“Premed” immediately brings up four issues:
One is that medical school is expensive. If you are intending to take this route, you need to budget for a full 8 years in university. If you ignore budget and attend private universities, you could easily spend $800,000 over four years, and might even get closer to $900,000. You do not want to take even half of this as debt. One quarter of this as debt would still be a lot of debt (but maybe just manageable for an MD). If your parents are fine spending $900,000 before they call you “doctor” then you can ignore the cost. If not, then it will be easier to save money on the first four years (undergrad) rather than the last four years (medical school).
The second issue is that premed classes are very challenging. I have heard stories of classes full of very strong premed students with exams with a class average in the mid 40’s. You should not want to show up in these tough premed classes with stats that put you in the bottom half of the incoming students. Thus suggests that you might be better off to attend a university where your high school stats put you in the top 1/2, and maybe even top 1/4, of incoming students. With an unweighted high school GPA of 3.7, this does not describe the four reach schools that you mentioned in your original post.
The third issue might be the start of good news. There are a LOT of universities in the US that are very good for premed students, hundreds of them. If you look at the students in highly ranked medical schools, or in other biomedical-related graduate programs, they come from a very wide range of undergraduate schools. One doctor I know said that the other students in his MD program came from “all over the place”. You do not need to attend a school on the U.Chicago / Johns Hopkins level to get into a very good medical school. You do however need to keep a high GPA in very tough premed classes and get very good experience in a medical environment.
The fourth issue is that the vast majority of students who start university thinking “premed” end up doing something else. There are a lot of forms of something else that are possible. Some are biomedical related, some are not. Fortunately of the hundreds of colleges and universities that are very good for premed students, nearly all of them are also very good for a wide range of other options.
Given this fourth issue, it might be worth pointing out that students who are in other forms of very good graduate programs, such as biomedical PhD programs, also come from a very wide range of undergraduate colleges and universities.
If “where you go” means “where you go for your bachelor’s degree” this is exactly right.
And this is very true, today. Five years from now medical school is likely to cost even more than it does now.
These are all reaches with your unweighted GPA, and all would have tough premed classes full of students arriving on campus with significantly higher high school GPAs. If you have a strong junior year of high school then you might have a chance at these schools. However, you need to find schools that are much closer to being a sure thing for admissions.
One more thing that I might add. I have a daughter whose high school stats were very close to yours. She got her DVM this past May. Of course her patients are not human, but she is a medical veterinary doctor now, loves it, and the path to a DVM is not significantly easier compared to the path to an MD or DO. This is not an easy path. This takes a lot of work over an extended period of time. This takes a lot of determination. However, your high school stats will not stop you from becoming a doctor, and having an uptrend in high school is also quite encouraging. With sufficient work and determination I believe that you can do this, but I would be a bit surprised if the best path for you starts with a bachelor’s degree from any of the four reach schools that you mentioned in your original post.