<p>Well said intparent. </p>
<p>Fwiw, my stepdad attended our state flagship, got accepted to med school and is doing quite well. You wouldn’t know it by his unaffected manner, but he had a perfect SAT score and was accepted into many of the places op had listed. He just figured it made more financial sense to stay instate if he was going to med school.</p>
<p>For some strange reason, these two lines seem a bit eerie to me:
and
and I believe you meant to write " I’m ".</p>
<p>Yikes!! Agreed, limabeans…a little eerie!</p>
<p>Ok, enough with the semantics. Plenty of people on here use “dont” instead of “don’t”. Obviously I would include the apostrophe on a more formal work but I’m not always going to check for these kinds of things on here.</p>
<p>Yes, odd, isn’t it, to have a communist from a top 2% (1% in parts of southeast Texas) income household, with a user name that brings attention to a region (now known as Kaliningrad and Warmia-Masuria) whose inhabitants were mistreated by communist governments…</p>
<p>East Prussia, or Ostpreussen, is simply an ancestoral homeland for part of my family. Most of them happened to be German leftists who fled the country after the Revolutions of 1848 from Pomerania (Pommern) and East Prussia. They were gone long before WWII broke out.</p>
<p>Well I wish all the best to the OP, I thought the Grammar Nazi thing was funny, and if he becomes a doctor, sure won’t be the first arrogant one on earth.</p>
<p>Apparently no one here keeps up with their Seinfeld episodes…</p>
<p>I can’t resist re-phrasing the initial post to point out how silly it is: I really want to marry Justin Bieber or one of the members of One Direction. What should I do if none of them propose? Marry any guy who happens to ask me, or just join a convent? There’s a big gap between attending a top-ranked school and going to community college/becoming a laborer. Your post makes you sound terribly immature. Your 8 or 9 hour radius must cover quite a few schools where you will be challenged and prepared for med school. Start researching.</p>
<p>A superiority complex often masks an inferiority complex, as you rightly point out. The grandiosity and condescension displayed in your posts (my father makes $350,000 a year) won’t help you make friends no matter where you go to school. We are all the same, whether we go to an Ivy, a community college, or no college at all. It’s an attitude you need to develop if you ever plan to treat patients. You are not better than anyone, no matter what university you end up at.</p>
<p>“Really, I’d rather go to school with some of the best and fail and just know I’m not good enough to be a doctor than go to some less prestigious institution.” That statement makes no sense. Many kids are good enough to become doctors, but their chances of becoming one are better at some less prestigious institutions that don’t start the gatekeeping for med school admissions within their own programs. What I think you mean, (with emphasis on the “I”) is that you would rather not make it into medical school in what you consider a presitigious college, than enhance your chances in what you consider less prestigious Prestige is a very important factor to you in your college list. </p>
<p>Which is fine. Just understand that with prestige comes selectivity, so the chances of getting into some of what you deem prestigious are very small with your profile. Fortunately for you, it appears as though you have an auto admit to your state school which is considering “prestigious” in many circles. So you give up some for the that prestige. It’s all a card game and you give up other cards for the prestige card.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Get over yourself. Do you really think that you are so intellectually gifted that there is not a single class at U Houston, Alabama, UT-San Antonio, whatever, that wouldn’t challenge you?</p>
<p>Given the popularity and excellence of Texas medical schools (I read Curm even though my kids are not pre-med), I would think there’d be plenty of high-level intellectual competition at in-state Texas schools.</p>
<p>Your father makes $350,000 a year and you say that money is no issue as long as the school costs no more than $35,000 a year. Well, that’s a problem right there, because most of the schools on your list will cost far more than that given your family income. If your parents have told you that $35k/year is your budget, you need to be hunting up some merit money. That puts the Ivy League, UC, and Stanford out of range, and makes some of your other schools chancy unless you get (in some cases highly competitive) merit bucks.</p>
<p>
Guess what? Some of the best are at Alabama. And at Buffalo. And at North Dakota. And at dozens and dozens of other schools, small, medium, and large. Maybe you will be too. Those schools know that their students will have to compete with the students from Rice, et. al, to get into and through med school. Do you really think they do such an inferior job that only the students from your “esteemed” schools actually make it into the medical profession?</p>
<p>There’s a big part of me that wants to give up on going to college altogether because evidently my academic record sucks in the opinions of practically everyone on here. Was in the top 5% or so nationally on most categories in the standardized tests like the SAT and ACT but I suppose that and all the classes I took in high school have accounted for practically nothing in most of your opinions. There are times like this where I could honestly kill myself and see it as a respite from what you all seem to believe is nearly inevitable rejection and save myself some misery.</p>
<p>So are you in the top 8% of your high school class? If so, then UT Austin is a safety for you, since you will be an auto-admit there, and you previously named a price limit greater than its in-state cost. So why are you so concerned about being rejected everywhere?</p>
<p>Your grades and scores are very good. They aren’t stellar. Some of the school on your list reject 80% of students with stellar scores. You may hit the lottery and get in with very good ones, but you can’t count on it. A lot will depend on what your teachers have to say about you and how you come across in your essays. (Better than you have here on CC I hope.) There are hundreds of very good colleges and universities in the country - really. There’s no reason to think you’ll be forced to go to a community college.</p>
<p>I suspect you are trolling here… but the schools you are talking about are the “1% schools”. May not seem like one difference to you, but I would point out that:</p>
<ol>
<li> 99% of the people who go to college are not going to the most elite colleges.</li>
<li> There is a whole different swath of the population who do not go to four year colleges at all.</li>
</ol>
<p>If you can only be happy if you keep the company of that 1%, then you are making your own misery, IMHO. It is not “nothing” to go to many of the other schools discussed on this forum (and some of the schools on your list). Nearly all of the people who are successful in life (both professionally and personally) did NOT go to one of the “ideal” schools you mentioned. They survived and in many cases thrived. You can, too, if you stop looking at it as the only path you can possibly imagine taking.</p>
<p>Stop focusing on the “name brand” and look for schools where you can achieve your goal of good grades and strong MCAT preparation to get you into med school. You should worry more about your “internal game” and less about the perceived prestige of colleges.</p>
<p>Because I really don’t want to go to UT. Didn’t like the way the campus looked at all, don’t like the prospect of having a bunch of classes with 200 + people in them, don’t feel like I could get one-on-one help from my professors if I needed it and I don’t feel like I would ever get to know anyone there. It’s just too crowded in general for my liking.</p>