<p>I recieved my BS in Astronomy from UMCP and my MD from MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine which is now Drexel school of medicine so I know something about both schools. I had a 3.6 GPA and a 31 MCAT so I also know how difficult it is to get those statistics. </p>
<p>First, both UMCP and Drexel Medical School are both excellent institutions in my experience so I do not think you can go wrong with either choice. UMCP is very strong in the sciences, has very good faculty, good facilities and a nice campus. It is a very large school though and therefore might not be for you if you are looking for a small college type feel. My one concern for you about going to UMCP has nothing to do with the quality of the school but the nature of the program you will be in. When I was at UMCP majoring in Astronomy I had no idea I would later decide to go to medical school so I have no direct experience with the pre-med program there and mainly took Math, Physics and Astronomy courses. I did, however, take two semesters of Chemistry which is also taken by pre-med students and it was extremely competitive due to the near desperation of pre-med students trying to get an A in the class and not everybody can get an A. I had to work very hard to escape with a low B each semester. Since you will be in a program where all students are trying to get into a medical school I would expect intense competition in all of your classes and there are some very smart students at UMCP. If you are one of the 60% of medical school applicants that receive no offers of admission from any American medical school you will have a life sciences degree that may not be the best ticket to employment but with all your FA you will not be in much debt either.</p>
<p>I never attended Drexel as an undergraduate so I really have no first hand knowledge about it. I think the medical school is vastly underrated. I was a student there during a very tumultuous time (1997-2001) when the new defunct AHERF owned the school and declared bankruptcy. There was a real possibility that the medical school and the hospitals would close and the AAMC had even drawn up plans to assign each of us to one of the other 120 LCME medical schools in the US to finish medical school. Despite the uncertainty, professors and clinical staff continued to teach students with a very high level of professionalism. At the last minute before liquidation, Tenet bought the hospitals out of bakruptcy and gave Drexel University $60 million dollars if they would operate the medical school with an option to take ownership. This was a time when many academic medical centers such as UPenn, Stanford and UCSF were close to bankruptcy themselves so it was a risky move for Drexel. I think the bankruptcy and the disclosure of the condct that led to it still haunts Drexel’s reputation.</p>
<p>The medical school itself has a wonderfull campus and outstanding laboratory and other facilities, by far the best of any medical school in Philadelphia. I opted for the unique case based Program for Integrated Learning (PIL) for the first two pre-clinical years and thought it was truly outstanding. I think the clinical training I received was extremely good and prepared me well for residency. If it were not for its troubled past Drexel school of medicine would be ranked much higher than it is.</p>
<p>Again, the downside is not the quality of the school but the nature of the program you will be in. Medical school feels like it is incredibly accelerated when you do it in four years, trying to learn all of that material in even less time is going to be physically, as well as mentally, exhausting. Getting a GPA of 3.5 might not be too bad at a regular pace but in an accelerated program could be tougher. A score of 31 on the MCAT is a full standard deviation above the mean for all test takers meaning you will have to do better than more than 80% of the other people taking the test. I was stationed in an Asian country when I took the MCAT and and had to fly a number of hours to Guam via Saipan to take it. The Saipan to Guam flight, with a stop midway on a tiny island called Rota was on a prop plain that must have been built in the 1930s and I still can not believe I survived it. The hotels were on one side of Guam and the test site, the University of Guam, which is really just a bunch of Quonsett huts, was on the other side of the the island so I had to get up early drive a rented car over decaying roads through the jungle to get to the test site and take the test in a decrepit stifling Quonsett hut. I relate all of this to let you know that the 31 I attained might not have been the best score I might have achieved had I taken the test under more normal circumstances. Nevertheless, a 31 is not going to be an easy score to get, even under the best of conditions, and if you do not make it you will be stuck with a degree that may not be any more valuable than the life schiences degree you would get at UMCP and you do not get into medical school.</p>
<p>My strong feeling though is that you will succeed and become a first rate physician whichever program you finally choose, but I wanted to give you the good and the bad about both from my perspective.</p>