Brown PLME vs Yale

sakky
Sun, 06 Apr 2008 09:27:46 +0000

I believe Brown PLME allows you to switch out to the regular undergrad prgram if it turns out you do not want to pursue medicine. Additionally, you can apply to other medical schools if you do not want to stay at Brown for medical school. Seems to me the PLME gives you the most flexibility and freedom. You also do not have the stress of being premed.



Exactly, and for those reasons, I would vote for Brown.

Look, Yale is better than Brown, but not THAT much better. We’re not talking about the difference between Yale and some no-name 4th tier school here. This is Brown we’re talking about.

Furthermore, I have to take exception with those posts who have stated that somebody who is good enough to get into Brown PLME will assuredly get into med school coming out of Yale. While I agree that that’s probably true, the fact is, you never really know. The fact is, the med-school admissions process is something of a random process, and some people who by any reasonable metric should have gotten in sometimes don’t.

As a case in point, consider the following data regarding premeds from Berkeley. You will notice that of the graduating seniors from 2006 who applied to med school and had GPA’s of higher than 3.9 and an MCAT above 35, a whopping 31% got rejected from every med school they applied to. Those are elite grades and MCAT scores by any measure, yet even so, not all of them got admitted.

[Career Center - Medical School Statistics](http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/2006seniors.stm)

Now, granted, that was an unusual year for those particular high-caliber Berkeley students. And certainly, it may have had to do with other factors. Perhaps they flopped during the interview. Perhaps they submitted bad essay answers. Perhaps one of their recommenders secretly hated them and decided to spike their application packet with a terrible rec. Many things could have happened to have caused these people to be rejected. But that’s precisely the point. Shi* happens sometimes. That’s why guarantees are so valuable.