Who Turned Down HPME For an Ivy League?

bluedevilmike
Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:03:04 +0000

1.) Prelaw students need excellent grades in all their classes. Since HPME’s have to take medical school prerequisites, then MD/JD students need excellent grades in their premed classes. It’s not like law school will ignore science classes. Nor will future employers for a pre-MBA track.

2.) Law schools don’t care about your EC’s anyway, so what else would you use the summers for? BioSci grad schools will look for research over the summers, which is what premeds do anyway. And the business world wants full-time, year-round work experience – so since premeds can do work in, say, health care consulting, then an HPME’s summer isn’t a replacement anyway.

3.) I suppose the time off from the MCAT could buy you some more LSAT/GRE/GMAT prep time. Okay. But GMATs and GRE’s are a joke anyway – and GMATs don’t matter all that much – and even the LSAT should take an HPME-caliber student about three weeks anyway.

4.) Again, I have to emphasize. I’m not arguing that HPME harms you for a dual degree. It certainly doesn’t. I just mean to say that your pursuit of the second degree nullifies much of the advantage of HPME in the first place, and that HPME’s advantage in such a situation is quite minor.

5.) I don’t know that I’d call any school in the country “great”, simply because then I have to nitpick about where the difference between good and great is. Certainly I don’t think there’s a large difference between Duke and NU, if that’s what you’re accusing me of.

6.) Accusing me of a lack of objectivity was unnecessarily rude. I don’t like joint BS/MD programs in general, and one offered by Duke would be no exception.