ElGrande

Hey all

I am currently an international student, pre-med, enrolled at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in his freshman year. For several reasons, I intend to transfer to another school: First of all, Stony Brook is the most depressing place ever, especially on the weekends as everyone goes home and the internationals are stuck on the (absolutely boring) campus. In addition, there is zero social life. However, what bothers me the most is the fact that they never provide enough places for the chemistry labs, so that i have to take it in winter and summer sessions. However, as I am a pre-med student, i read that medical schools frown upon you taking essential courses in winter/summer session. Concerning the transfer, I looked at several schools:

1) University of Minnesota- Twin Cities
2) State University of New York at Binghamton
3) Temple University
4) Texas A&M University
5) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
6) Clemson University (already applied there for fall semester, got into)
7) University of Mississippi
and some others. Can you recommend any from this list?

Important factors for me are:
1) The school should not be too expensive (<40k per year), as medical school is not going to be cheap either and international students pay more everywhere.
2) Guarantee that I get into the desired courses in the fall and spring semester (especially concerning labs).

However, in your opinion, does going after a ranking make sense at all? Or is this a factor one should not consider when transferring?
In addition, does transferring from one college to another look bad on your CV?
Does the size of a school (e.g. Texas A&M with more than 40k students) matter at all, especially concerning the courses? I mean, do big universities tend to have courses which are filled up and hence have to be taken in winter/summer semester? (Stony Brook, for example, has 24k students and there is no chance to get into a lab in the regular semester).

entomom

These are FAQs over in the PreMed Topics subforum, go there and read the stickies, recent threads and use the Search function, and you will find lots of valuable information.

xFoRTiTuDe

Size certainly matters concerning being able to enroll in courses. Enrolling a larger undergraduate population vs. a smaller one in classes undoubtedly means having a harder time getting into the courses you want without priority by seniority. That doesn't mean you run the chance of never getting the courses you need; rather, you might not get them when you want them and end up, like you said, taking them over a winter/summer break. (That's speaking from my experience at UCLA, with our 26k undergrads.)

I don't know very much about Texas A&M in particular, but I do know that they're known for the math and sciences mostly. Therefore, a large portion of the students there are going to be after the chemistry labs you're probably going after. That, plus a large undergrad enrollment, seems to imply you'd have issues with enrollment in the courses you want, but like I said, it doesn't mean you'll never be able to take your labs.

If getting the courses you want, when you want them is your primary concern, I would advise looking into some smaller schools. But even that's no guarantee!