<p>just a short question!!</p>
<p>Is UC berkeley a good place to pursue pre-med?</p>
<p>grade deflation! wheee!</p>
<p>“Good” is a relative term. What are you comparing it to?</p>
<p>It depends. I’ve heard from students there that it is a very competitive, cutthroat atmosphere.</p>
<p>Then again, where is pre-med not a competitive thing?</p>
<p>ive heard that the majority of berekly kids are instaters who smoke weed all day and lack intelligence (according to someone from the berekely board)</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard, Berkeley is not a good place to do pre-med because it is very cut throat, there is excessive grade deflation, and they weed out their premeds a lot. Even if the statistics look good, Berkeley is a hard place to do premed just like Cornell is.</p>
<p>Medical school adcoms do not consider the name value? It’s unfair!!</p>
<p>Here are the Berkeley premed stats. You can decide whether it means that Berkeley is a good place for premed or not. </p>
<p><a href=“http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/top20.stm[/url]”>http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/top20.stm</a>
<a href=“http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/national.stm[/url]”>http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/national.stm</a></p>
<p>its not bad for a state school…remember berkely is over-rated for how good it is; the quality of OOS students is extremely high, but often in-staters are pretty average and get accepted to the college… so alot of them in turn probly apply to med school and get rejected</p>
<p>I don’t think those numbers are very impressive, especially for the elites. For instance, Harvard med school has a 2.8% acceptance rate overall, yet in the past 5 years, an average of only .8% of Berkeley students who applied were accepted (that’s 3 out of 361). Therefore, the applicant pool from Berkeley is much weaker than the average applicant for Harvard. Of course, whether this is because of Berkeley’s undergraduate reputation or because the students at Berkeley are, on average, a lower caliber than those representing the elites, I don’t know.</p>
<p>But it also seems that the average accepted Berkeley student has a much higher than average GPA/MCAT for the schools he applied to. If Berkeley was highly respected for its rigorous courses, we would expect the students accepted by an elite to be roughly at the elite’s mean GPA. Instead, the average Berkeley student must have a much higher than average GPA and MCAT to be accepted.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not that UCB is a “bad” school for pre-med, it’s just that the majority of the applicant pool to elites are from “better” schools.</p>
<p>also, to add to that, compare the acceptance rate at berkeley to a place like Duke:
<a href=“http://www.aas.duke.edu/trinity/prehealth/appendix/New2004HPAC%20Annual%20Report.pdf[/url]”>http://www.aas.duke.edu/trinity/prehealth/appendix/New2004HPAC%20Annual%20Report.pdf</a></p>
<p>Duke’s average accepted student’s GPA is lower than the national average, even though Duke has come under some fire for grade inflation.</p>
<p>The key question is the advising you’ll receive at Berkeley. Some previously mentioned private schools have wonderful systems that will streamline a very complex process - from internships as freshmen to professor mentoring early on to streamlining letters of recommendation. Do you have access to faculty mentoring? Advising? Elements like this make a huge difference in tricky processes like applications.</p>
<p>The second key is to keep in touch with other students who have high aspirations and realistic expectations about what it will take to earn them. Keep in touch with the numbers of the schools you’re applying to, and always remember that averages mean that half the students at a school beat those scores. One good source is the MSAR, available on Amazon as well as directly from the AAMC. (The title is misleading - the book actually contains much more than just admissions requirements.)</p>
<p>its not that bad. its cut-throat i guess… in the sense that all the ppl who dont study get weeded out. but berkeley has more of those ppl then HYPMS. it isnt that bad, seriously.</p>
<p>and no, avg ppl dont get accepted into berkeley. 70 something percent of ppl that get accepted are in the top 4% of their classes, and the other 30 percent have some great EC’s to back up their low class rank. USNews ranks berkeley #20 or soemthing… well there’s 1000s of colleges in the US. you do the math…</p>
<p>Hey, bluedevilmike, can you name some schools which have great advising for pre-meds and try their hardest to get them into med school? I’d really like to know that, thanks.</p>
<p>Hi Stanford,</p>
<p>The truth of the matter is that I simply don’t know. My favorite school in North Carolina does a really wonderful - spectacular, in fact - job, which is reflected by some pretty incredible numbers and admissions committees who always ask me to say hi to my advisors for them. A thread on the question of UCB had a link for you.</p>
<p>My assumption - and it’s just that, an assumption - would be that schools that have a strong reputation for emphasis on their undergraduates (Princeton, Yale, Williams/Amherst, etc.) would have the best advising departments. Larger schools, or schools that are more focused on their graduate students and faculty research, are less likely to have good advising teams.</p>
<p>Still, it varies considerably. The best thing I can say is to keep your eyes open for statistics regarding what kind of MCAT scores and GPA you need from a given school. In a completely hypothetical example, if your average Duke undergrad can get into medical school with a 3.54 and your average Stanford undergrad needs a 3.75, you’d assume that Duke’s “intangibles”, including advising, are stronger than Stanford’s.</p>
<p>Hopkins has GREAT advising, even though it is often said that we like to focus on our grad students and faculty research.</p>
<p>I’m not so sure that Hopkins has great advising either. The notion of being dangled with a bad committee letter is chilling. </p>
<p>“A student with a much lower GPA can still insist on having their application sent to the committee, yet Fishbein stressed this will most likely reflect badly in their recommendation”</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.jhunewsletter.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/03/21/3e7a3fbeb5814?in_archive=1[/url]”>http://www.jhunewsletter.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/03/21/3e7a3fbeb5814?in_archive=1</a></p>
