Worried about Pre-Med at MIT :(

collegealum314
Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:38:12 +0000

However, those stats are for people who got into any medical school, not just top medical schools. If **you want to get into a top medical school, you have to be the very best, **no matter where you are – if you are really top med school material, it won’t really matter where you go to school, because you will get a perfect or almost-perfect GPA or no matter where you are.



Sort of, but not really. I wonder what percentage of Harvard medical students could major in physics at MIT and get a 4.5 or above. My guess is like less than 5%. There are really smart medical students out there, but let’s just say that as a currency intelligence is worth a lot more in fields such as science and engineering than in medicine–at least as far as admissions is concerned. If you can get a top MCAT score and a near-perfect GPA from Stanford in biology, for instance, then you have topped out of the smartness requirement. Being “the best” in terms of who would be the smartest and most competent doctor does not help you. The rest is all ECs and your personality. It seems like they look for the beauty queen type.

As for the 94% med school admission rate from MIT, a better marker would be to look at the GPA of people who expressed interest in med school when they came into MIT–or maybe the GPA of these people in premed classes at least. I’m sure some people who got hosed never end up applying. Such statistics don’t exist, of course.

To refute cellardwellar’s point, getting into the best residencies does depend somewhat on the ranking of the med school you went to–not just board scores and med school grades.

There are certain advantages to going to MIT for smart people interested in top schools. For one, it is easier to gain leadership positions in ECs (although it is also harder to spend time in them because we actually have real classes to take.) There is occasionally some recognition of the grade deflation, as I know a few people who ended up at top 5 med schools with horrible GPAs (although they got rejected everywhere else.) And it seems like there are certain research niches in which MIT-trained scientist/engineers seem to have become popular among top med schools. Bioinformatics is one.

This is a meandering post, and I’m not sure what it necessarily should mean to the OP. You could major in physics at Stanford, it would be a ton easier, and have similar med school results to people at MIT with the same major.

Btw, do course 8X (for premeds) people still have to take Junior Lab? Stuff like that can hurt your GPA if your really not on top of things. My opinion is that because you want to go, you should go. If it looks like you’re going to be a “B” student or worse through 3 semesters at MIT, you may want to consider transferring. It’s not like you are locked in for 4 years.