UCLA undergrads don’t have class at the Med School.
Penn advising means students have a personal adviser from the time they set foot on campus and lots of dedicated resources (and funds).
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At UCLA there are numerous opportunities to work, volunteer and get involved in research in the medical center that is on campus. There are also more students interested in these opportunities than there is space available.
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I admire your gumption. Unfortunately, your options are limited without your parents’ support. As another poster mentioned upthread, if they refuse to share their financial information with you, that will affect your financial aid. I agree with finding a trusted member of your community to advocate on your behalf. Maybe your counselor is that person. Has anyone else from your immigrant community attended Penn or moved far away from home for college? That person could be a resource too.
The concerns of your parents about travel costs are warranted. It already sounds like it would be a hardship to even visit campus. How would you feel if you were unable to travel home for breaks? Penn has a huge endowment, but they were not generous with emergency/travel funds for low-income students when campus closed suddenly during the pandemic. You can reach out to Penn First Plus to determine what financial assistance they offer.
I understand your parents’ concerns. The immigrant families I know are close-knit and interdependent. Your parents probably did not seriously envision you moving across the country. I hope it works out for you but wherever you are headed, you can get there from UCLA.
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UCLA has 32423 undergrads to Penn’s 9760, a ratio of 3.322:1
UCLA sent 2863 into Doctoral programs in the Life Sciences, while Penn sent 1746, a ratio of 1.64:1.
So per capita, assuming the schools have been roughly the same size over the last 60 years (as they are now), Penn sends about twice as many kids into Life Sciences doctoral programs.
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Your family probably doesn’t have the means to pay 8K/yr for UCLA. You will need to fly home for Christmas, and maybe for the summer if you aren’t doing an internship somewhere else, or taking a science during the summer. Your family does not need to fly to Philly to visit you, and the likelihood of them needing to come for an emergency is very low. The 4K difference in what you need to cover is more than enough to cover your travel home twice a year.
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At UCLA, there are approximately 1000 applicants to med schools each year and >50% of those get admitted to medical school.
At Penn, there are about 215 applicants and 83% of those got admitted to medical school.
While these stats are useful, what you need is a comparison of just the cohort of people who got into both UCLA and Penn and then applied to med schools from either school. I would argue that the admit rate for UCLA pre-med aspirants who also got admitted to UPenn would likely be mich higher than the aggregate 51.3% shown on the UCLA website.
Honestly, the OP is going to have a similar shot from either school, and again I’ve not really seen a compelling reason for why Upenn in the context of parental resistance.
If the OP can convince his parents to let them go to Penn, that’s great. But, if they are unable to do so, honestly its not going to put them at a disadvantage relative to med school admissions.
OP - show both these links to your parents and see if the 83% admit rate relative to 51% sways them.
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Penn has a pre-med committee. While this can be an advantage in many ways, such as better pre-med advising, and letting pre-meds with little or no chance of medical school admission know that they should not waste their time and money* applying to medical schools, it does result in inflated admission rates for those who do apply, since only the most likely to be admitted pre-meds are encouraged to apply.
*Yes, applying to medical school is expensive, and may be out of reach of a student with little family money. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/it-can-cost-10000-to-apply-for-medical-school.html
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@MagicBirf can you tell them it is like Harvard and Yale? Have they heard of those? This is frustrating! And the financial aid is fantastic.
Editing to add to again say that if you, the student, have been in need of support from family or at school, that would argue for staying closer to home. I also want to respect family culture and needs, about which we know little but it is true, from what I know, that immigrant families tend to be close-knit and moving far away may be more difficult. @MagicBirf you can be the judge of that. If fear is the root of family resistance, perhaps that can be assuaged.
Good news is your will be in a good situation no matter what. I do have a bias for UPenn!
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I’ve told them but they won’t budge at all just because it’s out of state. I’m 100% sure if I had been accepted to Harvard they still wouldn’t let me just because it’s out of state. When I got accepted early to Berkeley and then soon Irvine (before ucla decisions came out) they told me to choose Irvine just because it was much closer to our home than Berkeley (even though I was heavily leaning towards Berkeley at that time).
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The link is for the post bacc program in LPS, ie., students with a BA or BS who have not completed premed pre-reqs and want to apply to med school.
@MagicBirf : you could email both UCLA and UPenn and ask whether there’s any aid (or dedicated work study awards) to help FGLI students complete the expensive med school application process and whether the premed faculty helps with applications or interview coaching.
Right now, please review what I wrote above wrt strategy. Let it sit and percolate, and find allies.
Do you live in LA?
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Yes, I do live in LA which partially explains my parents’ one-sided bias towards UCLA.
