If I had been a premed student, I think that I would want to be coming in as a student in the top 1/2 of the incoming freshman class, if not the top 1/4. This might be another way to trim the long list of reach schools.
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Here’s my 2 cents…out of all of the premed hopefuls coming out of high school, very few actually go to medical school. As kids mature, they find where their real passions lie. I would advise going in with an open mind. There’s a good chance you’ll end up liking something else. Also, medical schools know better than anyone that prestige is a luxury not everyone can afford. There’s just as many qualified applicants from state schools as private universities. It comes down to top grades and MCAT scores. Graduating from an honors program at a state school is a tangible accomplishment you can put on your application, and it’s worth its weight in gold.
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That’s basically my reasoning too, and in fact I would make it top 25th specifically. Among other reasons, being top 25th overlaps with likely being a strong merit candidate at many of the colleges with robust merit programs, so that is two birds with one stone.
And the thing is, I would probably give the same advice to someone gunning for, say, PhD programs. As much, or possibly even more so, as with med school, competitive PhD programs are usually looking for people who were outstanding students in their department as an undergrad, so you want to give yourself a fair chance at being such a student.
And really it just continues on like that in so many potential next steps with competitive selection processes. I don’t think you have to overdo this and try to be ludicrously overqualified by their normal standards (although with enough merit? not the worst idea). But being comfortably into the top portion of their normal range just seems like a solid idea when how you actually do in college is going to be an important factor in your possible next steps.
Anyway, hopefully the OP finds some of this useful, and for what it is worth I know at least some of the premed kids with doctor parents and such in our feederish HS basically thought the same way.
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This thread is starting to remind me of Yogi Berra- “Nobody goes there anymore- it’s too crowded”.
I know several young physicians who graduated from many of the universities mentioned on this thread and despite the much-feared grade deflation, too competitive, etc. they all managed to graduate, get into Med school, get their desired residency, etc.
There is a little bit of magical thinking that goes on with premed kids. They aren’t really sure what a career in medicine entails (now, not when Great Grandpa became a surgeon after sawing off some limbs in a field hospital during his military service). They know they like bio, can tolerate chem, and they need to head off to college with a “respectable” career in mind to keep their families happy. So you have a huge population of “I want to be a doctor”, which of course gets whittled down fairly quickly since “I want to help people” or “I want to become an obstetrician because babies are so cute” or “I want to become a gerontologist because old people are so cute” is clearly not going to get a kid through Organic Chemistry. It’s not enough. And the need to have actual, hands on experience with actual, sick people (so many body fluids! None of them fragrant in a good way) further whittles down the pool, which is good for society and good for anyone who shows up at an ER with a bullet wound.
So the “fall off” from premeds to actual, successful med school applicants is really a red herring. A substantial percentage of the premed pool was NEVER going to become a doctor, whether they graduate from University of New Hampshire, Yale, or University of East Overshoe. They don’t understand what a medical education is (and is not); their experience babysitting or running a fundraiser for the Red Cross notwithstanding.
So once you look at a smaller and more manageable pool of people- there are very compelling reasons to attend your own state flagship (deep bench of faculty in relevant areas; usually a cost effective way to put together a med school application and strategy) AND very compelling reasons to attend one of the more expensive/“famous” privates IF you get enough aid to make it affordable. The resources of some of the expensive/famous privates are pretty close to unlimited if a kid is savvy enough to tap into them. No, not every kid needs or wants “the bells and whistles”. But the funding is there for cool and innovative health-related projects (just come up with an idea and some Dean has a grant for you); connectivity all over the place. Yeah, Harvard is a terrible place to be an undergrad if you want med school, except for the thousands of doctors over the years who attended Harvard for undergrad. Yale is the largest employer in CT and by the time you’ve added up all the research projects going on in Yale owned and affiliated hospitals and research centers, you’ll be too old to practice medicine.
