Brown PLME vs Yale

afan
Sun, 06 Apr 2008 08:41:07 +0000

To expand on BDM’s comments:

The kids who are accepted into PLME tend to be at the very top of the applicant pool. If anyone can feel confident about getting into med school four years later, it should be them. Combine that with the very high admissions rates for Yale undergrads who apply to medical school, and going to Yale is not nearly as risky as it might appear. You are going to work hard at either place in college, and for the rest of your career as a physician, so that should not be a consideration. When you are in med school, you will have to stress about your performance. If you were not the goal oriented-get the work done type, you would not have been admitted to two such competitive options.

I don’t know anything about the undergraduate major in neuroscience at Yale, including whether they even have one. I am sure that Yale students, in droves, go into medical school and the clinical neurosciences, and a significant cohort goes into graduate school in neuroscience. One does not need an undergrad major in neuroscience to do this.

If you are fairly sure that you want to study neuroscience as an undergrad, then you should look carefully at the undergrad program at Yale. It sounds like you have already done this for Brown. You have time. Contact admissions at Yale and ask them about it. They will give you some very general, nearly useless information. But, they will also tell you who to contact in neuroscience for more information.

Find out how many students major in this at Yale, what they do afterwards. Then get pushy and contact a few of these students (can probably find them on the department website, or the department can identify some for you) and ask them what they think of the program. This will be far from a comprehensive survey, and take what your hear with a grain of salt. But they could give you useful information that you would not otherwise know. For example, are the three top teachers among the professors all leaving? Is the main neuroscience building a dump, scheduled for disruptive renovation during your entire time there? Are they in the midst of a massive expansion of the neuroscience faculty? General expressions of dissatisfaction or joy might not mean much.

Just remember, many, perhaps most, students major in something different from what they anticipated when in high school.

Similarly, Yale admissions should be able to give you hard facts on medical school acceptances for Yale undergrads- they get this question a lot.

To get into medical school you need high grades and MCATs. I am going to guess you had high grades and SATs, or you would not have been admitted to Yale and PLME. So odds are you will be in good shape 4 years from now from either place.