’t think it is atypical. Half of the people I knew who started premed decided to do something else. A few because they knew their grades were not cutting it, but most because they found some other area of study they liked more given the wide range of opportunities at Yale. Those that were passionate about medicine stayed in it and are very successful practitioners or researchers.
5

Current student at Emory. Would be more than happy to answer any other questions you may have.

  1. Depends on your major and schedule. You can cherry pick teachers for easy A’s or choose more difficult ones that will prepare you better but may jeopardize the possibility of getting an A. From what I read, the average GPA for the College is ~3.3-3.4 so I would say it is comparable to that of Emory’s peer schools.
  2. If you network and maintain a high GPA, it shouldn’t be too hard to obtain research opportunities. The CDC is right next door and seeing how much alumni give back each year, it appears that they would love to extend a helping hand to Emory students. These opportunities will probably not be handed to you but as I said, with networking and a high GPA, an Emory degree most likely won’t hold a student back.
  3. Very collaborative. While I am not pre-med, I have noticed that my friends all group together to study for Orgo and physics. No gluing textbook pages together or anything like that.
  4. Many people are alarmed at Emory’s acceptance rate to med school (58%) but this is because when applying to med school, a committee letter is required. Many schools will refuse to write a student a med school if their stats are below a certain range but Emory will write one for everyone - no matter how low their stats are. This oversaturated the applicant pool and thus brings our acceptance rate down.