I want to pursue a neuroscience major on a premed track. I’m particularly looking for a small class size, high professor accessibility, dedicated pre-med advisors, research opportunities, and nearby pre-med opportunities (like hospitals for shadowing)
Should I also limit my list to schools without grade deflation? Lmk
These are the colleges I am looking into, lmk if I should take any off my list, as I am having trouble letting go of some of them.
Princeton
Brown
Yale
CMU
UPenn
Northeastern
Harvard
MIT
Tufts
BC
BU
Wellesley
Cornell
Columbia
Barnard
NYU
This looks like a list of reach schools that are very expensive. Do you have any safety and target schools? What is your budget? Does your family qualify for FA?
I think you need to hone in on what you want in your undergrad experience…beside a prestige name. That’s what your reach list is. So…what type of college do you want…and where. Weather? Size? Geographic location? Activities? Ease of travel from home?
Start really thinking about these things…and remove colleges that don’t check the boxes you want.
It kinda looks like someone took a dartboard to the top eastern schools list. Agree with those who say to think about whether you want urban, suburban, rural the size, Greek life, etc.
Another consideration. Med school right now can cost 400K. Private colleges right now are 90K/yr, so you’re probably looking at 800K for your education. If your family is so wealthy that 800K on your education is chump change for them, then sure, go to whatever private college you like and can get into. But assuming that your family is not super-wealthy, you probably want to go to your in-state flagship for undergrad, to keep your costs down.
Pre-med courses will often be among the largest classes at a given college, although the largest class at a tiny LAC will be smaller than the largest class at a huge university.
You may want to check the online class schedules of the various colleges to check the class sizes of courses like general biology, general and organic chemistry, physics for biology majors, and upper level biology / psychology / neuroscience courses.
It’s impossible to advise what schools you should cut without knowing more. You said it’s hard to let go of some of them. Which ones?
Your list is frankly a list of top schools that many people have heard of and not much else. It’s hard to imagine that the same student could equally love all these colleges. 7 of them have not much more in common than being in the Boston area.
What’s your GPA and how much rigor do you have? What are your interests outside of school? What type of atmosphere are you hoping for? What are your safety and match schools? What are your reasons for applying to, for instance, both Northeastern and Cornell?
If high professor accessibility is very important to you, you may have to cross quite a few of those colleges off your list. Research universities are not generally known for easy access to professors because those profs are focused on research and not undergrads. If you’re considering Wellesley and Barnard, you could also consider Colgate, Grinnell, Carleton, Pomona, Bates, Macalester, Amherst, and many others, or honors colleges at public u’s.
Bottom line, the best way for you to eventually get into med school is to get top grades, ensure you have plenty of experience relevant to medicine, get great recommendations, and take advantge of good premed advising. A lot of colleges I listed above will have excellent accesss to profs and great premed advising.
Have you researched each school on your list with respect to the above factors ?
Small class sizes can be found at any size of school; you do not need to attend a small school in order to have access to small class sizes; for example: Northwestern, Columbia, & U Chicago offer smaller classes overall than most highly ranked colleges and universities. College Transitions recently noted the high percentage of classes of nine (9) students or fewer and even higher percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students at Northwestern University.
At state (public) flagship universities, you may find the honors colleges to be of interest for small classes, priority registration, mentoring, honors only dorms, merit scholarships, research and internship/externship opportunities & options.
If you value serious research opportunities, then you need to examine this particular major at each major university (you might be surprised at the offers & guarantees with respect to undergraduate research at many Big Ten Conference member universities).
Campus culture should be investigated. For example: Can you deal with the intense academic environment at a school such as CMU or JHU ?
Are your stats high enough to be competitive for admission to universities such as Harvard, Princeton, & MIT ?
To how many schools do you plan to apply when including reaches, targets/matches, and safeties ?
I see your list of 16 reach schools as a desire to surround yourself with exceptionally bright and highly motivated students rather than a focus on prestige. However, if you are focusing on prestige, then you are not approaching your search in a wise manner.
The Big Ten Conference member schools offer tremendous resources for those interested in research opportunities and conferences (here is an annual conference that is free for Big Ten undergraduate students interested in neuroscience):
The University of Washington at Seattle is now a member school of the Big Ten Conference. UW-Seattle currently has 150 labs engaged in neuroscience research:
The University of Washington notes that 100% of undergraduate students who wish to do neuroscience research are placed into at least one lab doing such research.
Easy to arrange undergraduate research at Big Ten universities (of which there are now 18 member schools). Here is an example:
All, or almost all, of the 18 Big Ten Conference member universities offers individual guidance for prospective graduate study related to the field of neuroscience. Here is a 10 week summer program for Michigan State University sophomores & juniors interested in applying to PhD programs in neuroscience:
I could list multiple research and mentoring programs for each one of the 18 Big Ten universities which offer neuroscience as a major (I think that all do).
OP: If interested in research, the universities with the largest R&D expenditures annually are Johns Hopkins, U Michigan, UCLA, Northwestern (#30), and several other Big Ten universities (I know JHU is not in the Big Ten).
My point is that you may not be engaging in a meaningful approach to constructing your list of schools. You need to research your specific area of interest prior to applying. Such knowledge will enhance your application.
Surrounding yourself with research opportunities and graduate students in your desired field or specialization will greatly enhance your undergraduate learning experience while expanding your opportunities and options in that field. Mentoring by professors is quite common for those who desire it at Big Ten schools.
