Stay at Rutgers or Transfer to Penn??

phillySASer08
Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:04:13 +0000

A few scattered thoughts on this…

1) I just graduated from Penn this spring. A friend of mine who applied to med school this year with me was a transfer from BU to Penn. He had taken all of his prereqs at BU, had a very high GPA and a superb MCAT. He was accepted to two schools and waitlisted at two more, so he did well especially since he did not apply broadly. He was offered many fewer interviewers than some of the rest of us with similar applications, however, even considering that he did not apply broadly, and he speculated that the fact that he took his prereqs at a less prestigious school hurt his chances, regardless of where his degree came from.

2) I have heard the argument of ‘go to a cheap undergrad so you can save your money for a top grad school’ innumerable times, and by and large think it a load of crap for a couple reasons. Firstly, unless you’re getting a merit scholarship to med school, which very, very few people do, oftentimes the ‘top-flight’ schools will be the cheapest relative to other private schools to which you are accepted, as they have the most money to fling around (this was the case with me). Secondly, in my travels on the interview trail this past year, I noticed that, at the top med schools, the interviewees and current students came disproportionately from a small pool of elite undergrad schools. This is not to say that there were not students from lesser-known or less-prestigious schools, but the student body was disproportionately ivy/ivy-like/small liberal arts college-educated. This could be due to a preference, or to the simple fact that the best high school students go to the best undergrads and in turn to the best grad schools, or that students at top undergrads are more ‘brand-sensitive’ than other students. What’s true I am not sure, but this has been my observation.

3) Why do you want to go to a ‘top-flight’ med school, which I generally assume means a highly ranked research school according to USNEWS? There are only a few reasons to aggressively pursue these schools (number one being the desire for a career in research); your board scores and letters are much more important for residency placement.

4) Are you unhappy at Rutgers? If not, I see no reason why you should transfer if your sole plan is to improve your med school chances, especially since you’re clearly doing well there.

5) Would you be getting financial aid from Penn? If so, calculate how much different the cost will actually be once aid packages are considered.