UPENN Vagelos Scholars vs. Columbia Rabi Scholars vs. Stanford

[phantasmagoric]

<p>OP, please note that the above person registered yesterday, has posted 3 times, each in “Stanford vs. ___” and each time he/she just advocates for the non-Stanford school with dubious reasons. edit: one of his/her posts was deleted. Trollery senses tingling.</p>

<p>Here’s what I said to another student regarding pre-med at Stanford that I think applies here as well:</p>

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I think your best bet would be Stanford: more grade inflation, more advising, and more access to funding and research. Any funding that you can get at [other schools], you can easily get at Stanford, which spends more on undergraduate research each year than any other university. You’ll have intimate access to the medical school while still having access to the rest of the university, since it’s all on campus… As an undergrad at Stanford, you’ll be able to take some classes at the medical school (there’s even one that requires you to work on real cadavers), work with med school professors (many of whom have joint appointments outside the med school), and use med school facilities, which are state-of-the-art and usually very expensive. For example, I know of someone who was able to use the med school’s imaging facilities (MRI, EEG) to do his research, with the help of a professor of course; he was first author on a paper and got into Harvard’s MD/PhD program, which is way harder to get into than the MD program. You’ll also have access (with the supervision of a professor) to non-med facilities that med researchers use, like the synchrotron or the nanofabrication facilities.

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<p>All these schools would be great for pre-med, so this should definitely come down to other preferences and fit. Do you want to be in or near a city? Do you like a natural landscape as well? What are your academic interests? What sort of extracurricular opportunities are you looking for? Are you looking to do research? What climate do you like? Are you interested in an intense environment or a laid-back one? etc.</p>