OP: If truly interested in neuroscience, you need to add Duke University to your list of target schools.
If I was guiding your efforts to compile a list of schools, I would encourage you to research the top 40 universities when measured by annual R&D expenditures. Broadly speaking, this will lead one to Big Ten Conference universities and Ivy League schools plus Johns Hopkins, Duke, UC-San Diego, Vanderbilt, Stanford, UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, NYU, WashUStL, & Emory.
Here is a list of the current 18 members of the Big Ten Conference:
If I recall correctly, Duke University has a brain research institute on campus and Duke has a strong neuroscience undergraduate program. However–and somewhat surprising to me, serious undergraduate research opportunities are easier to obtain in the Big Ten Conference than at some more prestigious universities. Regardless, Duke should be on your list of targeted schools. Here is a guide to applying for undergraduate research at Duke University in neuroscience:
OP: In answer to your question regarding which of the 16 colleges and universities on your list should be eliminated----my answer = all of them.
Why ? Because I doubt that you have researched your academic area of interest at each of these 16 schools. Also, in my view, any list of schools for the undergraduate study of neuroscience should include both Duke & Johns Hopkins in addition to most of the Big Ten Conference schools if you are truly interested in undergraduate research and mentoring.
If you do not qualify for any financial aid, then for this coming year Tufts has a total cost of attendance of about $95,000. Assuming that you will start a year from now, you can figure closer to $100,000, and this is for your freshman year. Costs will increase over time. Medical school is likely to be more expensive than undergrad. The estimate in another reply above that this could cost you $800,000 over 8 years might very well be low. $900,000 might end up being more accurate. I would only ignore your budget if your parents would be fine spending $1,000,000 for your education with no debt and no economic hardship, because it might come to that before they call you “Doctor Coolcats” (which by the way might be a very good name for a DVM!). And yes Tufts is a very good university with a main campus in an attractive location, and it does have a great graduate school of biomedical sciences in Boston.
Grade deflation? (which might apply to Cornell and CMU and some other schools on this list also). MIT is an academically very demanding university. Premed classes are very demanding at a very wide range of universities. If you were the #1 student in your high school and got 800 on the math part of the SAT, then you might be average at MIT.
Large and in a big city.
Small and in an attractive suburb on a well defined campus.
This list is a list of highly ranked universities mostly in the northeast, that tend to be expensive. Let’s suppose that you attend one of them, do very well, apply to MD programs, and get accepted to an MD program. Any of these schools will prepare you very well do do well in a very good MD program. However, if you end up studying in a very good MD program, you will find yourself studying alongside graduates from U.Mass and UVM and UNH and Rutgers and a SUNY or two or three and a long list of other schools and they will be very well prepared also, and no one will care where any of you got your bachelor’s degree.
I think that it is very difficult to choose from among a long list of excellent universities. Visiting them would help. You can read about them. You can think about how large of a school you want and where you want to be for four years. I don’t think that any of us can tell you which schools to cut from the list.
And I think that you will get this at any one of a hundred or more (probably a LOT more) colleges and universities.
But this is a tiny sample. Students can be premed from any college with any major.
Pretty much options are unlimited. It should be most affordable school (no loans) where a student has great fit and an opportunity to stand out (top 10% of the class). That is why I do not get why students are fighting to get to JHU, Harvard, Stanford etc.
Honestly you could not pay me to do premed at Hopkins. I think it is a great school for all sorts of OTHER things, but that always struck me as stacking the deck against yourself.
I guess the question, though, is where you draw that line (if you buy this at all–obviously lots of kids are going to keep gunning for Hopkins et al regardless of what I think).
Like personally, I know that universities like Pitt, Case, Rochester, and so on get a lot of premeds too, but I personally do not have a problem recommending them to sufficiently strong students looking for a research university with an affiliated hospital in a city with experience opportunities.
But what about a Rice, Vandy, or WashU? Our WashU tour guide claimed they did not have premed “weeder” classes in the sense there was a forced curve, but it still seems to me like SO many kids with such ambitions are in the same classes.
And in fact, if it were me doing this knowing what I know today, I would probably choose a nice Upper Midwest/Great Lakes LAC with strong life sciences and chem departments (there are many that fit this description), preferably one where I could get decent merit and felt comfortably well-qualified. That to me just feels like the safest path to a strong student getting into a good med school, and also a fine path if they end up deciding to do something else instead.
This is something that occurred to me also when re-reading this thread.
Just as one example, I got my bachelor’s degree at a university that has only about 4,000 undergraduate students. Freshman year I still had a class with 500 students in it. 4,000 undergraduate students implies about 1,000 freshmen. The class was however required for freshmen, and there were two sessions. Half of the freshmen were in each of the two sessions. You can get some big classes even at schools that are not all that big.
And a lot of students start off university thinking “premed”, which suggests that freshman year biology might for example be a large class even at a relatively small university (for one daughter this was the largest class that she had over four years of university).
On the other hand, upper year neuroscience classes might tend to be a bit smaller (?).
I do see that there is some value in smaller class sizes. For example this might make it easier to get to know the professors, and to interact with the professors. The total size of the undergraduate population of a school might be one reasonable way to reduce the long list from the original post at the top of this thread. As an example, BU with 17,700 undergraduate students might be considered too large by some students.
