URochester vs Emory Pre-Med

[mom2collegekids]

For med school only GPA matters (not rigor) for academics, so if a student thinks they can do well, they usually do.

True. It’s kind of sad when high school students looking at premed will post things like, “I want the most rigorous curriculum”. There are no brownie points for that…and probably they’ll set themselves up for a troubled GPA.

I’m currently helping some premeds who are on gap year…they have troubled or borderline GPAs. Two both went to tippy top schools (with tippy top high school stats), and both ended up with GPA issues. Ugh!

Another student also went to a top school, applied with a 3.5 gpa (borderline for unhooked trad) and she thankfully has nabbed an instate acceptance to an unranked SOM…which is totally fine, but certainly wasn’t in her original plan when she chose elite undergrad over midtier where she could have gone for nearly free. Being from a lucky state helped her, I think.

There is a difference that my lad has seen once in med school. His undergrad classes (U Roc) seem to have prepared him very well for the coursework. He tells us many of his peers in med school are envious asking him how he already knows X. “I learned it in undergrad.”

Whether that came from his college, major, or specific classes/profs that differed is impossible to tell, esp with anecdotal data.

In any case, in med school they teach you everything you need to know, so if one doesn’t have a head start, they just have to put a little more time into learning it then. That’s similar to some folks getting material in undergrad in a 201 or 301 course instead of 101. (I’ve seen this happen via tests - what’s covered in a higher level research school’s 101 course for “everyone” can be in a later course for majors at a different school.)

This can be true. I don’t think my son encountered much of this but maybe because he was a STEM major? I could see how a humanities major who only did the prereqs at a school where more difficult concepts are found in a 300 level course would be less-prepared. But med schools seem to be fine with that as their goal is to teach everything in med school.

One newish trend that may end up backfiring is that more schools are moving to a 2 or 3 diadatic semesters, rather than the standard 4, I wonder how that’s going to affect some students.