I understand that you are frustrated, but I don’t think this is going to end well. Your parents may have reasons that you don’t understand. Unless you have the means to support yourself, you are going to have to find a way to work with your parents rather than against them.
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That explains it a bit.
I understand they want to keep you close plus they are used to UCLA being the best public university in CA (with UCB). And now you got into it! UPenn isn’t even on their radar.
And like most immigrant parents, they want to protect you and see with their own eyes that you’re okay.
In some cases, it’s also hard to lose the relation of interdependance (whereby they also rely on you and are quietly freaked out at your going away.)
It’s all sorts of more complicated for FGLI kids, even if all parents fear their kids going away, “leaving the nest”. Yet all kids grow up, leave, and create a new life, and although it upsets parents at first it also makes them proud.
And BTW there are enough situations X v Z on this website, I’ve never seen an upper middle class kid admitted to, say, UVA and Stanford with a merit scholarship that made it less than UVA, to whom posters advise “pick UVA and don’t talk with your parents about why Stanford would be better for you”.
I agree you can’t work against your parents. You need allies to reassure and convince them not to pass on that life-changing opportunity.
First step, your faith representative at Penn and the faith groups there.
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That is literally the plot line of a Greta Gerwig film.
I went to college on full scholarship against my parents’ wishes, OP. I paid my expenses until my mother missed me too much and offered to cover my meals out with friends and trips to the local Walmart. If it leads to more estrangement, then there are way more issues going on than where a young adult chooses to attend college.
If they have to pay a significant difference, OP, then different story, but if you are paying, you get the call. That’s called growing up.
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Can your councelor and teachers speak with your parents and explain that you got to one of the best and oldest universities in the US?
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OP can’t continue to qualify for financial aid without their parents filing FAFSA every year (and CSS Profile if they attend Penn.) I wouldn’t recommend testing these waters. Hopefully OP can have some trusted third parties talk with their parents.
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Both schools are exceptionally good. Both will be very academically demanding, and your premed classes will be full of very strong students at either of these very, very good universities.
I wonder whether your parents understand how good the University of Pennsylvania is. It is a very strong Ivy League university. However it is not as well known as a few of the other Ivy League schools (such as Harvard and Princeton). Penn is somewhat smaller than UCLA, which to me looks like an advantage.
However, there is also something to be said for staying relatively close to home for a bachelor’s degree, and UCLA is a great university that is close for you. Travel costs will be lower. You will not need to purchase winter gear (winters in Philadelphia are a bit milder compared to the far northeast where we live, but you would still need some winter gear). I do understand the reluctance of parents to allow a teenager to go so far from home.
If you get to live on campus, being a student at UCLA will be very different compared to living at home. However, if you get sick, or have a nasty breakup with a “significant other”, or if something else goes wrong then help is nearby. If you attend UCLA you also won’t be waiting in crowded airports waiting for pre-Christmas flights home and post-New-Years flights back to university.
I am a bit concerned about Penn being your “dream school” when you haven’t visited. The reality when we show up on campus does not always match our dreams or our expectations.
I do agree with the idea of talking this over with a trusted third party. It is not clear to me whether this would be a high school guidance counselor, or some form of religious leader (such as a minister or priest), or a grandparent, or someone else.
I do think that the parents get to say “no” at this point. However, before they give a final no you might be able to get some help educating them on how strong a university U.Penn is. For graduate programs (after you get your bachelor’s degree) I think that the only “no” that a parent can give might be a refusal (or inability) to help pay for it.
The last thing that I might say is that if you have these two options, then you must be doing very well in high school. Congratulations, and know that this hard work will pay off in the end.
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My understanding is that it is likely that the colleges that give great need based aid will provide a stipend to purchase winter clothes if needed.
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As someone who understands the immigrant mentality quite well, I believe you should go to Penn after getting a respected teacher, principal, or anyone who could support your view. It’s extremely rare to be able to attend your Ivy League dream school for less than your amazing but still local university. Not to be cynical either, but frankly you need to do what’s in your soul and follow your gut because no one out here really knows your mind and frankly, too many wouldn’t waste two seconds taking the spot you relinquish. Keep working on your parents and find allies. You are clearly accomplished, so work that on your parents and find the way to Penn. Make sure you are getting your aid package for all 4 years and that you have thought through every detail. Also make sure you have a back up plan in case your dream is not as it seems. Best wishes to you!
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Once she makes facts on the ground, meaning once she is actually at Penn, there is no way that her parents would sabotage her by refusing to sign a FAFSA. This is not the sick family dynamic with parents who undermine their child’s college education by refusing to file a FAFSA, all the while loudly proclaiming, “I made it without any help from anyone, and so can you!” This is a relatively poor immigrant family, with parents who want to keep their child, whom they love and worry about, close to home. Once OP is at Penn, they’ll come around to it.
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