<p>When a medical school specifically requests 1 or 2 letters of recommendation from a science faculty member, do they consider only biology, chemistry, and physics? Or would they also consider letters from faculty of courses taken in the Department of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention such as “Environmental Health in the Community”, “Global Health”, “Health Behavior Research Methods”, and “Biological and Behavioral Basis of Disease”? Would public health courses count as “science”?</p>
<p>I’m specifically wondering about schools like Harvard and Duke which ask for 2 letters from faculty “in the sciences.”</p>
<p>I’d say anything that counts toward your science GPA would count as a science class in their eyes. sGPA=bio, chem, math, physics. In my experience (I took a handful of public health etc classes), the courses you listed are more often part of the school of health professions and not really a science class. As an applicant, I’d personally be wary of listing anything other than a hard science class as something acceptable for a science LOR. What department are those classes from? If bio basis of dz is a bio class, I could see that working; otherwise, I don’t think the others would count.</p>
<p>Certainly could use those PH etc profs for the other LORs!</p>
<p>The Global Health course was an upper level Biological Science Department class. The biologic basis of disease class was in the Department of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (which is an undergraduate major in the School of Medicine).</p>
<p>The bottom line is that all the hard science classes were very large with >200 students. They were also typically team taught by 2 - 3 professors, so it is a small amount of contact with the professor (about 1 month) even attending office hours every time. On the other hand, the Department of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention classes were small classes with lots of interaction with the professor.</p>
<p>If “Health Promotion and Disease Prevention” classes don’t count as a science letter of recommendation, would they count as a specifically “non-science” faculty recommendation that many schools ask for? Or is this risky in that it might be subjective as to whether these are science classes or not? My daughter’s major is in this department, so many of her classes and the professors she knows best are in this department.</p>
<p>Hmmm. Sounds like getting the traditional rec letter from the hard sciences profs will be annoying, given that they’re all team-taught. As far as I’ve been told, the purpose of the science prof LORs is to compare the applicant to other students in the course and comment about their critical thinking/knowledge acquisition/etc skills when it comes to new and challenging material. Even though global health was in the bio dept, I wonder how much of it was really a “hard science” class; my senior seminar, for example, was in the bio dept and focused on the global health implications and trends of influenza pandemics, focusing specifically on 1918 and 2009 H1N1–so lots about global and public health, but not so much about complicated biological principles. I wouldn’t have chosen my senior seminar prof for a science LOR. At the same time, sounds like she’s having trouble finding a suitable pair of science recs. I don’t really know what to say about that one!</p>
<p>In my mind, the purpose of the LORs was for people who knew me well to go to bat for me in terms of med school admissions. I wanted people who knew me from a variety of perspectives–academic, community service, leadership, employment, research, health care, etc–and made sure to choose some who could speak to multiple aspects of me/my personality/my candidacy/etc. I didn’t want them to “just” read my CV and my personal statement and then write some canned letter about how I’m a great student with lots of potential or whatever. So, if the HPDP department profs know your daughter well and would be able to write persuasively about her performance in classes, her dedication to the concepts of the dept (ie health promotion and disease prevention), the things she does to complement her education, etc etc then I personally think those people would be PERFECT for the job.</p>
<p>Other things to keep in mind:
Will she be applying to her school’s SOM? If so, I imagine a particularly strong letter from people that SOM’s adcom already know would be beneficial–another (small) reason to get that LOR.</p>
<p>2) Is there a limit to the LORs she can submit to her committee? Generally speaking, a committee letter “overrides” the individual school’s letter requirement–which means if the school says “send 2 sci prof LORs and 1 non-sci prof LOR” you can (and should!) send in a committee letter/packet to satisfy that requirement. Now, the committee probably has its own rules about submitting letters from profs to it; mine, for example, required at least 2 sci and 1 nonsci, but applicants could submit up to 10 if they wanted. The committee reviewed all the submitted letters and interviewed the applicant before compiling a committee letter packet, which consisted of a letter about the committee’s thoughts about the candidate as well as excerpts from the submitted letters AND the original letters themselves. I believe this practice is relatively standard.</p>
<p>The point is, even if she (unfortunately) ends up with weak letters from these practically nonexistent profs, if she plays her cards right she should be able to dilute those with particularly strong letters form other people–depending on her committee’s rules.</p>