I'm guessing I'm a bit older than everyone else here (late 20's). From personal experiences and those I've observed of classmates I can add some great tangents and info to this line. I am currently a medical student at Creighton University.
I graduated from UW Seattle in 2002 in Molecular Biology and would NOT recommend it to anyone trying to get into any professional program (medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, optometry, etc.). It is no doubt a relatively prestigious school known for having excellent science program and I did all kinds of great research there. The campus is beautiful and the party scene was awesome. And Husky football was good when I was there (..if you can remember back that far).
However, reasons for NOT recommending it for UW Seattle for pre-meds:
1) As stated previously, it is a pre-med magnet school which means an extremely high percentage of cut-throat kids and not a nurturing evironment (as mush as other universities). You will encounter cut-throat competition even to get freshman research spots in the lab.
2) Class size is HUGE. This isn't in itself a problem. Most pre-meds are bright enough to never require office hours. But with bigger classes means less time alloted to grading tests. When it comes to grading your long answers to questions from BIO 180-220, BIOC 440-442, the TA's may just look for certain words and not actually read the question. Over time, this means more points lost for no reason at all. For all college students, a feedback loop is created between academic achievement and studying. If I study a lot and do well on a test, it makes me want to study more the next time because I was positively reinforced. If you are not doing well on tests because of bad or unfair grading, the feedback loop becomes broken and you are in the danger zone of not caring anymore. I saw this happen to a lot of people at UW -- they started out as very studious but became indifferent to studying and grades because they learned they really had no control over them. This was especially rampant in BIO 180-220, "The Weed Out Series". Everyone who gets into UW is capable of mastering the material in general biology. So how do you weed people out a create a curve? Unfair grading and ridiculous tests that become a mad rush against time. Most potential pre-meds I knew, who are hard working and bright people, became so dishenchanted with the unfairness of BIO 180-220 that they dropped out of the biological sciences completely.
3) The grading scale at UW is extremely incremental in point 1's (4.0, 3.9, 3.8, 3.7 all the way down to 0.1 and zero). Most universities still have the old school solid A's (4.0), B's (3.0), C's (2.0), etc. Others only go as far as having differences for A + (4.0), A - (3.7), etc... The more incremented scale is worse for your GPA over time because your competition at other schools will be getting many more solid 4.0 (A's) while your are always stuck in low 3.0-3.3 land because of the curve. Even other large prestigious state schools (UT Austin, U of Michigan, UCLA, UofILL) do not use such an incremented grading scale.
4) The UW sets different mean grades for classes in different majors within the sciences. If you are lucky enough to get into Neurobiology or Bioengeneering programs (which are almost as competitive to get into as medical school) the classes are curved at about a 3.4. However, if you go into the lesser-competitive biology or zoology programs, the classes are curved at a 2.7-2.8. Your best bet for pre-med is to get into Neurobiology or Bioengeering. If you don't, you are dead meat. Continued from #2, the problem is that the classes used as the criteria for admissions to these majors are the crazy weed out classes.
5) The competition was so bad in my Physical Chemistry (for Bio Majors) class that people were stealing other people's homework out of the drop-off box to mess up the curve. My buddy's assignment inexplicably dissappeared, probably because someone used it to copy off of an then threw his away, and he ended up getting a zero which pushed his grade to by 4 tenths. There were also a lot of teachers who refused to re-grade tests, even if there were blatently obvious errors in the grading. On some homework assingment, notoriously all chemistry classes, they would just pick 3 questions out of 10 to grade. This is absolutely horrible for a high level chemistry class.
6) It is harder to get letters of recommendation at bigger schools. I did research for 2 years, even did my own project that got published 3 years later, and the faculty member from my lab still tried to blow me off when I asked. I have heard people from small, private schools say they could get LOR's from pretty much everyone and they were always happ to do it.
As stated in a previous thread, it is much better to be a "big fish in a small pond" than a "medium sized fish in a huge pond". Because of the competition at UW, being very bright and hard working will still leave you only as a "medium sized fish in a huge pond".
I grew up in Idaho (much more redneck and less sophisticated than WA) and did my first two years of undergrad at University of Idaho (WSU's sister school). U of I was a really easy school and I was a "big fish in a small pond" with a 3.8 GPA and rocking grades in all pre-med prerequisites. But, I longed for more excitment and hotter girls at UW Seattle, which I most certainly found there. But in the next two years of school I spent at UW my GPA got completely F**** up because of reaons #1-6 and I was deemed not competitive for med school. To put the sour icing on the cake, many of my friends from U of I, who in my opinion were lesser in intellect and work ethic, ended up getting into med school (WAMMI thru UW or other places). I keep getting these stupid letters in the mail from the UW Biology Alumni Association asking for donations. I will never ever give those idiots any money after how bad they screwed up my academic career...
I ended up moving to New Mexico a few years later after working boring office jobs and got a Master of Public Health. While I was getting the MPH, I redid a lot of classes at U of New Mexico, a VERY easy school. After I finished my masters, I applied to med schools all over again with my newly enhanced GPA from New Mexico and got in.
The moral of the story is that going to a large, competitive, first tier state school like UW is not a good idea for highly competitive medical school admissions.
Pick your battles wisely... I have lived in 8 different states by age 29 and have seen lots of different schools. Obviously, the West and East Coasts are way more academically competitive than the midwest, southwest, etc. If you are feeling adventurous, go to a school like University of Montana or University of Wyoming. They are ranked second and third-tier by US News but when it comes down to it the admissions peole could care less. With the marks it takes to get into UW, you could probably get a full-ride scholarship to one of these schools based on academic merit. You are guaranteed to get top grades and your professors will love you. Also, you will look more unique to medical schools becasue there aren't that many people applying from these schools. At UW, a bright, hardworking person is still just "average". My parents actually paid out-of-state tuition for my 2 years at UW which was a huge rip-off for what I got. It would've been betters spent at Seattle U, Seattle Pacific, or Gonzaga.
If or when you do get into med school, you will meet people from lots of weird school that you didn't even know existed. The main reason that these people got in is because they're a minority or are from some geographically under-represented area. For UW it's Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. Everyone is smart, but most aren't extremely bright, they just played their cards right in the admissions game and got a little lucky. Admissions people are looking for smart people with good temperments, not extremely bright people who may explode at any moment.
If I could do it all over again, I would go to a small, presigious university (i.e. Carleton, Yale, Claremont-Mckenna, maybe even Gonzaga) OR a medium-sized non-competitive state school (i.e. U of Idaho, U of Montana). I know way more people that have gotten where they want to be in life by going to these kinds of schools than those going to huge, competitive state schools like UW. You either want to be on top of the competition or on the bottom of the competition, never in the middle of it.
Notwithstanding, UW is very good for engineering and business. Just not pre-med. Forgetting the pre-med part, there are numerous points to praise UW about.
The advice that I just gave out in this long composition is not new or original. It is the same advice that is in many books at Barnes and Noble on how to get into med school. I had read this advice as a teenager and it went in one ear and out the other. Now that I'm older I know that it is true and I should've listened.
. I know I wouldn't have gotten to know people as well if I didn't live in the dorms, but I have met others who got to know many more people than I did and commuted.
. That's...roughly 3x tuition. That's about what they told me when I started out, but I was paying out-of-state. Jeez.
