<p>I was just wondering if the people who apply to Emory are also Ivy-material. As in, did everyone get really good grades and have LOADS of EC’s and are extremely competitive.</p>
<p>Or are there people who are just average people who didn’t get straight A’s on high school and were not student gov presidents. i.e. me!</p>
<p>So what’s the general atmostphere?</p>
<p>Depends on the ivy. However, the average GPA of the freshman class was a 3.8 and the average SAT was a 1399 ( think). </p>
<p>So I can’t really see how you could be anything but a straight A student (with the exception of 1 or 2 Bs) and get in here. If you compare the average SATs, Emory rivals and in the past has even been more selective than some of the “lower” Ivies, such as Cornell while coming very close to some of the middle ivies. If you were just an average student here at Emory, for example, your stats would probably be in the higher 30 or lower 40 percentile of say, Dartmouth’s students. It would probably be near the 20th percentile for the “elite” ivies, such as Harvard and Princeton. </p>
<p>A lot of people refer to Emory as a backup to the Ivies, which doesn’t really make any sense, because almost every non-Ivy in the top 20 is a backup to the Ivies. Since I come from Texas, most of my friends who didn’t get into HYSPM ended up at Rice, for example.</p>
<p>Those are my two cents.</p>
<p>It seems as many people here got into Cornell and perhaps Brown. A few I know were admitted to Princeton or Yale (don’t know any Harvard admits). A few straight up preferred Emory, but many came here due to money issues, but they seem not to be having problems. As for “Ivy” material, that’s vague. For example, schools like Duke are now very comparable to mid/high Ivies in terms of stats., but the admissions rate is higher than many of them. Are we to simply say, they are not “Ivy” material, whatever that is? It is even difficult to claim that for a person of a person at a non-Ivy/top 10 to 20 that failed to gain admission into an Ivy. With admission rates (in some cases) of less than 10%, and a student body with stats. similar to Duke, UChicago, and some of the LACs, it’s not exactly easy to determine what they are looking for that is so much different than the criteria at similarly ranked schools. Can be almost random to some degree, requires some luck or lots of connections. I need not mention, that that’s just admission. Once you get to any top 20, unless you’re at one heavy in engineering or very intellectual(JHU, MIT, Caltech, Princeton), you may not see much of a difference in performance/difficult due to relatively high grading amongst elite institutions. And speaking of difficulty, I checked out MIT’s open courseware. The school is really hard!! And it reflects in the average graduating GPA which is low given the caliber of their students (as in far lower than us and the liberal arts counterparts in the top 20), so they don’t play with grades. MIT students work for it. However, I was surprised when I noticed that the orgo. material on display was actually easier than perhaps two notorious profs. we have here. Basically saying, that a person here who may not rank well at say a top Ivy in terms of entrance stats., and may not perhaps be as intellectual as their peers at the Ivy, could still probably pull off a comparable performance at said institution. But your answer is, yes many/most Emory students could have probably been admitted into at least the “lower” Ivies.</p>
<p>As for me, I didn’t apply to Ivies. This is perhaps the problem with this topic. It assumes everyone here initially wanted to go to an Ivy. Kind of like the weird effect we have in some neighborhoods here in Georgia, it’s just assumed you want to go to UGA, even over Tech or Emory lol.</p>
<p>Emory is where Duke was about 20 years ago–it is definitely the back-up to the Ivy League (and to Duke). Emory is successful in buying students (like Duke did and still does with wonderful merit scholarships like the AB Duke), but it is RARE that a student will choose Emory over any of the Ivy League (win/loss records from the schools suggest that). Emory is a great school, strong in many areas, but does not have the prestige of the Ivy League (any), and it has difficulty competing with the non-Ivy schools like Duke, Stanford, Georgetown, MIT, and even Wash U., Rice, Notre Dame and Vanderbilt. It tends to carry less social prestige than many schools as well. Given that Atlanta is a much better place to be in college than St. Louis, Durham, South Bend, and even Nashville, it is likely that Emory can catch up to schools located in those areas. Despite its ranking in USNWR, Emory doesn’t win many students when competing with those schools, although it does tend to win students over Wake Forest, Boston College, Boston University, George Washington, NYU, U. Miami, Syracuse, William and Mary, and other southern state schools.</p>
