<p>If I really wanted to be a physician (of any type) I would give serious consideration to going the accelerated route. The number of students who go to elite colleges and then move on to run of the mill or no name medical schools (or none at all) is enormous, and frankly, I would hate myself for passing on an assured spot in an MD program in order to spend four years studying at topic that will have little or no bearing on my future (i.e. social science with pre-med). </p>
<p>Just consider the basic figures. According to the pre-health guide, only 60% of those who graduate with Honors from Chicago get into ANY medical school, while in turn 50% get Honors to begin with. So, as a back of the envelope calculation, only a little over 30% of UChicago pre-meds will ever see the inside of a MD program (adjusting for those few that get in without Honors). These are not really numbers I would want to be up against, and I would wager they are about the same or worse at Case. </p>
<p>At a summer program before college, we all kind of laughed at the idea of one of our roommates passing on a partial scholarship from Princeton for college to do NU’s combined BS-MD, but having a better sense of the competition now for medical schools, I fully understand while he locked in such a respectable course of study up front.</p>