Any input about experiences with these schools would be appreciated! The obvious is that UF is very large (35,000 undergrads) and in a warmer climate. He would be in honors college and was invited to join the URSP-university research scholars program. Hamilton is obviously very small (2,000 undergrads) and there would be fewer STEM options if he decides to pivot away from pre-med to some type of engineering. However, small class sizes and access to professors would be great. We feel like CWRU, UR, RIT are somewhat similar. He is a music lover as well and will probably minor/join as many ensembles as he can. All are about the same cost. Thanks in advance for any input!
Are you the parent? If so, please pass this on to your student….so they can research and choose themselves.
Your son can pursue premed at just about any college in this country, arts conservatories excluded. So that being the case, any of these would be fine.
I personally would vote against RIT. It’s an institute of technology. Yes, they have other majors, but tech is their strength. I would suggest a college with more varied options and less of a focus on tech.
Both CWRU and UR have ensembles for those who are not music majors. And both are fine for premed. Both have plenty of places where students can shadow, although this can also be done during the summers.
I’ll tag @WayOutWestMom who might be able to give more info about premed at University of Rochester.
I can’t really comment on Hamilton. The only students I know who attended majored in English or History…which a premed can do as long as they take the required courses for medical school applicants.
My suggestion…take premed out of the equation. Your son should choose a college where he will be happy to be for four years. Happy students do better than unhappy ones.
I will add, it’s not easy at many places to pivot into engineering. Your son needs to check to see what it takes to do so at any college he is considering.
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Case Western and Rochester are popular pre-med choices in my circles because they both combine good related departments with lots of relevant experience opportunities.
In terms of music, you might want to check out this prior thread by a person looking at those two universities with a combination of biology/neuroscience and music interests:
As discussed there, Rochester is interesting because it has a separate School of Music, Eastman, where you can take classes, but also a Department of Music in the main college where you can do a cluster, minor, or major. See this post:
Just to elaborate a bit about Eastman, if you are a regular Rochester student, aka River Campus student, you can, subject to an audition, take what they call secondary lesson classes at Eastman. Here is a short official blog post:
Much more information:
https://www.esm.rochester.edu/academic-affairs/rcstudents/lessons-rc-students/
Obviously you have other good options, but to me it feels like Rochester might stand out as a great place to combine pre-med and a love of music. And it is also a great university for other things in case he changes his mind about pre-med, which many do.
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Just want to add…that for orchestra lovers, CWRU is located practically across from Severance Hall…home of the wonderful Cleveland Orchestra. It’s also near the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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The OP’s child sounds like a normal, high-achieving kid. Not necessarily spikey in any one direction. IMHO, he will find his peep (including fellow musicians) no matter where he goes. And as others have pointed out, what does it really mean for a school “to excel at pre-med”? It’s a standard series of courses found at virtually every bachelors degree-granting institution in the country; he doesn’t have to switch out of it to major in something.
Hamilton is a very pretty college located in Western New York State. It doesn’t offer engineering, but for students with a quantitative bent, it does offer a top-notch undergraduate Physics department. If the quintessential “small college experience” was ever a part of the calculation, you can’t go wrong with Hamilton College.
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Yes! I am the parent. He has been doing a ton of research on his own, attending accepted student days and joining Zoom sessions when he is able to in an effort to come to a decision. Thanks for tagging for me- I really appreciate the input!
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Excellent information. Thank you!
While I’d love to go to Hamilton if I were repreating my youth, I think it is a much weaker choice in terms of being able to get the volunteer and shadowing needed for med school applications when weighing it against CWU and UR simply because of location. That being said, most kids that start out pre-med don’t end up applying to med school.
I agree that hospital mentoring is a wonderful extra-curricular to have on one’s resume. But I’m not sure that it ever weighs more heavily than a good score on the MCAT. And I’m sure that at this point, med school admissions committees realize not all undergraduate colleges are located in big cities. Who are we kidding? LACs have been sending kids to med school since, like forever.
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Many med school applicants do this during summers and vacations…and during a glide year after they complete their bachelors.
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My two cents from talking to lots of savvy pre med families is there can be a convenience factor to having lots of experience opportunities very close to your campus. However, that factor almost surely should not trump choosing the college where you think you will be happiest overall and do your best in classes. Whether Hamilton is that college for the OP’s kid is up to him, but if he feels that way about Hamilton I would take that very seriously.
I’d actually view the more serious issue to be the note about possibly wanting to pivot from pre-med to Engineering, since Hamilton does not offer Engineering. Again, the OP’s kid will have to decide what value to put on that being an option.
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D2 were to UR. There are plenty of music opportunities at UR, UR has ensembles that are only open to UR students (and not Eastman students who have their own ensembles). Positions in the ensembles are by audition and the level of performance can be pretty high.