<p>Actually, I think that explains it’s USNWR ranking (at least versus the other Top 20s). If we can’t get more applicants (indicates how many students are even willing to consider), the USNWR ranking suffers, as it is now. However, if cross-admit battles/popularity were weighed much heavier, we admittedly wouldn’t be even this high, and neither would many of the top 20s. Many public schools would have a place in the top 20. And again, I don’t know if Emory can catch up. I can honestly see us catching up to /remaining with Vandy and Rice (honestly, we are still about the same. I’d imagine Emory loses to Vandy partially b/c of demographics. Certain groups applying to both, will more likely attend Vandy I mean. The atmosphere at the schools are so different) and possibly WashU (whose prestige I think is inflated perhaps merely by it’s rank which may or may not be deserved), but Emory has to do something big to actually put itself on the map. It’s name would have to be everywhere. And one thing a majority of our peers has is D-1 sports. We could probably attract much more students w/them. I’m tired of the cost argument made by the administration. I don’t accept it. If Georgia State (I don’t think they even have close to 1billion dollar endowment even if you add state funding and stuff) can put a plan in place, so can we. We need not have a great D-1 program at first (or ever), but just have one. It will bring a more socially diverse (as opposed to merely ethnic and religious) group here. The same argument could be made for establishing at least some type of engineering program of our own (joint program w/Tech is good, but no student really wanting to come here would consider Emory just for it’s relationship w/Tech). We’re good at biomedicine. Why not simply work on getting an undergrad. BME program, or chemical engineering program? This could attract more students and strengthen the course offerings along with the whole math and physics depts (they’ll be forced to in order to support such a program). I think the money we throw at construction projects could be used more efficiently to establish completely new academic programs. Emory needs to perhaps step a little outside of it’s comfort zone and use it’s strength to go bigger. Hopefully the new rank is encouragement for them to get some incite on what can be done outside of “cheating” (like WashU used to be accused of) to get us some long term prestige, and attract better students. Enhancing the experience and giving more aid to non-preprofessional students would also help. Prime example of how we fail in this category is how we have the “pre-health” office which of course primarily focuses on pre-med issues when the reality is that most students here will not be admitted. How about promoting other career paths that lead to a happy, productive, and perhaps lucrative future other than being a Doctor. It should be beaten into students heads that being pre-X is not the final option/most guaranteed pathway to success. Until then, we will have a rather unintellectual student body that merely wants to get by with as little thinking and work as possible to get the Emory degree associated with what is perceived (in other words, they choose the easiest profs., that probably teach the least) to be a difficult curriculum so they can move on to X-professional school. This wouldn’t happen so often if students were actually doing what they wanted. Otherwise, profs. should simply start grading for real, and ensure a smaller applicant pool (honestly, the 48% med school admit rate makes us look bad. Needs to go up by some means). </p>
<p>Just saying that there are certainly some internal issues Emory needs to work out before moving forward.</p>
<p>“honestly, the 48% med school admit rate makes us look bad. Needs to go up by some means” Wait, I’m confused, bernie2012, are you saying that only 48% of students who apply to medical schools actually get in to medical school?? Because if that’s the case, that’s pretty bad/scary. Then, out of curiosity, how is Emory’s Pre-Med program as compared to other peer institutions/Ivy-Leagues?</p>
<p>Yes, our med school acceptance rate is only 48%. No one really knows why, though. Compared to Rice (90%) or Vandy (70-80%) or any other top 20, this is atrocious. Don’t expect this to get any better, either. The entering pre-med class this year was MASSIVE (labs were actually being overflown and had to be stopped because they weren’t done with the prof’s permission). I’m expecting a lot of dropped classes and everyone running to get their business pre-requisites done after the first couple of tests.</p>
<p>Honestly, I don’t know why everyone considers Emory to be a great pre-med school. It has the same acceptance rate of most low-tier state schools (my tier 4 uni back home had a 60% acceptance rate!) with ten times the work and ten times the competition. It’s much better for, I think, pre-law (a lot of the acceptance rates to the T14s last year hovered around 20% and we got 7 into Harvard and 2 into Yale) or graduate school or business school.</p>
<p>Yes, our med school acceptance rate is only 48%. No one really knows why, though. Compared to Rice (90%) or Vandy (70-80%) or any other top 20, this is atrocious. Don’t expect this to get any better, either. The entering pre-med class this year was MASSIVE (labs were actually being overflown and had to be stopped because they weren’t done with the prof’s permission). I’m expecting a lot of dropped classes and everyone running to get their business pre-requisites done after the first couple of tests.</p>
