Recommend me a great pre-med school!

keefer
Sun, 02 Nov 2008 01:51:18 +0000

This is coming from a premed turned engineer.

The name, the rankings, don’t matter. You need to figure out the right environment where you can get the best grades possible, get research experience/right internships, and good recommendation letters, and enjoy your college life at the same time.

I have known brilliant people in high school who went onto MIT, worked extremely hard only to get a 3.1 GPA, waste 2 more years in a post-bacc program, before getting into a mediocre med school. And there were also a few average students who went to local schools, where they stood out, and got into top tier medical schools.

Med school admissions works the same way as college admissions. Do people from Andover, Exeter, TJHSS, Stuyvesant get into prestigious colleges at a great percentage? YES. BUT, there are thousands who came from regular high schools and did well and they got in. There are also many from those great high schools who couldn’t compete at that level and end up with grades that gave them no shot at a good college, even if they had a great SAT score.

Look, people get into med school from all kinds of colleges, looking back, I would not advise anyone who wants to get into medical school to goto a school like Johns Hopkins, or Caltech. Do they care about your undergrad affiliation, YES, they do, but assuming all other things equal, my experience with medical school data suggests that 3.7 at SUNY-Potsdam is better than a 3.1 at Johns Hopkins for a premed, which isn’t exactly easy to do.