That is awesome, HKim! Really, you are a very mature and thoughtful person. It’s hard to let go of a dream, but sometimes that needs to,happen.
Last year we all went through the heartache of your situation. Now we get to get just as excited for you as you make choices between some excellent programs. Can’t wait to see if you start a thread while your in college. Maybe some updates along the way?
Well… Onto your next decision… ?
Edit/Update as while I was typing this up, OP switched to RD round. So this analysis is for future applicants looking into Pre-Med at UChicago . . . .
UCIHP GPA data refers specifically to MD programs, so at least we can all be clear on that.
GPA and MCAT should not be considered independently from one another. Med-school admits from UC have a lower GPA and higher MCATs than the national average, as UCIHPS has pointed out in the FAQ’s.
Obviously they aren’t controlling for other factors when presenting this data. It would be deceptive do so when, in fact, a post-bac program would be required at those values. However, a couple of points: 1) The higher national GPA/Science GPA data obviously also includes some percentage of Post-Baccs; so the relevant comparison would be whether UChicago includes a LARGER or SMALLER percentage of such, not whether it includes Post-Baccs at all; and 2) Given that it’s UChicago we are discussing, some med school applicants might already be engaging in post-baccalaureate education anyway - not to boost their GPA but to to further their education.
OP can easily contact UCIHP and ask what percentage start the application cycle their junior year vs. senior year or later (because they plan to work or attend another education program after college), what GPA range would require a post-bacc boost, etc.
URM impact on UCIHP’s GPA data: I don’t think there is an impact. First of all, the very notion that there might be is based on faulty reasoning. UChicago shows a higher MCAT as well as lower GPA’s. We know that URM’s on a national average basis show both lower MCAT and lower GPA’s. Therefore, UChicago URM’s admitted to med school are either negligible as a group or follow the same trend as other ethnic/racial groups at UChicago. Second, it appears that as long as UChicago’s racial/ethnic mix of med school admits is representative of the College overall, then there can be no GPA differential due to racial mix. We can see that simply by comparing what the national average GPA’s in the link below would be if adjusted for the the College’s specific racial/ethnic proportions (from College Navigator). Admitted Science GPA’s, adjusted for UChicago’s mix, is the same 3.66 as the national average. Therefore, at least for the Science GPA, UChicago’s mix isn’t different from the national average. According to UCIHP, about 100-125 students apply to med school every year, and somewhere between 80-88% are admitted regularly. That means at least 80 students per year are admitted to med school. Unless the racial/ethnic mix of this group is different from the College overall, the Science GPA differential is due to lower overall grades, not a higher-than-average number of URMs.
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/blog/medical-school-acceptance-rates-by-race
One can do the same analysis with the overall GPA and the MCAT.
Again, hope this is helpful information and analysis to OP’s decision - or anyone else’s for that matter.
I see no shortage of state school graduates doing years of post-bac GPA repair hoping to make it into some medical school somewhere so it’s entirely possible to miss out on a better education and still not get the GPA needed to get in.
Your post #22 is full of all sort of assumptions that you don’t have any basis for and the source you cite is a for-profit company that purports to get students into med school–hardly a reliable source.
Your analysis fails to consider several things including–
- Amcas and medical schools do not use the same definition of URM as you are using. Medical schools consider whether one belongs to a group that is under-represented in medicine (UiM), which is not the same thing as a URM for undergrad admissions.
UiM is defined locally by each individual medical school and it will depend on the local patient population vs the school’s applicant pool. UiM also looks beyond ethnicity when deciding which groups are UiM. LGBTQ+ students are considered UiM at some med schools. Utah’s med school considers many Asian ethnic groups UiM.
- The geographic home state of a med school applicant is a critical factor when analyzing whether a particular GPA/MCAT is competitive for a med school admission. Some states have highly protected in-state admissions; others do not. Students from CA, for example, are highly disadvantaged in med school admissions simple because the state has far too many highly qualified applicants for the limited number of seat available. This coupled with the fact that CA state med school offer only a weak in-state preference in admissions means 2/3rd of CA med school matriculants attend OOS schools. Thus a CA applicant needs to have [a significantly] higher GPA/MCAT to be a successful applicant to med school than an applicant from South Carolina or Kansas. Other applicants are disadvantaged because their home state does not have an in-state public medical school–ME, AK, ID, MT, WY, MT, RI, DC.