<p>Honestly, I don’t know why everyone considers Emory to be a great pre-med school. It has the same acceptance rate of most low-tier state schools (my tier 4 uni back home had a 60% acceptance rate!) with ten times the work and ten times the competition. It’s much better for, I think, pre-law (a lot of the acceptance rates to the T14s last year hovered around 20% and we got 7 into Harvard and 2 into Yale) or graduate school or business school.</p>
<p>Emory has a lower acceptance rate than others only because it allows ALL students to apply to med school. Almost all other schools filter their pre-med students and allow only those with higher GPA’s and MCAT scores to apply. This is the reason that their acceptance rates are much higher.</p>
<p>MathNut, I’m sorry, but that’s complete nonsense. The only top 20 that filters its pre-meds is Johns Hopkins.</p>
<p>It is solid, but too many apply and the mentality of the students don’t lead to good outcomes when it comes to admissions into medical school. The courses and the professors are really solid, and the opportunities offered by the campus itself is amazing, but the pre-med program is saturated and I think the grades are a bit high now. Many of the students receiving a B- should instead probably be getting Cs. I think a C is a bigger reality check than a B-. I’m pretty sure Emory’s pre-med program used to be harder (other than maybe classes like orgo.). Biology used to be an amazing weedout class. A sufficient amount of students would actually get C grades before I entered from my understanding. And while indeed we have no filtering out at Emory, and neither do many peers, it seems as if Emory fails to do exactly what I suggest. They fail to seriously introduce alternatives to students who want to be involved with healthcare. The advising should be better (in terms of how to apply properly and etc.), and Emory probably needs to get serious again with the weeding out. Grade inflation may simply only result in more med school rejections of solid students (even those performing well on the MCAT) as it gets more difficult to distinguish who earned their grades and who didn’t. Again, this idea may have some validity because I don’t think GPAs here are normally a problem for many pre-meds not admitted. It’s MCAT scores. And I’ve seen the material from watching my friends study and notice that the classes are in theory rigorous enough (at least in terms of the type of material) to lead to a good performance. However, the testing style in biology seems flawed and does not promote retention of information (yes I know the MCAT is multiple choice, but you can overtrain with shortanswer and stuff that actually requires you to write down your thoughts unlike the predominant multiple choice style here). These are, however, pedagogical issues that we have no control over. Not to mention, most will disagree with making pre-med classes here even the slightest bit tougher. Again mentality here amongst them is that the goal is to have the smallest workload and easiest grading possible. They fail to realize that they cheat themselves out of longterm preparation for the MCAT. Most people rather cram and have to solely rely on an expensive test prep. program than to get something out of the coursework. People here simply want to get by until they take it and are shocked at their lack of preparedness once they get to the prep. period. Perhaps the workload should be higher in classes like biology so that there is indeed a mechanism through which students receive extra exposure to material than the text and exams. Dr. Arri Eisen’s class is an excellent model. More profs. should try it. If he can do it with a 92 person class, so can the others. I hear that even though it’s harder, the students actually enjoy it more.</p>
<p>I hear that the advising has gotten somewhat better since establish of the “pre-health” office. Now it’s up to the students to stop acting like wimps and successfully use the great teaching, faculty, and resources to develop and challenge themselves. What’s the point of coming here (even if it is a second choice) if you don’t actually want preparation. The Emory degree and a decent GPA alone is not good enough. This is a false assumption. If someone from Tech with a similar GPA applied to the same med. school, they probably have a higher chance of getting in b/c they probably aren’t in any of the catch all majors for pre-meds, have hands on experience, and are perceived to have had a much higher workload (this is true, especially for intro. courses over there. Mediocre students at Tech don’t get Bs, they get Cs. Can’t say the same here).</p>
<p>Okay the 48% rate really worries me… It doesn’t sound like Emory does a good job with Medical school applicants and their applications. (Inferring from posts above) I really am strongly considering medicine as a career path, and I really need a school that will help me out with the whole process… This worries me. :(</p>
