<p>basically i have been accepted to Duke university (likely letter) as a premed student…i am sitll waiting to hear from hyps…i also have been designated as a meyerhoff scholar at the univ of Md- baltimore county…now for those of you who dont know about meyerhoff it is program designed for URM’s to help promote in grad/med school…it is really great program that offers great advising, collobarative learning and what they call intrusive advising where they basically follow you around to make sure you are staying on track…another important detail is that their students enjoy a 90% acceptance rate to grad/medical school…infact they have more students at harvard medical school than any other universsity other than harvard itself…im having a difficult time deciding whether or not to enroll in this program or to accept admission to the school i have dreamt of going to all my life…HELP!! (sakky your advice especially would be greatly appreciated!!)</p>
<p>This is a question I have had pitched to me before, and unfortunately, I don’t think I or anybody else is really qualified to answer that question for you. Only you can really answer than question for yourself. It usually boils down to a simple question - how badly do you nee the money? Unfortunately I don’t think anybody here is qualified to answer that question for you.</p>
<p>What I can do is that I can offer you a framework for answering that question. #1 - when you are talking specifically about med-school and grad-school admissions, the prestige of your undergraduate school does not seem to be a large factor. It’s a minor boost at best. What matters more are your grades, your test-scores, your EC’s, your rec’s, your essays, and your interview. PhD programs are heavily weighted on your EC’s, especially any undergraduate research you’ve done, as well as your rec’s, along with GRE scores and your grades in your intended PhD discipline. </p>
<p>{For example, let’s say that you want to try to major in electrical engineering, but then you do poorly in your EE weeder courses, so you shift your major to English, and you do extremely well in that major, and so now you want to get a PhD in English. The PhD adcom will not hold your bad grades in EE against you, because they have nothing to do with English. It’s an entirely different story if you want to go to med-school. Med-school adcoms will hold those bad EE grades against you, and can easily decide to reject you because of them. Why is that? I don’t know. Not only does EE not have much of anything to do with med-school, but you decided not to major in EE anyway, so why should the med-schools care what grades you got in those EE courses? But, that’s the ‘game’ of med-school admissions.} </p>
<p>I would also extend caution to any quoted numbers of X% from such-and-such program get into medical school or graduate school. I don’t know anything about the Meyerhoff program, but I would say that there are a lot of programs out there that artificially boost their statistics by either flunking out/expelling those students who aren’t good, or simply only allowing their best students to apply to med-school/graduate-school in the first place (usually by refusing to write the required ‘Dean’s Certification Letter’ that med-schools/grad-schools demand). You can obviously get very high success % rates by playing these games - if you only allow your very best students to complete the program and/or apply to grad/med-school, then those students will obviously enjoy a very high success rate. Again, I am not saying that Meyerhoff plays these games, but what I am saying is that a lot of programs do play these games, so it behooves you to find out if that is the case for this program. </p>
<p>But again, I would say that it is really up to you. The best thing I can tell you is to choose the option that allows you to live with no regrets. If you choose Duke, or HYPS are you always going to be wondering what would have happened if you had gone to Meyerhoff? If you choose Meyerhoff, are you always going to be wondering what would have happened if you had chosen Duke or HYPS? Only you can answer that question. You will have to go to a room with a mirror, and look at yourself, and basically have a sit-down conversation with yourself.</p>