Is Undergrad Really That Important?

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
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<p>Shows how naive many people are.</p>

<p>I go to LSU.</p>

<p>I know several people who have gotten into Vanderbilt and Baylor. Two of my friends last year got into JHU and UPenn MD/pHD programs. My closest friend, both of his brothers have attended/are currently attending WashU.</p>

<p>And think about it like this, these are just the people I KNOW. There are several people who go elsewhere.</p>

<p>Another one of my friends is in the app cycle right now with me, here’s what she has done: [MDapplicants.com</a> - View Profile](<a href=“http://mdapplicants.com/profile.php?id=10813]MDapplicants.com”>http://mdapplicants.com/profile.php?id=10813)</p>

<p>If you have the GPA and the MCAT to match, LSU as a university gives you just as much chances in EC department with it being a large university with research opportunities. Plus, it’s a fun university. :)</p>

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<p>^^wow, those are amazing stats. btw, I am really impressed that a mathematics major basically destroyed the BS section of the MCAT. Is it relatively easy, or did she study a lot? or is she just crazy smart? lol</p>

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<p>obviously a good undergrad is better than a state school. more opportunities. more challenging thus better MCAT. it’s probably harder on your GPA but hey. 3.6 from Columbia beats a 3.8, 3.9 from a state. just look at how many people get accepted from top 20 schools into prestigious med schools. then look at how many get in from ohio state.</p>

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<p>^ 3.6 at Columbia doesn’t beat a 3.9 at any decent university. if Columbia is sending a lot of people to top med schools, it’s based on high MCAT scores and more people applying.</p>

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<p>would a 3.6 from a top 20 school beat a 3.8 from say UTexas or Baylor?</p>

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<p>Smart and studied a lot. :slight_smile: </p>

<p>Plus, she has some pretty cool ECs that I’m not going to disclose for sake of anonymity on her part.</p>

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<p>Are you sure about that? I tend to believe that 3.9 from a state beats 3.6 from Columbia, assuming that everything else is equal. Although there are indeed more people from the top schools who get accepted into prestigious med schools, I think the factors (MCAT, ECs) besides the GPA are at play here.</p>

<p>If what ChoklitRain said (that is, “3.6 at Columbia doesn’t beat a 3.9 at any decent university.”) is true, this begs a question:</p>

<p>Statistically speaking, is it easier to get 3.6 at Columbia than 3.9 at a state (a decent one) or the other way around? Here, let us assume that the stat (SAT or ACT, GPA) of the students we are talking about are at the 50 percentile of all the students who are admitted to Columbia. In other words, will most medical schools (excluding the top-20 ones) mostly likely reward or “punish” such students who chose to go to a prestigious school just because he gets a 3.6 there?</p>

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<p>blieux_monkey could you check you PMs please? I sent you one with a bunch of questions. lol, sorry for hassling you haha</p>

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<p>I’d tend to think a 3.9 would be better than a 3.6 from a top school, but what about when you get into a difference of 0.2 with the same MCAT scores?</p>

<p>And what is the GPA is the same, but the MCAT for the state school student is 3-4 points higher?</p>

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I think you are seriously misinformed. Are you even in college yet?</p>

<p>“State school” and “good undergrad” are not mutually exclusive. MCAT scores, GPAs, and medical school acceptance rates are functions of the student, not the school. Of course more people will probably get in from Columbia as opposed to Ohio State. It’s a selection bias; there are more strong students at Columbia than at Ohio State. This isn’t an argument for Columbia or against Ohio State. It’s an argument for strong students. The idea is that somebody with a high GPA and MCAT will stand a better shot at being accepted to medical school, regardless of school or major. A “3.6 from Columbia” is absolutely not going to get brownie points over a 3.9 from somewhere else. The idea that somebody would have a 0.3 grade point difference is ridiculous. A 3.9 at one school would probably have a 3.9 or close to it at another school.</p>

<p>Moreover, data actually indicate that a lot of higher ranked schools tend to be grade inflated (thanks to BDM for this):
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/3365648-post29.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/3365648-post29.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>The discussion here lacks subtlety on both sides. Undergrad matters a little, but it isn’t necessarily the name-branding of it that matters. </p>

<p>1.) Excellent undergraduate programs provide excellent opportunities - opportunities that are technically available at larger schools (like LSU, or for that matter UC Berkeley) but are difficult to find and obtain.</p>

<p>2.) Being surrounded by talented peers also helps. Of course you can make contacts in medical school, but you’re still robbing yourself of four years worth of contacts. And you need some of those to write you letters of recommendation to make it into graduate school in the first place.</p>

<p>3.) The main point here is that if you go to a program like LSU, you will have to be one of the dozen or so most driven students in your entire university. You will have to be studying when everybody else thinks it’s ridiculous. You will have to have an MCAT score relatively high enough that it is embarrassing and will make you want to hide it from your friends, even your well-meaning ones.</p>

<p>If you are at a top school, your friends will be similarly talented and driven. They will help encourage you to perform at your best, and if anything they will express disapproval if they see you slacking off. This was very important for me, and it is very important for most people. Maybe you’re the exception.</p>

<p>Can you do this? I certainly could not have: the ostracization would simply have been too high. It would have made undergrad miserable. Most people cannot. But maybe you are the exception, since obviously some exceptions do exist.</p>

<p>4.) People who are trying to quantify the effect of a top-tier college education are ignoring the situational differences here. In general, I’ve found that name-branding matters only in situations where the candidate *already *has a high MCAT score.</p>

<p>High MCAT/High GPA: No need for top school
Low/Low: Top school doesn’t help
High/Low: Top-tier university helps explain why obviously bright student has poor grades; at a low-ranked university, you just assume he’s a slacker
Low/High: Again, top school doesn’t help.</p>