I also can’t fathom the “GPA protection/too much competition” mentality. For an ambitious kid, being in a competitive cohort with other smart and ambitious kids makes you stronger, not weaker. Do we tell potential Olympic athletes to play tennis at the local community center because the competition is too stiff at a training center? Do you want to watch track and field competitions when most of the athletes have never competed against anyone besides their friends at the Boys/Girls Club? So the advice “make sure you’re in the top 25% of the class from the git-go” seems counter-intuitive.
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While it is true that many people go from, say, Hopkins to medical school, what we don’t really know is what percentage of people at Hopkins sincerely wanted to go to med school (so it wasn’t just a frivolous notion) and then did not get adequate grades. This simply is not an easily observable variable, unlike the success stories.
Indeed, just untangling motivational factors would be a nightmare–did this person get worse grades because they eventually lacked sufficient motivation, or did trying hard and getting disappointing grades diminish their motivation? Even figuring this out on an individual level would be difficult, let alone across a lot of potential med school applicants.
That said, to my knowledge, the best information we have about this process generally came from studies like this one:
I think premeds should read that for themselves, but the authors in the abstract note:
Predictors of persistence include academic preparedness before college (e.g., SAT scores, high school GPA) and college performance (e.g., grades in pre-med courses). Students who perform better academically both in high school and in college courses are more likely to remain eligible for medical school.
In the discussion section they elaborate:
Consistent with the reputation of a degree in pre-medical studies for being cognitively intensive and challenging, coursework fulfillers entered college with higher scores on all components of the SAT as well as higher high school GPA.
. . .
When examining the predictive validities of academic preparedness measured by variables prior to college (SAT and high school GPA) and college performance (course grades), an interesting pattern is observed. For predicting completion of the first semester of coursework in the absence of any college grades, higher academic preparedness was associated with a greater likelihood of completion. However, the predictive validities of such more distal, pre-college factors were overtaken by that of the more proximal college grades. The exception is whether students complete the first organic chemistry, for which academic preparedness rather than college grades was predictive. This may be due to the notoriously difficult organic chemistry being overwhelmingly identified as culprit in the leaky pipeline
The details of how they studied that are interesting, and again I would suggest reading the paper. But my personal takeaway is it certainly seemed like coming in more rather than less prepared to immediately do well in relevant classes definitely played a significant role.
That said, they acknowledged shifting student interests might also play a role, and I am sure it does. But based on their findings, I think it seems rather unlikely it was ONLY a matter of shifting interests, particularly not if we define that as independent of the sort of shifting interests that are actually caused by realizing despite your best efforts you are not doing well.
And again their measures of preparedness were pretty basic, just grades and test scores.
My two cents based on all the things reported in studies like that is as usual, this is complicated. On the one hand, I think we would likely all (or mostly) agree that we eventually want our med school students, and eventual doctors, to be capable students. On the other, I think the evidence from studies like this is suggesting that there may well be people who would eventually have been capable students, but they were overwhelmed by their competition very early in college, and that ended their process.
So of course I would not guarantee anyone that they would both: (a) actually end up wanting to go to med school; and (b) do well enough in their courses; just because they went into their college with relatively high grades and SAT scores.
However, I do think it is possible that in some cases, a person who chose a school where they had a relatively high level of pre-college preparation by those measures would be more likely to do well in their initial courses than if they chose a school where they did not have that same relative level of pre-college preparation. And if so, in some cases that might be sufficient to sustain their interest and carry them on to actually going to med school, whereas at the other college they might have become one of the many non-success stories.
Or not. No guarantees. I just think these studies pretty strongly suggest that going into premed really well prepared, including in relative terms using basic measures like test scores and grades, is shading the odds in your favor.
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Can you name a single profession where having weak high school and college grades is predictive of better performance down the road?
Of course HS and college academic performance is important for med school applications. As it is for law school, business school, getting a job in the diplomatic corps/passing the foreign service exam, getting hired as a cyber analyst for the CIA, etc.
What exactly are you arguing here?
And do you want your future neurosurgeon to be someone who consistently performs at the top of the pack because she chooses a low performing cohort to begin with?
