Biology at Caltech and MIT

molliebatmit
Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:49:53 +0000

MIT’s and Caltech’s biology programs are scientifically at the same caliber as Harvard’s and Stanford’s programs. (I say this as a former MIT undergrad who is now a PhD student in biology at Harvard.) All four schools are full of outstanding faculty members, and students at all four schools receive a rigorous education in biology.

MIT and Caltech alums are extremely well-prepared for medical school. Unfortunately, in some cases, they are over-prepared – friends of mine who are now medical students reported being bored to death in their first year classes. There’s not a great deal of memorization in an MIT biology education – tests are problem-based and often involve applying techniques and knowledge to a novel situation, and they’re often open-book. Medical school, at least in the first year, involves a lot of memorization and spitting back information.

MIT is very difficult to enter as a transfer. For most of the last several years, the number of transfers admitted has been in the single digits. (Transfer statistics are [here](MIT Institutional Research).) To my knowledge, there are not any MIT students on this board who transferred in.