<p>So it doesn’t make any sense to suggest that it’s worth 0.3 GPA or 3 MCAT; it isn’t that simple. It’s situationally-dependent.</p>

<p>5.) And, again, it isn’t name-branding that actually does the work. Even after controlling for statistics, a couple high-ranked schools seem to do a little worse than lower-ranked ones. It is about the other opportunities, the peers, the advising.</p>

<p>6.) College is about more than getting into graduate school.
A.) For one thing, very few students stick to their plans. If you are blindly focused on one goal, it means you might get stuck without other options if you change your mind. Or if you are forced to change your mind.
B.) For another thing, college is also supposed to prepare you for graduate school – not just get you in.
C.) Finally, even if you get in and attend graduate school eventually, college is also supposed to be fun. Maybe you’ll like LSU; maybe you won’t. But you cannot ignore this factor.
D.) If you insist on being totally mercenary about it, going to a fun college helps you excel there. But more importantly, having fun in college is also an innate good.</p>

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<p>GS: I believe that link indicates that top-ranked schools tend to be deflated.</p>

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<p>My bad, you’re right. I just linked to it without rereading it and remembered incorrectly.</p>

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<p>From this, I would infer that students should do whatever they can to increase their odds of getting a high MCAT, no matter what college they go to, and no matter what major they are in.</p>

<p>Thanks for the insightful post.</p>

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<p>Could you clarify what you mean by opportunities? As in what kind of opportunities?</p>

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<p>While I’ll disagree on what I consider an exaggeration of being ostracized for making good grades/high mcat/studying, I will agree with what I think it’s probably the intent of this point.</p>

<p>That I think it’s a good thing to try and surround yourself with people who have similar ambitions. I think that is the purpose of many school’s residential colleges and honors programs. I encourage those programs (as long as it’s not a detriment to your GPA) because it puts you in an environment where there are people that make you want to push yourself to do just as well, if not better. And, yes, you are probably more likely to find those people at a top university as opposed to a place like LSU.</p>

<p>I agree with the rest of post.</p>

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<p>While I’m at it, I’ll throw out why I think Top schools send more people to medical schools than do low ranked ones.</p>

<p>The people who get in to top schools as a whole are people who are more driven, already do well on standardized tests, and know what it takes to make good grades. To me, it seems that you are going to have a higher portion of people at these schools who will continue to do those things and thus lead to a good medical school application and acceptance into medical school.</p>

<p>There are of course exceptions to every rule.</p>

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<p>I think it is generally agreed that 3-4 points on MCAT are worth a lot more than the school name. Some CCers claimed that the school name is worth about 0.1 or 0.15 GPA, but I do not know how much the school’s name is worth in terms of MCAT (My guess is 1 point at most.) I rarely see any applicants with a high MCAT struggle to get into a medical school, but I see applicants from a brand name school with a low MCAT struggle during the application cycle. (Granted, percentage-wise, more applicants from top schools apply with a higher MCAT.)</p>

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<p>3-4 points on the MCAT or 0.3 on the GPA are HUGE differences so it’s unfair to expect a school name to override those factors.</p>

<p>Here’s where I think going to a top university helps the most:</p>

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<li><p>For the students who are aiming to get into top med schools. Sure, they may have a 4.0 if they had gone to their state school and instead they have a 3.8 because they chose Harvard or Cornell. That’s okay because at the top of the GPA spectrum 0.1-0.2 on the GPA has little effect on admissions PLUS you get the added bonus of the school name. Let’s face it, many top med schools are rather snobby. Of course, if you have a 4.0/40 from LSU, you’ll get the interview/acceptance regardless. Where it starts to matter is when you have a 3.8/35 from LSU and you have to battle all those 3.7/35’s from top 20 universities (and there are A LOT OF THEM; Cornell alone generated ninety 35+ scorers from solely its senior applicants, not even including its alumni applicants) for an acceptance to a top med school.</p></li>
<li><p>If you end up with a high MCAT/low grades, which happens quite often for students at top universities. High MCAT, lowish grades (3.4-3.5 range), with a good school name tends to do decent actually from what I’ve seen. The students who struggle the most in getting acceptances are actually the high GPA (3.9), low MCAT (below 29) people, which happens far too often at students who went to less rigorous schools. Often those people tend to end up at their state schools while the 3.5/36 people end up at mid-tier med schools (and I even saw a few Top 20 acceptances with those stats).</p></li>
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<p>The kinds of students who are hurt the most by going to a top university are usually the borderline applicants. They would’ve had a 3.6/30 if they had gone to their local state school and would’ve at the very least qualified for their state med school. But, now, they have a 3.4/30 from a top 20 university and they’re in danger of not getting in anywhere at all.</p>

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<p>Opportunities include things like internships, research, certain types of specific volunteering projects.</p>

<p>For example, Yale’s Elmseed fund, a microfinance group that sustains projects in Latin America (I think). Or working for a professor at Harvard’s Petrie-Flom bioethics center. Or doing your photography project among clinical trial patients at Duke’s hospital under the supervision of a pediatrician who also happens to be a widely published photographer.</p>

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<p>You should google “Dr. Q John Hopkins”. Started at Community College, transferred to UC Berkeley then Harvard Med.
Many comments on this thread are erroneous. First off, you will not “breeze through pre-med” at any high quality university. Next, the idea that a 4.0 at LSU is better than a 3.5 at Columbia may or may-not be correct. The ultimate equalizer is the MCAT.
As far as I know from my career in higher education, the only medical school admissions committee that has a formal grade adjustment factor is UCSD.</p>