MyBlsflHrt

Will going to Barnard give me an advantage for getting into Columbia Medical School (if I do research will the biology professors at Columbia)?

mardad

Doing research of any kind as an undergraduate in any college is an advantage at in applying to any medical school. Would there be an advantage at a particular medical school in doing research at one of that university's undergraduate colleges? Maybe a little, but not enough to make you want to go to that particular college. You would have to know that you wanted to go a particular medical school, and medical school education is heavily standardized in comparison to undergrad. Pick a school where you want to spend four years and work on grades, MCATs and research. Also, do some summer or volunteer work to find out if you really want to do medical work. We see a number of students whose parents pushed them to go to medical school who find out later that they don't like it enough to do it 12 hours a day.

michellesterr

i think mardad said it very well. just to elaborate from my own premed POV...there are certainly things that med schools expect from you esp a school like columbia med: ridiculously high GPAs & MCATs, research, internships/work/volunteering, great essays & interviews. these are things they expect from you but they're also things you really want to do and enjoy doing.

if you're thinking about the best place to do research idt thats the best way to go about it. think about why exactly you want to do research in the first place. the reason why so many med schools like to see undergrads doing research is bc they themselves emphasize research. research encompasses a lot of the qualities they want in their students: curiosity, innovativeness, desire to help, etc. some schools really don't care if you do research or not and it won't really be a big advantage.

what kind of research do you want to do? it's def nice doing research at columbia or columbia med bc you can see a lot of applications to medicine. but my sister did research in medical anthropology at her liberal arts undergrad and she's at harvard med now. as long as the med school sees you were passionate and dedicated about the research you did it doesn't matter where you did it. it may benefit you to do research at columbia if you wanna go there but def don't pigeonhole yourself esp if you don't find certain research projects their interesting bc it's not gonna make a difference where you did the research. you may see more columbia undergrad students getting into columbia med but that's only bc 1 they're already qualified in the first place and 2 they already know all about it so it's gonna be somewhere at the top of their lists.