Can you please provide insight on Yale vs JHU vs UPenn for a premed student?
Which one would you pick, if you were accepted into these three & why?
JHU: Its good for premed/volunteering, but hear a lot about stress and grade deflation.
Yale: Prestige college and little less stressful than JHU.
UPenn: Read premed is little better than Yale.
Any feedback is highly appreciated to a parent who has not studied here.Thanks in advance.
Theyâre all top schools with excellent clinical and research opportunities. The problem is getting in, and then the next problem is achieving a very high GPA in extremely competitive large lecture pre-med classes. I went to an Ivy. If I worked incredibly hard in a premed class, I might get an A, but more often an A minus, or even a B+, and that was with just killing myself with studying. If I didnât work so hard? Not a pretty picture. I also took some classes at a well-respected 4 yr public college. There, all I had to do to get an A was do the work, and review a bit before the final. It was just SO much easier to get straight Aâs there. My point is, itâs gonna be extremely stressful at any of these. Since they all have hospital and research facilities, Iâd honestly say that the choice should be made based upon geography. Philly beats Baltimore and New Haven.
Guessing things are getting jittery around your house as Ivy day approaches! Please help your student by not getting sucked into it. Your student already has CalTech & JHU, and Yale or UPenn would just be cherries on top.
All of the possible options are good for pre-med & volunteering; given your other choices the relative prestige of Yale is immaterial (except for you putting a sticker on your car, which should not be a decision factor), and whatever you read about UPenn is an opinion, not a fact true for 100% of people.
More importantly, none of those should be decision variables: at that level the key difference between them is how your student lands- how well they settle into the uni.
So pull back and put your energy into distracting your student for the next week.
This is like saying you are looking for a sports car and canât choose between a Ferrari, Porsche, or Maserati. All these choices are great and they are wonderful options to have. Evaluating them based on the school characteristics that fit your child and would make them happy is way more important than how âgood they are for pre-medâ. Finding the school where your child will be most comfortable will lead them to be happier which will lead them to better performance which is more important in regards to pre-med than the institution itself.
I think these questions are best asked after getting into all the other choices. Why think too much about hypotheticals?
Maybe you are looking for something like this: Top Feeders to Medical School
I have also heard that JHU is particularly stressful. That would be an important factor in our family, but yours may be different. Donât worry about what is âbestâ for premed, these schools are all ridiculously good.
This. And remember also that one can take the required courses for medical school applicants at just about any four year college out there (arts conservatories excluded).
Nobody gets through pre-med without a lot of hard work, self-discipline and pushing themselves to do their best under pressure for sustained periods of time. Those add up to stress, no matter what.
JHU is a âwork hard/work hardâ school. That is very stressful to some students and suits others down to the ground. CalTech (another school that the OP has been accepted to) is also considered very stressful, though in a different way.
Note also that there can be a big gap between the parent view and the student view. I know a recent JHU grad who is now doing her PhD at Oxford. Her mother will tell you how hard JHU was, how much work, how she thinks it was just too much stress. Her daughter (who has now ofc forgotten the âomg Mom I think I am going to fail Xâ calls!) says she had a great UG experience and made a great group of friends with whom she is still close. She would also point out that it was her relationships with her profs- and their relationships with profs at Oxford- that got her the connections that now have her doing a very high-profile piece of cross-border research on pharmaceutical efficacy for her PhD, which is being co-sponsored by JHU, Oxford, the NHS and Pharma.
For me (child of a refugee, so I was raised to ALWAYS have a Plan B and C) the question would be, where is the âbestâ place if I decided NOT to study medicine! As everyone has pointed out, these are all fantastic choices (none of them have a âpremedâ major, but presumably the kid can find something else to major in while preparing to fulfill med school requirements). But where would the kid thrive if something else snagged him during his undergrad years- epidemiology? biostatistics? urban planning and sustainability?
So many neat careers!
Penn is tough for premeds. My kid is not premed but is majoring in bio. The chem and bio sequences are challenging even for top students. Students work hard and play hard, but difficult professors and a heavy workload often tip the balance towards work overload.
The premeds are universally stressed out there, but I suspect that is common at most top schools. Personally, my kid is so turned off by the undergrad bio experience that Penn is low on her list of places to do her PhD.
Plenty of labs and hospitals in the immediate area for practical experience though. And opportunities are available as early as freshman year.
These three schools are all great and are full of great students, whether they are pursuing pre-med or not. Iâm not sure there is a fool-proof way to rank them in terms of pre-med difficulty. All will have outstanding career support, and I imagine that extends to pre-med curricular planning and med school applications. Organic Chemistry is hard everywhere.
So I would make this decision as if you were not planning on med school; in other words, make it about fit and finances:
In your case, evaluate Plan B at each school â if you changed your mind, or could not pursue medicine, which academic and vocational detour would you take?
@mountainsoul
Thanks for detailed reply. Can you please elaborate by âdifficult professorsâ ?
I sent you a PM.
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