Direct Admit vs. Accelerated vs. Traditional

mcat2
Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:27:57 +0000

This may be an interesting question: What are the percentage of students in the biology department are premeds at your school? In freshmen year as well as at the end of junior year? (let’s exclude those in the evolution/ecology bio to simplify the discussion here.)

When DS was a frshman, some CCer at his school posted that her estimate was about 80 % for the bio majors (on the molecular bio side.) I still do not know whether this is true as of today. I think she also said that for the biochem majors, it is between 40 % and 60% (I forgot the details.) It was also lower for the BME majors (which is a much smaller department, in his year at least)

In DS’s year, I think there were about 200-210 med school applicants from his college. Slightly over one half were alumni applicants year after year, I think. So only about, say, 95 were applicants applying in the summer between junior and senior. I could not believe 80 of them were bio majors (about 100 molecular bio majors in his class, I think.) I would guess about only 40-50 of the bio majors applying without a gap year (just because bio majors are more dedicated premeds as a group), and the rest applying after at least a gap year.