What is the best college for premed. A big mistake many students intending to go to medical school make is going to a top 30 undergraduate school. Medical schools are ranked based on MCAT scores and GPA of the students they admit. They adjust GPA somewhat for the level of the school, but not much.
Do you get better preparation at a top school? Absolutely. However, medical schools do not rate applicants the name way school do for undergraduate admission or graduate programs in subject areas do.
What are the worst schools to go to for premed? My alma mater, Johns Hopkins may be one of the worst if your goal is to be a physician rather than a dentist, biology Ph.D or whatever. The reason is that it is harder to get a certain GPA there in premed majors than at the top Ivies. Does that make it a bad school? Maybe the opposite.
I saw about a Hopkins student who got into medical school with a 3.1 average in Bioengineering, a notoriously difficult major. She had 99th percentile on her MCATs, which compensated for the “bad” GPA. I also saw about a Hopkins student with a 3.2 who “got in” after going to a special masters program. If you go to a top undergraduate school, have good MCATs and are close in GPA, then it might to a good idea of going to a program like that or applying after a year or two of regular graduate school and more MCAT study. I understand it is now hard to get a US residency after going to an offshore medical school, but if you are really top academically but have the GPA problem, you might be able to get a really high score on the exam they use for ranking students for residencies, and it would be hard for them to turn you down.
When I went there, it wasn’t as tough for premed, as most of the premeds were medical school legacies who were from a background that their fathers could not buy them into the preppy liberal arts colleges doctors favored. The premed atmosphere then was bad. In some ways, it is less sleazy now, but even more cutthroat and intense.
The worst schools for premed are MIT and Caltech, because they are of course the hardest schools to get grades at. They take more an academics rather than ECs, connections and so on as at top Ivies. The courses are more intense and the grading harder.
From a medical school admissions point of view, a 3.8 average at a school with an 80% admissions rate is better than a 3.2 GPA at MIT, despite the name on the MIT degree. At MIT, almost everyone has many 5s on AP exams at the 80% acceptance rate school, most students didn’t take AP classes or did poorly in them.
So if your goal is medical school, it is better to go somewhere easy, but not that terrible you won’t be prepared for the MCAT and so on. It is often recommended to go to an ordinary state school in state and save money. If money is not a big issue, liberal arts colleges are not as difficult for premed as top universities for the reasons I implied above. They are also generally decent schools. They have less course selection, which means less games or taking easy courses and so on. You could also go to a #50-100 or so school, knowing the grading could be a difficulty, but you not a huge obstacle, and you will get a good education and preparation.
If your goal is to get into a top medical school, then going to a top school for undergraduate is an advantage. Top medical schools take almost all graduates of top schools. They also have about 96th percentile average MCAT and a 3.9 average GPA. However, unless you are at the level where you are pretty sure to get a 3.5 or whatever at a top 30 school, it might not be a good idea to chance it.
If you are not sure if you want to become a physician, then it might not be a good idea to go to a lower ranked school to increase your chance of getting into medical school. Also, is your main goal quality education or getting into medical school?
The premed environments at competitive top 30 and such schools are particularly intense and “cutthroat”, partly because it is so hard to get grades at those schools.
Half of medical students have a parent who is a physician. Are they legacies whose parents contributed? What portion of medical students had relatives who made major contributions whatever their occupations? How many had advantages of family, political etc. connections as with undergraduate admission?
Then medical school admission is much easier at black medical school, and has been so for 100+ years. In state admission is also easier in backward states and from rural and small town areas of most states. They want doctors who will practice in rural areas and relate well to their patients there.
So a minority of medical school places are available to unhooked students. You need to have really good academics and also numbers, including GPA.
If you check out College Confidential, there is plenty of discussion along similar lines to my advice.
The following sources give bad advice https://blog.prepscholar.com/best-pre-med-schools http://www.savvypremed.com/savvy-pre-med/2019/4/15/top-25-best-colleges-for-pre-meds They suggest all the hardest craziest premed schools. Yes, if you want to be prepared to do well in medical school, those are the places, but if you want to get into medical school, avoid top 50 schools.
