I was accepted to the LSU (Louisiana State University) Fastpath program, which admits 10 students every year. The Fastpath program allows you to skip 1 year of college and join the med school and grad school after 3 yrs of college.
My goal is to major in bio/cs and get an MD/PhD.
I was also accepted to Umiami, and I’m waiting to hear from Duke.
Should I go to LSU and attend the program, or go to Umiami/Duke if I get in?
You need to maintain a 3.75 GPA in your bachelor’s degree study to continue on to the MD/PhD part:
http://www.bae.lsu.edu/file/bae/file/BAE_FastPath_Brochure_July15.pdf
Also, admission to the MD/PhD part of the program is competitive and requires a high MCAT score in any case:
http://www.bae.lsu.edu/academics/undergraduate/fastpath/faq
Consider potential costs (undergraduate + medical school) carefully, since medical school can be very expensive.
I am not a huge fan of BS/MD programs but I am definitely opposed to the idea of a BS/MD/PhD program. First, I would wager that most students don’t really need an MD and a PhD to do what they want to do. (If you want to do research, you can get a PhD. If you want to do research with the option for clinical practice, you can get an MD and do a postdoc in research. You could even get an MD and then get an MS in clinical laboratory research. There’s not really much need to do an MD/PhD, especially since even if you do one you’d still need to do a postdoc anyway to have a research career.)
Second, you should select your PhD program on the basis of your research interests and fit with the department, but as a senior in high school you really have little sense of what your research interests will be by the time you’re a junior or senior in college. Not to mention that if academia (being a researcher in a university setting) is your goal, you should also be selecting your PhD program based on its reputation in the field, your potential advisor’s reputation, and its placement record. I just can’t imagine that making a 10-year commitment to a very specific path of education at a very specific department is a wise thing to do at age 17.
Also, I cannot see how this program can possibly take 10 years. The BS is supposed to take 4 years - the program says it on the flyer.
• MD: During fourth year of BS, students apply for the Early Decision Program at LSUHSC-NO Medical School
So you aren’t really saving any time on the BS. (In fact, you have to take an average of 16 credits per semester to graduate on time.) Also, if you have to apply, it’s not really a combination program, is it?
The flyer also indicates that the MD part is still 4 years - you do two years of med school, then the PhD, and then two more years of med school.
So 4 years BS + 4 years MD = 8 years. The flyer says the whole program is supposed to take 10 years, which means they are telling you that the PhD part should take 2 years. Poppycock! Even if your department counted 100% of your med school classes towards the PhD (which, haha, they won’t) you’d still have the engineering coursework to take, plus exams and a dissertation to write. At * bare minimum* that would take 3 years; more realistically it would take around 4. So really you are only shaving about one year off the PhD/MD part - and potentially no years at all - because most PhD/MD programs take around 8 years to finish (assuming you are moving quickly and nothing bad happens and your experiments for your dissertation go exactly as planned).
(The website for the medical school seems to indicate that you would apply for the med school in your sophomore year of college, potentially beginning it in your fourth year. So 3 years of BS + 4 years of MD + I guess what they assume is 3 years of PhD. I still call poppycock, because how are you going to complete 130 credits of undergraduate engineering courses in three years? You’d have to be taking 21 credits a semester, or take classes every summer. And even if you could do that, you are still killing yourself in undergrad to at best shave 2 years off the whole process.)
It also looks like you still have to apply for the MD/PhD program and qualify. The program’s so new that they can’t even tell you what the MCAT score will be, just that it will be “high.” Tuition exemption is not guaranteed, which is a bit unusual since the one benefit of MD/PhD programs is often that your fellowship covers your MD tuition as well as the PhD. So where’s the benefit? You could just go to UMiami or Duke and apply to an MD/PhD program in your fourth year there.
In fact, that’s what I think you should do, assuming it’s affordable to you. Even if you did go to LSU I wouldn’t do this program.
My advise would be go where you would be happiest. Have you visited each of the schools? Did you like LSU? Our state is cutting a ton of funding to higher education and LSU will be affected.