For your argument to be true, UC’s geographic diversity would need to match that all med school applicants nationally.
- A number of medical schools are mission-based–dedicated to serving specific patient populations. These include many state public med schools, HBCU medical schools and faith-based med schools (Loma Linda, Liberty University plus Catholic universities’ med schools). On the whole these medical schools are less stat driven in admissions. These schools tend to accept applicants who are a “good fit” over those with stronger stats but a poor fit.
@WayoutwestMom - If you check that “for profit” source you will note that they use AAMC data on GPA and MCAT. I just pulled that source off the internet quick because it had the data I was looking for.
Most analysis makes an assumption or two. A good amount of the “help” that OP has been receiving from others on this thread has been well-meaning but notably absent of concrete data, analysis, or similar tools that can shed light on or assist in a decision.
To answer your specific complaints, obviously each school will define its under-represented pool uniquely but there will be overlaps with traditional definitions. Locales matter, as they do for any admission decision. None of this negates a look at the data. And I certainly hope you are not advising others to dismiss available data just because some schools have a holistic admissions policy!
If I’m not mistaken, OP is at the finalist stage of a few scholarships that would put him on track for pre-med preparation; he has not been awarded those yet (if he has and I missed that then double congrats to OP!!). While OP has been awarded a full ride to UIC, it’s in another area of study other than Pre-Med. (again, my apologies if I’m misremembering or missed a major post). While OP’s prospects look very good, the jury is still out on where he will end up and now he assuredly has one fewer possibility, since a switch to RD at UC signals that he must have received a LL or some other opportunity that he considers more desirable. Hopefully OP used the information he received in this thread to weigh his options and arrive at the correct decision for him. If he’s relieved at this point, that’s very likely a great sign that he did just that. ED isn’t for everyone and OP seems more to have his hopes pinned on med school rather than a particular college. I do tend to agree with Cupcake’s post #23, however. One of the questions that seems prudent for a prospective pre-med to reflect on is whether the host school is still a good fit if for some reason pre-med doesn’t work out or you change your mind about it.
“For your argument to be true, UC’s geographic diversity would need to match that all med school applicants nationally.”
- Per the FAQ's on UCIHP:
"What are the most common medical schools to which UChicago applicants are accepted?
This list will certainly vary from year to year, but we usually see a large number of acceptances at: University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, Northwestern University, New York University, University of California San Francisco, Emory University, University of Michigan, Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Clinic, Tufts University, University of Southern California, Albert Einstein Medical College, and the University of Illinois."
“While OP has been awarded a full ride to UIC, it’s in another area of study other than Pre-Med.”
- Oops sorry: meant UIUC, not UIC.
I don’t understand this…OP would likely be pre-med at UIUC…which is an intent, not a major. OP would have a choice of many majors.
Health professions offices will not be able to provide this information. They may be able to provide raw numbers, but certainly not percentages. There are missing denomimators.
Many, perhaps even most, pre-meds have no contact with the HP office until they request a committee letter of recommendation. Because pre-med is an intention, not any specific major and one that does not require specific support from the school-- not even a HP committee letter if you want to be technical (committee letters are preferred but not required for a med school application), the HP office has no idea exactly how many pre-meds are attending the college. The HP office will not know which students plan to do a post-bacc or even exactly how many plan to apply to med school post graduation.
Students who attend post-baccs generally get their committee LOR–if they choose to use one-- from the post-bacc, not from their undergrad. (This means their data is not available to the undergrad HP office, and often the undergrad HP office is unaware that those individuals even applied med school.)
^ @WayOutWestMom - perusing the UCIHP site fairly quickly, it appears that UChicago college students interested in applying to a health profession grad school (including medical) are invited to participate in a two-year application cycle, the successful completion of which will culminate in the HMC rec. letter. Those a few years out of college may not find the rec. letter all that helpful given their other post grad experience.
https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/uchicago-careers-in/health-professions/applying
Best guess is that post-bacc can be discussed with the preprofessional advisor who has an idea of what sort of GPA would be advisable for that student. UChicago college matriculants or current enrollees who are interested in pursuing a health profession are assigned their preprofessional advisor as soon as they indicate interest. For many that means before they even show up on campus as first years.