Caltech has less than 1000 undergraduates. most selected mainly on academics. By contrast most undergraduates at top Ivies got in on hooks, like money or connections, recruited athlete, or underrepresented minority or geographical area. The curriculum at Caltech or MIT is also extremely intense.
From West Point or similar, you can apply directly to medical school, unlike other graduate and professional schools. They are only like top 100 academically, put harder than that to get into with requirements for athletics, leadership, and generally political connections. However, they are very hard to get into medical school from because their grading is so tough and it is harder to prepare for MCATs with only 1/4 of your classes in your major.
Dental, law, and MBA schools do close to the same thing with publishing and looking at mainly GPA and exam scores. However, you do not need that high a GPA for dental school and it is easier to get a high GPA at an Ivy or whatever not in STEM subjects. It is a big thing with recruiting to have a degree from a top law of MBA school, but people can see the undergraduate degree. Patent attorneys mostly did not go to top law schools, because it is harder to get in to them with the harder grading in engineering than English, political science, etc.
It is important to understand that you get a completely different type of education at a top school. Hopkins was extremely intense with a cutthroat atmosphere outside of premed. Other top schools have more emphasis on education rather than career, and in some cases more emphasis on socializing and connections.
The quality of the classes and their competitiveness was much higher. Hopkins also trained you well for a high end career. It developed scholarly and research skills, but also taught you to do a high quality of work. It prepared you for handling situations in the business world: such as handling yourself at a meeting and getting information you need. If you go to an ordinary state school, you will learn the material in your classes, but little beyond that. So you are losing something by not going to a top school.
Hopkins plays Division I in lacrosse and Division III in everything else. It used to be they would usually be under ranked going into the NCAA tournament, because their record was not that good playing such a tough schedule, but then they usually finished in the top 2 in the tournament. Now the lacrosse team is not that good. In 2021, it had a 4-9 record and was ranked 20th at the end of the season, and was probably better than that.
Hopkins was modelled on German universities, specifically Heidelberg. Before Hopkins, you had to go to Germany for a PhD. However, it is probably more competitive than German universities, which are very large, like good state universities. European universities admit mostly on standard exams in subject matter. Hopkins generally wants to see almost all AP classes or the equivalent with almost all As and mostly 5s. They don’t care as much about SAT/ACT scores and ECs as most top schools do.
As far as Hopkins is concerned, I do not want to badmouth my school, and it is an incredible school in many ways, but there was a pretty crazy atmosphere when I went there. They had just eliminated the honor code, because almost all of the premeds were openly cheating in groups in exams. Now they say the atmosphere is collaborative not cutthroat. Not just in premed, but all STEM classes, they give impossibly hard homework, and people work together on it in groups.
There was not a clear curriculum for majors and most classes were very advanced and in the professors’ research areas, and they would have several professors all with the same research area. The premeds would give each other informal advice on what classes to take to get grades.
There was a class “astrogut” Astronomy of the Solar System. It was supposed to be a science class for non science majors, but all the students were premeds, and about half of the premeds took it. The instructor was a school board member, who apparently was teaching it partly as a political favor. All the regular faculty had PhDs and all sorts of publications. I do not know what his academic qualifications were, but he did not have a PhD in Astrophysics. The class was taught sort of like a high school class in the wrong part of town, with no textbook. The premeds would figure things out from the class notes. It was probably much less work than other classes, as well as easier to get a grade.
This was not premed and it is not like that now, but a woman told me her father who was a Hopkins professor told her he definitely did not want her to apply to Hopkins. He told her it was all career and not about education. Of course, he would get free tuition if she went there.
I had some problem in that initially, they asked me if I wanted to major in “Math or Math Sciences”. I said “math”. The general advisor told me how I was not qualified for Math. I said “Math” anyway, because I thought I was qualified. He did not explain the Math was all this weird academic theoretical math, and that they did not really have a Math undergraduate program. They had introductory classes and then all graduate classes. I got into these graduate classes I could not understand, and had a hard time finding my way into the right classes. It was a difficult experience and really messed up my grades. Many of the departments did not really have undergraduate programs, and they would give students wanting to major in those the run around. Then most of the students were in a few career oriented majors and mostly into grades and the best career moves. Despite the problems, I did get an incredible education, development of skills, and preparation for career.
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