I have nine days to make the decision of a lifetime.
My two options are UGA with the Honors Program vs Mercer University’s Guaranteed Admissions Program to Medical School (8 years but ED to Mercer Med is required)
The reason I can make my decision is because I am pretty determined in not attending Mercer for Medical school on the basis that I want to go to a more elite and higher status medical school. However I know this program is extremely rare (10 students/year) and a great opportunity. I have my heart set on being a doctor but I don’t know the right path to achieve the goal. Should I commit myself to Mercer for 8 years or take the risk with UGA? Someone else said to take the option of going to Mercer and after receiving my MCAT scores, judge whether I should stick with Mercer, or attempt to not apply ED to Mercer (with guaranteed acceptance) and look at other medical school.
Your friend’s advice on attending Mercer and seeing if you want to finish the med school there seems to make a lot of sense to me. You keep your options open that way.
It’s not that I don’t want to do it. But when your overwhelmed with options it’s hard to make the right choice. I didn’t really think I would be one of the ten student picked for this program. But now that I have been, I have to take in to serious consideration all my options. I know it is very hard to choose between these two options.
Go to Mercer. Once you have your MCAT results, decide on what you want to do.
If after 3 years you’re still sure you don’t want to attend Mercer med school, then don’t apply. Students change their minds. It happens. You can’t “be made” to attend Mercer for 8 years, just for 4 years.
Guaranteed medical school admission programs typically have conditions to retain the guarantee. Mercer is no exception, in that the student needs to maintain a pre-med-worthy GPA and get a pre-med-worthy MCAT score, among other things: https://medicine.mercer.edu/admissions/md/enhancement-programs/guaranteed/ . However, a student who does keep the guarantee won’t have to go through the stressful medical school application and interview process at a whole bunch of medical schools.
A student looking at such programs should consider the costs of both the undergraduate and medical school, and the resulting total amount of debt at the end. If the debt is too high, it may limit the choices available (e.g. may pressure the new physician into chasing the highest paid specialty rather than a lower paid one that s/he really wants to do, or may create pressure to do some things that some may consider ethically questionable; see Doctored).
