Every volunteer/work opportunity, that you do in college, counts towards your patient skills background.
Every language that you speak needs to be native proficient. We were fortunate that our daughter is excellent in her Spanish skills. She reads/writes and translates well.
Your English skills should be strong and exceptional because they expect that to be your minimum. I don’t want to get into it but physicians do take out malpractice insurance Because patients sue for the craziest reasons.
Re cars: At all three of my children’s colleges, the freshmen were not allowed to have cars.
Land is expensive. There was no space to park them at any of their three schools.
Upper division students may have jobs that require independent transportation. Even then, you have to have a parking permit via lottery.
Re MEAL Plan: If you attend the university where you will not be staying on campus, but living at home, you don’t need to buy a meal plan because you’ll be eating at home. It will save money. But if you want an occasional bowl of noodles at your commuter campus you’ll be eating on campus.
Will your parents pay for your meal plan, in addition to the 20k they will provide for tuition? Since presumably they are paying for your food now, it won’t actually be an additional “cost” for them.
In fact, since colleges charge separately for tuition and room and board, maybe they will pay 20k for tuition plus the standard charges for room and board? (together, the latter two often run around 17k for the academic year, although it completely depends on the college, so look it up for the schools of interest).
For schools that do allow cars, there will be fees for a parking permit. Again, depending on the school, this could be anywhere from approximately $100 - $1000+ per year.
Do you think they would respond to the proposal that it is no extra money for them, since they are paying for your food costs now?
Perhaps you could print out the Cost of Attendance information that colleges provide, so that they can see what the going cost is for various schools. Maybe they just don’t know what US colleges cost.
Or…are you Canadian? (I thought there was a post above that said that was possible? If so, Canadian colleges are often much less expensive than US colleges. @DadTwoGirls has a lot of information on that.
Yeah, I think if I tell them that they probably pay the same, if not more for buying food for me, maybe they’ll agree. I’m Eastern European (international), but i live in the US, not Canada.
Also, when we were figuring out what we could afford for colleges, we took into account the amounts we were spending in high school for extra curriculars. Colleges offer tons of EC-like activities mostly for free, so we allocated the money we were spending for high school ECs to what we could spend for college, since we weren’t spending it for HS activities any more. Of course, each family’s spending on HS EC’s varies, but if yours is a high amount, that might be something to consider asking your parents about as well.
I will run the NPCs, but my parents are very busy as of recently, and as I said before they’re very reluctant about giving me any information about their finances.
Yeah, I’ll ask them to do that. As far as I know, they don’t have any money in retirement plans, investments, etc. They have everything in their savings.
As mentioned above your best bet is Alabama plus Ohio schools.
Research with Ohio private schools can you get discount similar to Ohio residents (some do). However, given very small total amount (tuition+ room and board) you are looking for, it is going to be very difficult to find. Please reconsider premed (it is going to be extremely expensive). As you already were told by many people, you will have no opportunity to work until you will get green card, and no work physically possible in medical school.
Anything in regular savings will be considered money they can use to pay for college. Most of our money (besides about $100,000 we have earmarked for a kitchen remodel which is taking forever to get started) is in retirement savings so it doesn’t affect financial aid (which we don’t get anyway).