<p>^I agree with this completely.</p>
<p>It’s not that MIT is a bad place for premeds per se, it’s just a bad place for cutthroat grade-grubbers. I don’t mean to make that sound like a value judgment, but I’m another former non-premed life sciences major who disliked stereotypical premeds but loved my premed friends who acted more like the rest of us.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There seems to be a contradiction of sorts, between what is presented as a “stereotypical premed” (bad) and the “non-sterotypical” premed (good) and chances of admission to med school. I think this type of characterization is somewhat simplistic and condescending to those that have a true desire to become physicians or physician scientists. </p>
<p>The stereotypical premed is presented as being obsessed with grades and taking only courses that improve their GPA and participating in activities that look good to med school admission. </p>
<p>The non-stereotypical premed is presented as somebody who will pick any class without regard for difficulty and engage in extra-curricular activities irrelevant to med schools. </p>
<p>I would venture to guess that the second group will actually find it very difficult to be admitted to medical schools. They will find themselves at a serious disadvantage in terms of preparation, demonstrated interest in the profession. Again, the data seems to support the fact that those students at MIT that do not take the med school preparation seriously will do poorly. </p>
<p>Partly because of MIT’s flexibility and absence of weeder classes, it may give students the false impression that you can “wing it”, pick any class and get in to med school without doing anything special. That is simply not true. </p>
<p>Med school admission is very much GPA driven. If your GPA drops below a certain level, your chances of admission go down dramatically. Even more so if you are interested in becoming a physician-scientist and enter into one of the more prestigious MD/PhD programs. Carefully planning your workload so as to not take on more more than you can reasonably manage becomes essential, especially at a place like MIT with no easy majors or cream-puff classes. That is the first thing your MIT premed advisor will discuss in reviewing your class schedule. It is completely unfair to try to compare a premed at MIT with the typical engineering major for whom GPA is largely irrelevant for grad school admission or professional employment. Google won’t really care if you have a B average, med schools will. </p>
<p>Demonstrated interest in patient care is also an essential element of an application. I seriously doubt that many premeds will go through the hundreds of required volunteer hours at hospitals just because it looks good on an application. They will be spending the next ten years upon graduation from MIT laboring in hospitals for nearly no pay and should pick another career path if they are there to make money. </p>
<p>Premeds also have to meet a variety of course pre-requisites, prepare for the MCATs in addition to any regular requirements for graduation. In that sense, their workload is not very different from that of a double-major. They have a lot on their plate as it is. It would be nice if they could pick some exciting classes outside of their major, possibly cross-register at Harvard for a humanities class or even spend a semester abroad. It is all possible, but again requires discipline and planning. </p>
<p>I believe MIT offers extraordinary opportunities to future physicians to engage in advanced biomedical and clinical research, volunteer and shadow physicians at leading hospitals in the region and build a broad scientific base. But MIT does not offer any magic bullet, (neither does Harvard or Yale) that will get them into medical school without meeting all the established requirements. An MIT education can be great asset to a physician involved in an increasingly technical healthcare environment. </p>
<p>If some students at MIT appear to resent the “stereotypical premed”, the blame should be placed on the medical schools that set up the guidelines for admission, not on the students that are required to follow them. MIT premeds are as intensely dedicated and passionate as any other students. They can share in the collaborative spirit, be innovative and fulfill the mission of the Institute in the field of clinical medicine just as others do in the fields of engineering, science, economics, business or law.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Oh, trust me, I largely blame the med schools. It doesn’t make it any easier, though, to deal with certain behaviors of the “stereotypical” crowd.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And I feel for them. But this is why I said in the first place that MIT is not always the best place for premeds. Its culture is not compatible with the expectations of med schools. Of course, the large majority of the premeds manage to triumph anyway, as you pointed out yourself.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>What, people who actually choose classes to learn something and challenge themselves intellectually rather than to maximize GPA won’t be academically prepared? I think that if you make it through MIT and take all the premed requirements, you are certainly academically prepared for med school. As for the activities, nobody’s saying that anyone <em>shouldn’t</em> do med school-relevant activities, just that they should do them out of interest. I have a (premed) friend who’s a MedLink, and the MedLinks who are just doing it to impress med schools really annoy her. The MIT EMS webpage specifically says that they don’t want people who are just doing it to pad their resumes.</p>
<p>The non-stereotypical premeds that I know are by and large very serious scholars. I think it’s condescending to <em>them</em> to say otherwise.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, yes, I completely agree! There is a contradiction! The contradiction is that med school admissions committees have very different priorities from what MIT culture does. That’s why I said what I said in the first place about it not always being the best place for premeds. But you’re very much right in that it has a lot to offer premeds in terms of opportunities. And again, like you said yourself, the vast majority of them <em>will</em> get in to med school, even with that contradiction.</p>
<p>Really, Mollie summarized it well:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I love how this completely turned into a discussion solely about MIT.</p>
<p>
I think that what Jessie and I are largely opposing here is making choices solely for the purpose of getting into medical school, rather than making choices that happen to facilitate getting into medical school.</p>
<p>I feel that it’s the same opposition all of us raise when a freshman comes to CC and says “MIT is my dream school; tell me the precise extracurricular activities and classes in which I should participate in high school in order to guarantee that I’ll get in.” In that case, all of us gently remind students that they should make the choices they want to make first and those that make MIT happy second. </p>