The good news is that medical education is designed to funnel- pretty aggressively-- the underperformers in relevant areas. So getting a B- in French in HS won’t keep a kid with strong college grades out of med school, but having to take O-Chem three times to finally pass with a C might keep you out. But I’m not sure this particular study actually concludes that attending college where you start out at the top of the pack and will face less competition to stay there is the path to take.
With respect to neuroscience specifically, it probably should be noted that Amherst College established the first undergraduate neuroscience major in the U.S.
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I don’t think anyone is saying that. But my interpretation of @NiceUnparticularMan’s comments is that students might have a similar level of preparation coming out of high school (for argument’s sake, let’s say a 3.9 GPA with a 1480 on the SAT). Kid gets in to Elite Name U and into Respectable School U. At Elite Name U, the applicant might not be in the top half of the incoming class and perhaps might even be in the bottom quarter. The classes at Elite Name U might be going at a faster pace, assuming that most incoming students already know A-Z. Kid only knows A-X and feels as though they’re behind the 8-ball already and struggling in comparison with their peers. Due to this struggle of feeling way behind, kid thinks that medicine isn’t the right path for their future.
On the other hand, if kid chose the Respectable Name U, perhaps the classes go at a more moderate pace. Or maybe they go at the same pace/depth as at Elite Name U, but here the kid knows A-X while many of their peers may only know A-R. So even if the material is a struggle, the kid feels like they’re still hacking it pretty well because they’re more advanced in the topic already and feel like they have what it takes to continue on.
So, in situation one a well-prepared kid veers away from the med school path while in situation two that same kid stays on, because the kid feels as though they’re still doing better than the majority. Thus, the preparation wasn’t an issue but how the kid feels about how they’re doing.
I see CMU on your list. I’d suggest U Pitt if you want premed. UPMC is highly accessible.
Rice is across the street from Texas Medical Center.
However, I believe (for premed students) the public universities, especially the flagships, provide better ROI. Generally speaking they have higher grades, easier for passionate students to stand out, and plenty of opportunities.
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I meet people every day (folks who are interviewing for jobs) who readily admit that they were NOT at the “top of the class” (at least according to their stats) when they got to college but ended up hitting the ball out of the park.
That was me btw- so I guess I’m already biased towards “I don’t know how I got accepted to this college but I’ll be darned if I’m going to show them they made a mistake” thinking.
Do we believe that college is such a deterministic assembly line that the best a kid can hope for is not to flunk out? Whatever happened to all the grit, persistence, study smart advice folks on here are always giving HS kids from rural and/or under-resourced schools? Does that advice go away when we are talking premed? We’re always encouraging the kids who are worried about imposter syndrome to show up at office hours, go to review sessions, ask questions when they don’t understand the lecture, make sure they aren’t trying to study in their room when the roommate is hosting a party, etc. That advice only holds for kids who want to study anthropology or poli sci?
Wow.
All of that still holds true. But folks from rural and/or under-resourced schools often go into college thinking that they’re going to be an underdog. They are mentally prepared for a big challenge. I can well imagine that there are some kids who attend well-resourced schools and have been at or near the top of their class their whole lives, and because they’ve been attending a well-resourced school, believe that their success at Elite Name U will come with the same degree of ease as it did in high school. Then when they start school and wham, find themselves near the bottom of the class, it is a big blow. Some of the kids are going to follow the advice of going to all office hours, tutoring sessions, etc, and do well. Others are going to struggle alone because they think that asking for help is a sign of weakness and that they don’t want to show their weakness to others. Those are the ones who are more apt to drop by the wayside when they could have made it had they been in a different environment. I don’t have any study numbers, but I suspect that there’s not an insignificant amount of this kind of dropping-down at Elite Name Us.
But all of this seems pretty far off from OP’s request to help cut down on reach schools. Once @coolcats998 shares more about what they want from their college experience, we can help provide additional suggestions that will help OP.
Please get back to the poster’s original question. Thank you!
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Is adding LACs an option? They seem like a good fit.
Edit: Sorry, withdrawn as advised.
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Agree with Hamilton. My D has neuroscience concentration/major at Hamilton. Fantastic experience. Extremely small class size and highly accessible professors, lots of research opportunities.
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