<p>Hi! My name is Rob and I’m a Binghamton University Student Ambassador.</p>
<p>We have a very strong pre-med program at Binghamton, with hundreds of students on that track. Out of the students who apply to medical school from Binghamton, our acceptance rate beats the national average by nearly 20 percentage points. Our pre-med students are paired with a pre-med adviser in addition to their other advisers to ensure that they have all the information necessary on what they should be doing to make themselves marketable to medical schools and to ensure they are completing all the courses necessary to be accepted into one.</p>
<p>We try to get our students involved in research as soon as possible. My friend, Sam, is a freshman on the pre-med track. By the start of her second semester, she was involved in Parkinson’s research on campus. She wasn’t doing menial tasks like data entry as “research” either; she actually got to perform brain surgery on a rat herself a few weeks ago. As long as you reach out to our professors and you have enough knowledge and skills to be able to be useful to them, they will be sure to get you involved in their labs and with their research. We do have undergraduate research available in all of our majors.</p>
<p>We also have some very distinguished faculty. One of our chemistry professors, Professor Wittingham, is the inventor of the lithium-ion battery used in all modern mobile devices today, such as iPods and cell phones. The best part about our faculty, in my opinion, is that they ALL teach undergraduates. Some schools separate faculty into junior and full faculty members, where junior faculty teach undergrad students and full faculty teach graduate students. This results in the best faculty being “hidden away” from the undergraduate students, making it difficult to network with them or get involved in their research. We’ve taken the opposite strategy at Binghamton and have all of our faculty teach both undergraduate and graduate courses.</p>
<p>Let me know if you have any other specific questions.</p>
<p>~Rob</p>