<p>I think it’s the same in the case of premeds. I applaud students who want to get into medical school, and who do things they want to do in order to achieve their goals. But I don’t think that all premeds at MIT (or anywhere else) do that. I think there are many students who let the goal of medical school eclipse absolutely every other motivation in their lives, and I think that’s the motivation that’s out of line with the general culture of MIT.</p>
<p>…and on another note, if anybody wants to turn this back into an MIT vs. Harvard discussion, perhaps he or she should ask a question we can answer?</p>
<p>
Well, this <em>is</em> the MIT forum, after all. The OP has posted a similar thread on the Harvard forum and is getting Harvard-centric answers there. No surprise.</p>
<p>Yes - I posted on both, hoping to here from both sides of the sword. And it has worked. Thanks everybody!</p>
<p>I hear that Harvard is putting a lot of money into their engineering program currently. Does anyone have any information or sources about their exact plan? Does anything feel that this might be beneficial for an engineering student at Harvard because you will be one of the firsts? Or is that horribly bad?</p>
<p>Well, my feeling is that Rome wasn’t built in a day – sure, Harvard’s throwing money at engineering, but that doesn’t mean that the program will improve on a four-year timescale.</p>
<p>MIT is already a great place for engineers, and that’s not going to change.</p>
<p>"Does anything feel that this might be beneficial for an engineering student at Harvard because you will be one of the firsts? "</p>
<p>I don’t see why this is an advantage.</p>
<p>It’s not like you’re getting in on the ground floor of a new startup company.</p>
<p>Sigh. I was only verbalizing a mere observation (whereas I, personally, am more interested in MIT). I apologize.</p>
<p>The Crimson recently reported that two thirds of Harvard engineering majors drop out for some non-science major before graduation. Less than 40 engineers actually graduate yearly. The article stated that the limited time for socializing, large impersonal classes, heavy workload and absence of collaborative culture in engineering and science was to blame.</p>
<p>LOL at “not enough time for socializing” and “heavy workload”</p>
<p>That sounds like a problem with its students and not the program.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Strange. I was under the impression that science and engineering disciplines are normally considered very collaborative relative to the humanities. And MIT, which is three-quarters science and engineering majors, is a very collaborative culture. That sounds like an issue with those subjects at Harvard, rather than in general.</p>
<p>You.re right. The Crimson mentioned the issue was specific to Harvard and that some students were trying to create a more collaborative environment to work on psets for instance. It is not part of the culture at Harvard to study in groups unlike MIT.</p>
<p>it’s something that has been alluded to before, but i think the biggest drawback for someone interested in science and engineering about ivy league schools is that you can easily be distracted because that is not the focus of the school. a good friend of mine is an english major at princeton, and he said that all of the engineering majors in his dorm who started as engineering majors dropped out simply because it was too far a walk to the engineering quad. this process of distraction could also leave you with a useless degree in 4 years, something which likely will not happen at MIT.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, to be fair, I think it should be pointed out that high engineering attrition rates and hostile engineering atmospheres are hardly specific only to Harvard, or to Ivy schools. Let’s face it. Engineering attrition and hostile engineering educational environments are nationwide problems. </p>
<p>National studies have indicated that attrition rates of engineering majors average around 50 percent after the first two years of college.</p>
<p>[Severe</a> shortage of engineers expected due to dropout rate](<a href=“http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/1990/03/03-28-90tdc/03-28-90dnews-06.asp]Severe”>http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/1990/03/03-28-90tdc/03-28-90dnews-06.asp)
*
"…The results showed that students strongly believed that faculty (in Science, Math, and Engineering or SME) did not like to teach, did not value teaching as a professional activity, and valued their research above teaching…When asked to compare SME courses with non-SME courses, students expressed strong contrasts: coldness vs. warmth; elitism vs. democracy; aloofness vs. openness; and rejection vs. support. The most common words used by first-year students to describe their personal encounters with SME faculty were “unapproachable”, “cold”, “unavailable”, “aloof”, “indifferent”, and “intimidating”. Students further elaborated, according to results by Seymour and Hewitt (1994), describing the coldness of an SME classroom as based on sarcasm and ridicule by faculty. These practices, rarely found in non-SME courses, are described by students as discouraging voluntary student participating and creating and atmosphere of intimidation that switches cited as a main cause of their decision to leave their SME major (Seymour & Hewitt, 1994). Attribution of this type of classroom structure to attrition is termed in the literature, “the chilly climate hypothesis”</p>
<p>Criticism by students also focused on a lack of discussion in the college classroom, with only one-way lectures, according to Seymour and Hewitt’s (1994) study. Interestingly, students valued their high school experiences, which they described as containing much dialogue, over their college lecture courses in SME areas. Poor preparation, a focus on rote memory, and faculty reading directly from textbooks were described as contributing to poor SME instruction (Seymour & Hewitt 1994).</p>
<p>…students cite instructor sarcasm and curving procedures as primary contributors to an atmosphere [of being relatively unwelcoming and competitive], thus supporting Seymour and Hewitt’s (1994, 1997) chilly climate hypothesis for attrition in SME areas. *</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1a/18/52.pdf[/url]”>http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1a/18/52.pdf</a></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Allright now, to this, I must take exception. You drop out of a major because it’s just too far of a walk? Really? Come on. I have to say, that’s pretty pathetic. </p>
<p>Let me put it to you this way. I have heard of people who majored in Management at the MIT Sloan School who were coming from Next House. That’s a pretty darn long walk. Heck, I’ve even heard of some people who majored in Sloan Management who lived in the frat houses across the river in Boston. Yet they still managed to get to their Sloan classes. Yet Harvard students can’t get to the engineering quad? That’s pretty weak.</p>
<p>It was Princeton, but same difference.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Oh, no! Imagine being surrounded by kids who aren’t chemical engineers or astrophysicists! You might get DISTRACTED! You might have conversations about Dante and Poe or actually discover a fascination for foreign policy! And that dreaded walk to the other side of campus for engineering classes is sure to be a killer. Oh, the horror.</p>
<p>Re: the Stata Center-
It is an interesting design, for sure, but from the decription of the litigation, calling the issue a “water leak” seems like a bit of an understatement
</p>