“I don’t understand this…OP would likely be pre-med at UIUC…which is an intent, not a major. OP would have a choice of many majors.”
- No doubt. OP was accepted to chemical engineering at UIUC and that doesn't preclude pre-med prep, obviously. But IIRC OP was thinking of switching to another major in order to access a particular lab (for Pre-Med). Not sure if that requires a switch to another college, and not up on the terms of his scholarship/whether funds are attached to a particular course of study or can travel throughout the university. That's where I was coming from. Sorry not to make that clear earlier.
RE: UC’s number of pre-meds.
Per AMCAS data, U Chicago produced 153 med school applicants last year–this number includes both current student applicants and any post-grad applicants no matter how far removed from the applicant is from undergrad.
(AMCAS only captures the name of an applicant’s undergrad. The data does not reflect if the applicant achieved a more advanced degree or attended a post-bacc.)
That number is significantly lower than any of UChicago’s peer schools of equivalent undergrad enrollment size–
Chicago —153
Harvard–289
Vanderbilt–264
JHU–428
WashU–370
Brown–299
Duke–346
Columbia–196
Stanford–230
Notre Dame–260
Smaller academic peer schools with smaller/much smaller undergrad enrollments
Yale (>6000 undergrads)–202
Rice (>4000 undergrads)–196
Dartmouth (~4000 undergrads)–157
Data is for the 2018-19 application cycle.
^ That sounds about right. The UCIHP FAQ said 100-125 every year. Perhaps 2018-19 was larger than usual, or perhaps a good 25 or so applied without the assistance of preprofessional advising. Conventional Wisdom has deemed UChicago to be a hard place for pre-meds; this in combination with the College’s smaller enrollments, only recently reversed in full, worked to keep pre-med application numbers down. We’ll see what happens going forward; the College has really pushed pre-professional prep and Med is no exception. However, not sure that they are making the curriculum any easier. 
Wow. I think the numbers in post #32 confirm that HKim has made the right call.
Really eye opening.
OP probably chose correctly. However, the figures in #32 are not telling me that UChicago college grads with the intent to attend Med School are less competitive than their counterparts in peer schools. That seems quite improbable in view of the rather small differentials in grade point averages between Chicago and the other schools and the quite comparable levels of intelligence and accomplishment of Chicago grads.
The explanation must certainly be that fewer of the kids attracted to UChicago culture are also attracted to the profession of Medicine, not that those so attracted won’t be proportionally successful. In a previous era I knew only a couple of kids at Chicago who aspired to be doctors. I myself toyed briefly with the idea and even took a course in vertebrate biology. This was a departure for me as a literary type, and I quite enjoyed it, in part because unlike literary studies it was so rooted in plain factuality. However, I realized in due course that these and related studies were not the ones near my heart.
I read these statistics as a further confirmation that Chicago is indeed rather different from the peer schools. They should be remembered the next time someone on this board denies that assertion.
What are you talking about? It is unclear that Post #32 supports his decision.
Agree with FStrat and Marlowe. What really matters is the quality of pre-health advising and placement rates. Both are supposed to be quite good-to-excellent and improving. A smaller number of applicants can actually be a good thing as it suggests less of a queue for advising, more personalized attention, etc.
Another thing to remember is that UChicago’s enrollment in the Fall of 2015 (around the time that some in that 2018-19 cohort was just entering college) was under 6,000. The entering class this fall will be joining a college community of about 7,000 total which is where the College is expected to hold steady for awhile. The Classes of '21 - '23 had an average of about 225-250 MORE enrollees than did the Class of '19. So the number of med school applications is very likely to increase. We won’t fully see that impact until at minimum the 2023 cycle (which will include some from Class of '23 and others from earlier larger classes who gapped a year or two). It might even take longer. And in the meantime, peers could be upping their numbers as well. It’s all good, as long as the support and the placement is where it’s supposed to be for any of these excellent schools.
BTW, happened to be on the Columbia website today and noticed that their average “successful” GPA/sGPA for admission to allopathic med school is 3.59 and 3.55, respectively. That’s lower than UChicago! (3.66/3.58s in 2019).
@FStratford , while we know HKim is a great student, it’s entirely possible that he would have a hard time maintaining a high GPA at a notoriously hard school. He needs a high GPA for med school. That’s what we’ve all been talking about this whole thread.