Am I making a mistake by passing up UMICH for UC Davis and UC Irvine? [MI resident, biology, pre-med]

[tamagotchi]

@UCLAri

Now, to be clear, you can easily go out of state for med school, but as the spouse of someone paying off private med school loans, it’s not preferable.

I think the problem for med school admissions might not be that UCs are “brutal.” Maybe it’s more that there are simply so many CA residents applying as medical school students.

I am not sure if CA residents can compensate by attending an OOS school, as you mentioned. Here is a thread that I found interesting, where @WayOutWestMom mentioned that regardless of the undergrad school attended (OOS or IS), a CA student is still a CA student, with the disadvantages of applying from a state with a very large number of med school hopefuls. I don’t know if the reverse of that might be true for an OOS student attending a CA school.

College Decisions: UMD [$48k] vs UW [$60k] vs CWRU [$60k] for pre-med vs Drexel (BSMD) [$59k before MD school] [also UCR, UCM, SJSU, Pitzer, SCU]

This will be true regardless of where your child attends undergrad since merely attending undergrad in another state won’t change her state of residence for med school applications. She will still be considered a CA resident (with the disadvantages inherent in that…) unless she graduates from college, then establishes an independent domicile in another state by living there and working at a job to support herself for 12 months. RE: Thomas Haider The Thomas Haider program is a wonderful opportunity, but admission to the program requires that the student be a resident of either Riverside or San Bernardino counties. The acceptance rate to program is about 10% (127 applicants last year for 12 slots) and last year’s acceptances were overwhelmingly from disadvantaged/lowSES backgrounds. (75% disadvantaged) The UCs and CSUs are probably the most cost effective option for undergrad. Attending a CA public undergrad–or even doing the CCC to UC route–will not disadvantage a student w/r/t i…

As far as this other comment,

@UCLAri

There was a commenter on here in the long ago (along with me) by the name of sakky who often pointed out that the experience at Cal was notoriously brutal.

My son who is currently attending Cal has wondered if this “notoriously brutal” reputation is fully justified, as he really isn’t seeing a Hunger Games-like atmosphere in lower level math and sciences.

Do you happen to have experience with UMich to compare? That was my question.