UCSB(Bio-Chem) or UCR (Bio-Engineering) as Pre med

ahuynh91
Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:41:52 +0000

I’m about to be a fourth year pre-med at UCR. From what I’ve gathered, UCR is an AMAZING college for pre-meds. We have so many opportunities for medical school. The HPAC center at UCR is a great resource for pre-meds and the advisors definitely know their stuff. Honestly, the only things that med schools will look at when you graduate are extracurriculars, your MCAT score, and probably most importantly, your GPA. If the cost of attending UCR is much lesser than SB, I’d take UCR. I probably could’ve transferred to any other UC after my second year because of my GPA, but chose to stay here considering all of the opportunities. Reputation doesn’t matter that much for grad schools (especially med), as you’ll find out if you stick around in the forums. UCR is still a UC, so unless you’re going to Berkeley, LA, or SD, it’s not going to make a big difference. Reputation usually only factors in if you’re talking about Ivy league schools, anyway. Lastly, your GPA will probably be higher at UCR because the curves are generally more generous to you (probably one of reasons I still have a 4.0).
UCR is close to a few hospitals where you can volunteer and/or do the CCE program. The most important thing to consider is the Haider program and the future School of Medicine. They reserve 24 whole slots EACH year for UCR students and alumni, mind you the class size is about 50. The applicant pool is only about 150/year according to HPAC’s data. It’s incredible how much UCR cares about their pre-med students. Besides that, you can apply to any other school you want. NO OTHER UC does this!