UR students are also eligible to get free musics lesson from advance students at Eastman. The number of students who will get lesson varies by instrument and the availability of instructors. Lessons require an audition and not all students will get lessons. For saxophone, for example, there were 5 students who auditioned and only the 2 best were offered lessons. Her roommate auditioned in violin and the top 8 students were offered lessons. Lessons take place on the Eastman campus which UR students can access by city bus. UR student ride free on city buses with their student ID. However, Eastman class schedules and UR class schedules don’t align and with the bus travel, your student will need a big block of free time for musics lesson. Typically a whole free morning for a 1 hour lesson.
UR has ore-med volunteering opportunities at Strong Hospital across the street form campus–though competition for positions can be high, especially right at the beginning of the year. . Other sites will require with a car or the willingness to utilize the city bus lines.
UR has tons of pre-meds. D2’s freshman year fully 35% of the entering freshman class considered themselves pre-meds. Like all universities, freshman lecture classes in Bio, gen chem, calc 1 and psych are quite large (~250 students) with smaller recitations led by advanced undergrad or grad students. Only once a student has finished Ochem and intro bio do pre-med class sizes get much smaller.
RIT students don’t have access to Eastman faculty or facilities.
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Without a at least some clinical volunteering (expect range 200+ hours) a med school applicants will not be considered not matter how good their MCAT score is.
Med schools want people who understand the lifestyle and career they are signing up for. There are 10+ applicants for every available med school seat. Med schools can afford to be picky.
RE: LACs not in big cities. Medical volunteering doesn’t have to be in s hospital. It can be at a county health clinic, a doctor’s office, a small, community hospital that offer limited services, a county or private nursing home, an adult daycare program, with a county EMT squad, at a campus-based student health clinic. Lots places that aren’t large, urban or suburban hospitals.
Also as @thumper1 mentioned, many pre-meds do clinical volunteer (or paid) work in the summers.
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I knew there had to be work-arounds.
Hamilton may not in a big city but there is a brand new 400ish bed hospital in Utica which is about 20 min away. There is a robust pre-health program at the college.
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Hamilton is actually considered one of the top liberal arts schools for pre-med (search top liberal arts schools for pre-med)! It also has one of the highest admit rates to med school. There are many pre-med/pre-health students at Hamilton and The Health Professions Advisory Committee (HPAC) will prepare a Committee Letter for all students applying to medical/dental school.
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If they use a committee letter, they highly discourage anyone they can’t write a glowing letter for…from even applying to medical school. Or they won’t write one at all. If a college uses committee letters and a student doesn’t have one…medical schools will justifiably wonder…why.
@WayOutWestMom can elaborate.
jumping in with a question here…how do we know which schools use a committee to determine medical school rec letters? Am I interpreting correctly that we want to choose a school that does NOT use a committee?
There a benefits and drawbacks to having a HP committee letter.
typically a HP committee will stratify the undergrad’s students into 4 categories: highly recommend, recommend, recommend with reservations, not recommend For students in the first two categories, the HP committee will highlight a student’s strengths in the letter and explain any issues/difficulties a student has had to overcome.
Benefits
- accepted by all med schools as fulfilling LOE requirements (which vary by med school)
- committee puts student’s achievement into context within their schools academics (like reporting only 5% of students got an A in Class Z taught by Professor Q)
- signals to uncompetitive applicants they probably shouldn’t apply, thus saving them the time, money and emotional roller coast of a cycle of med school applications. (A cycle of med school applications–even without interview travel-- will cost around $2000-$6000.)
- early dates set by the HP committee force a student to prepare their application and have there supporting documents collected in plenty of time for applying to med school on June 1 when AMCAS opens.
Drawbacks
- Students in the latter two categories cannot use the HP letter to apply to med since it will draw negative attention to their applications
- Students who apply from a school that offers a committee letter and don’t use it are asked to explain wy they don’t have a committee letter
- the lack of a HP letter can prevent some viable candidates from applying. Applicants who with a strong narrative for “why medicine?” and a well craft application list might well get accepted to a med school.
Schools without HP committees have benefits and drawbacks
Benefits
- No gatekeeping by HP committee. If a students wants to apply, then a student can apply.
Drawvacks
- the student has to be on top of their application and makes sure they fulfill the LOE requirements at each individual school (which are not the same everywhere and may require a student to obtain a half dozen different letters) If a student sends t too few LOEs to a med school, their file will be marked incomplete and will never get reviewed. If a student send too many, or the wrong type of letters, the student will get rejected for failing to follow directions.
- student has to obtain LOEs from at least 3 or more professors who may or may not send them to the right place in a timely fashion.
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The average age for first year medical students is mid 20’s. So…many are nontraditional applicants in that they are not applying directly out of undergrad. In fact some don’t even decide to actually pursue a career in medicine until some years later.
If this is the case, the committee letter won’t apply…because those students were not premed anyway as undergrads.