Elon Honors Program or Furman for pre-med

hornet
Fri, 28 Mar 2014 05:18:28 +0000

Both of my children turned down UNC (the younger is a student at Furman). UNC is a good school but the the opportunities to do meaningful research with individual faculty members as an undergraduate is more difficult to secure simply due to the large number of students and the fact that most faculty are mentoring graduate student research and simply don’t have the time.

Academically strong small colleges provide the student with the opportunity to have individual lab stations (not shared with a group of four like most large state schools such as UNC). The faculty at Furman are very involved with students. The 77% acceptance rate for 2012 was, I believe, an attempt on Furman’s part to bring in more diversity (in terms of talents, region of the country, etc) in the student body. Many students and faculty were unhappy with the compromises (in terms of qualifications of applicants) made to do this The acceptance rate dropped significantly for the class entering in 2013 as Furman retooled some of its practices from the previous year’s experiment.

BTW- UNC posts the undergraduate origins of its entering medical class each year. There is no advantage to attending UNC for med school.Here’s a link to the undergraduate origins of this year’s class: http://www.med.unc.edu/admit/about-unc/our-students/demographics/demographics#schools

First year med students came from Western Carolina, UNC-Charlotte, App State as well as Haravrd and John’s Hopkins