Premed at Cambridge

cadriethiel
Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:27:43 +0000

Having spent 2 years in London at a top-notch university, I am very familiar with both the US and UK medical and college systems. In addition, I applied MD/PhD in the US, but had many friends applying for medical school and graduate school in the UK and US this year. I think GeraldM is right–getting into a PhD program is the US with a 3 year BA from Cambridge (thanks for pointing that out) would be less problematic (for the most part). However, I think this is very important: medical school is a completely different monster. The system is not the same, the application process is completely different, and the two should be compared. At all.

So back to the point of this thread.

Medical schools do accept 3 year degrees from the US. Many people shorten their time to graduate by using AP credit, and they are not usually excluded from medical school for this reason. I cannot say how adcom’s feel about a shorter degree, but I do not think this is the main problem with pursuing a degree in the UK.
For example, from Columbia says:
“Attendance for at least three full academic years at an accredited college in the U.S. or Canada.”

I feel that problem comes from fulfilling pre-req classes abroad, where they will differ from American required courses. Does the OP know if Cambridge will teach organic chemistry in the two semesters, as they do in the US? How will the medical schools know that you have the same base knowledge as their American applicants? Obviously, you will receive the best education possible at Cambridge, but will it be the same education? This is hard to guarantee. Some schools also require a number of liberal arts courses, which you would not get from a UK school. Furthermore, every medical school will want 1 year at an American institution too. So to summarize, there are three problems here:

1. The pre-req classes: will you be able to do them in the UK, or will you have to come back to the US? You will need one year of english, this won’t be do-able pursuing a natural sciences degree at a English uni–even if they teach organic chemistry, general chemistry, physics, and biology in the same way.

2. 1 year at an American school

3. Liberal arts requirements, will have to do in the US.

Medical schools have 30,000 applicants a year. If they don’t like your classes, they can just pick someone else who went to Stanford and met their requirements. Don’t make yourself stand out in a bad way. As I said before, go to Cambridge if you want to do it for the experience itself. Call around now and see what the medical school admissions people think. And then realize you may have to spend 1-2 years at a US school when you come back, to fulfill any requirements (1-3) that you were unable to do abroad.

EDIT:
Last thought here: grading! Your GPA is going to be on a completely different scale in the UK. As are MUCH harder to get in the UK. And as med school adcoms do not deal with foreign degrees very often, you can’t guarantee how understanding they will be. Will they really recognize how could your good 80% average is? Will they be forgiving? All these things, you can’t guarantee. My mother recently translated her 2:1 degree (only one person got a first from her year) to American grades for her second bachelor’s degree. Guess what? They got translated to straight Bs/B+s by a company that specializes in transferring degrees. And it was certainly not a reflection of how well she did, considering that B/B+ is average here in the US.