<p>Someone please clarify this for me…</p>
<p>I don’t understand why advising is so important - can’t a focused person do the research on his/her own and get through the applications process successfully without too much help on the part of the college?</p>
<p>It’s always better to have advising services that will give you ‘inside information’ on how to make yourself look better to the med-school adcoms. For example, consider a school that will advise you on just-opened opportunities for you to do medical-related EC’s, how nice would that be? How about advice on which profs have historically given excellent rec’s to their students? Full interview workshops so that you can constantly hone your interview skills? A full rack of MCAT prep books and software, available free of charge? Advice on what the med-schools like to see on essays - including any new changes (i.e. such-and-such med school is now emphasizing some new character trait, so it would be good to write essays that highlight these traits, etc.). And of course probably the best perk is an advisory committee that will take your entire application and summarize it in one letter to make you look as good as possible. Hence, the advisory committee becomes a strong advocate on your behalf to get you into med-schools as possible.</p>
<p>Sure, some of these things can be replicated by the student himself. But clearly, it is a whole lot better to have the school do it for him. The best advisory committees serve as a virtual pipeline to med-school in that they primp and prep all of their candidates to put their best foot forward. It’s like hiring a good marketing or PR firm on your behalf to put you in the best possible light.</p>
<p>The answer is yes, but it’s annoying and will put you at a disadvantage.</p>
<p>If you pay attention to discussions of various how-good-is-this-college boards on this forum, you’ll notice that many schools seem to have an “index disparity”. As has been commonly noted, Duke students who get admitted to a given medical school tend to have worse numbers than the Berkeley students who get admitted to the same medical schools, a statistic which is in fact the REVERSE of what grade inflation is supposed to imply.</p>
<p>Why? Do Duke students do more extracurriculars? Almost certainly. But much of the answer lies in the fact that Duke simply has better advising.</p>
<hr>
<p>1.) Every school has a different deadline for each of several different things. Keeping track of the deadlines alone is a nightmare. This is only one representation. When do you expect secondaries? What should you write on them? How do school’s interviews vary? Yes, these are all things you could keep track of on your own - and, for the most part, you’ll have to know at least a little bit about them in each case - but it eases your burden considerably. Applying to medical school is a four stage process (primary, secondary, interview, selection), and keeping track of every deadline and facet of each school can be a logistical nightmare. A good advising team will give you a single deadline and prepare you for the paperwork ahead with mock applications, mock interviews, and personal statement feedback. Knowing what’s ahead of you allows you to prepare and thus perform better - because how you perform on the process itself, not just your academic career, matters a great deal.</p>
<p>2.) Every school requires different letters of recommendation UNLESS you have an advising team that sends off the letters for you. In my case, I had to ask for four letters, which were sent to every school. In other cases, one might have to ask for as many as nine letters because each school requires something slightly different. You are then in charge of tracking down the addresses and pre-assembling packages for each of your letter-writers. A good advising office handles all of this internally.</p>
<p>3.) Your premed office writes you a letter of recommendation. This is required by medical schools - neither you nor your undergraduate institution has a choice in the matter, which tells you how important this is. Some undergraduate schools don’t have this option at all, which will - given how important MS’s seem to think it is - will put you at a disadvantage. Some schools with bad advising will write you useless letters. Schools with a long track record of accurate letters of recommendation have letters that can carry a great deal of weight. My school’s advisors work to craft an accurate letter that doesn’t just speak positively of us, but also works specifically to tell medical schools what kind of student I am. Not all medical schools are the same; not all medical students ought to be the same; I don’t fit equally well at every school. Singer & Co. try to help schools get a feel for how good a student I am, but also what kind of student I am.</p>
<p>4.) Your premed officer simply knows more than you possibly can. Baylor, for example, has high numbers (GPA and MCAT scores) from their incoming students, higher than many schools that might be considered equally prestigious. Is this a new trend? Is this because Baylor places more weight on the numbers? Or is it because Baylor applicants tend to be nerdier people in the first place? How seriously does UCLA take its Spanish requirement? What are my chances, not just of getting into Wash U, but of winning scholarships that they won’t announce until May? Which of the UC’s pay attention to state residency, and how much? Does my rejection from Northwestern mean I did poorly in their teamwork-based interview, or could it mean something else? Am I expected to carry a full course load in my final semester? These are questions that only experience can answer for you.</p>
<p>5.) Finally, your premed advisors have a reputation. Those undergraduates with strong advising will notice that, when traveling the interview circuits, the admissions committees are very familiar with your premed advisors. A school with a strong reputation for good advising - a school where your advisor can tell a committee that the professor who gave you a C- in evolution and diversity really is insane and have them believe her - is invaluable. Of course students think their applications make sense - but if your advisor, who knows med schools and knows your undergraduate institution - agrees, then med schools will consider that carefully.</p>
<hr>
<p>PS: Sakky is brilliant. What he said.</p>