<p>I agree with Bernie (I usually do).</p>
<p>I just want to add that students who get B-'s would probably not apply to medical school if they were C’s.</p>
<p>While getting A’s is hard, getting a B/B- is not (in the sciences). If some of these students got C’s, then they would realize that they are not going to get in. However the good GPA encourages them to apply even with the low MCAT. This is why it equals 48%.</p>
<p>However, we have all the resources we need to get high MCATs and GPA. We just need to take advantage of them.</p>
<p>Hopefully, the prehealth office can be honest and tell people they wont get into medical school. Even if they don’t stop the students from applying, these students need to realize they need to be REALISTIC. At 50000 a year, I feel like the university owes us an accurate assessment on whether or not we’ll get in.</p>
<p>Oh btw, the number thrown out was 70% of the incoming class… I was like holy ****. Out of that 70%, 30% change career plans (and 48% get rejected).</p>
<p>So out of the 1400 kids, 980 want to do prehealth (lets say 50 want to do dentistry or something). So out of 930, 651 continue with it junior year. Out of that, 320 actually get into med school… Just to put the reality in perspective, this is hard ****.</p>
<p>We need to realize that</p>
<p>Emory has a 56% acceptance rate with the most recent med school numbers, but that’s because we report the acceptance rate for all applicants to med school.</p>
<p>The majority of schools out there ONLY report acceptance rate for kids with >3.5 and >30 on MCAT. When Emory looks at kids >3.5 and >30, then the acceptance rate is 89%. </p>
<p>You’ve got to be crazy to think that kids from Vandy/Rice (just to reference the schools mentioned earlier) of all GPA/MCAT have 90% acceptance rate. Every one of those schools only reports #s for a certain subset of their population</p>
<p>70% is scary. We need to get some more intellectuals up in here. Why can’t John’s Hopkins just admit these students? I have to wonder if an Emory student would work harder at JHU. It might be that intro. classes here get people used to not actually working (yeah, we indeed study hard and perhaps attend SI if it is found to be helpful with test performance, but not much graded work is required for the most part) that hard, so complacency ensues, and hence the avoidance of harder classes later. Or more people are actually surprised when they just happen to chose an upperlevel course significantly harder than intros. I am willing to admit that physical biology (taking now) and human genetics (last year, easy/more than fair grading, but intense workload) were/are shocking to me because I had gotten used to taking quizzes, tests, perhaps webassign for physics (not that strenuous even though I took 151/2 series. I heard it’s much harder now with Burland teaching it though, as it should be. I also here that Spell actually requires some outside class). I’m not used to doing much work for the lecture component of a science class, normally only the lab gets intense.</p>
<p>In my class (freshman class) I have met a bunch of people who got into Ivies. A lot of people seem to have gotten into Cornell/Brown in my hall and like 5/6 people that I met got into Penn (one into Wharton). I’ve met another 2 kids who got into Yale also, and one into Harvard/Princeton (liked our campus better apparently). Also like 3 people into Stanford. Pretty much every Emory Scholar has gotten into HYPSM while the general population often gets into Chicago, Cornell, JHU, etc. Also I feel like everyone has gotten into WashU. In fact, I’ve only met one kid who didtn get into another top 20 school and that was because he applied ED. So yeah I would say a lot of people get into Ivies. </p>
<p>*also, just curious Bernie… is Bernie your real name?</p>
<p>*Also these kids who turn down these top Ivies love every second of their Emory education and are glad they made the choice they made. Due to its top academics, location, research facilities, elite business school/pre-med reputation, and faculty along with a beautiful campus and great student body there really isn’t much not to like. . .</p>
<p>No, but close. Surely you can figure out what it really is, easily. I’ll agree w/most getting at least a waitlist from WashU. Yeah, it seems like Emory can successfully buy students from many top Ivies with Scholars and Emory Advantage. Those programs have been very effective. We have solid academics, now this place just needs to be more fun lol. Not looking forward to our fake/lame homecoming next week. I wonder when the actual homecomings for Tech and UGA start (wait, maybe UGA already happened). I’ve been too busy to keep up. Physical bio. is really time-consuming.</p>
<p>A friend of mine got into Emory but was rejected from Columbia. That’s just my input.</p>
<p>oh… so they are generally really smart ivy league kids…</p>
<p>I have a fear for ivy league kids… I have this feeling that they’re all really confident people who know who they are and are really ambitious and arrogant… I’m the total opposite…</p>