Pre-med programs.

I go to the Univ. of Southern Miss. I think
that we have a great pre-med program here.
Well at least we did. The pre-med advisor
got a better position and left. I think that
a group of professors are taking over her
position. I went ito her office about 6
weeks ago to tell her that I had an interview
but the secretary told me she was gone. I
thought that she ment gone to lunch. I returned 2 hours later and the secretary told
me that she had accepted another position.

The pre med advisor collected letters of rec and sent them out to the schools for me. All I had to do was give them the names and address of the people I wanted for recs., and
she did the rest. Then as requests for secondaries came in I told her where I wanted them sent. We also have a chapter of AED but they have not had any meetings this semester.

I hope this helps.

Premed1

I went to Stetson University in DeLand, Florida for my post-bacc work. It is about 45 minutes from UCF, SqB.

Personally, I liked the program a lot and I think going there was the best decision I made. The school is small (~2000 students) so every professor gets to know you personally. And when they send out an evaluation on you, the letters they write are very personal. And I think that makes a tremendous difference.

Another good thing that they have at Stetson is the minor in health issues. This is fairly new, but it adds a lot of non-science, health-related classes to the catalog which a premed can take as electives. I took a few of them (Sociology of Health and Illness, Contemporary Health and Policy Issues, and Medical Ethics) and quite enjoyed them (I even assited teaching the section on Osteopathic Medicine in Sociology -- pretty cool).

So overall, the program gets an A+ in my book. The only real drawback is that there aren't many older students there. So when an old geezer like me (24) is taking classes, you feel quite old. It is also quite expensive (~$14,000 yearly) so I went into debt to go there. But it was worth it -- I did real well, learned a lot, and most importantly, I got accepted where I wanted to go. ;-)

Check out the website if you are interested: http://www.stetson.edu/departments/biology/health.html

Gregory Gulick
http://www.osteopathic.com/gregory

[This message has been edited by Gregory Gulick (edited 11-17-98).]

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there are schools that have an undergraduate pre-med major (notre dame comes to mind). at my school (johns hopkins) there is a strong pre-med office that takes care of dispensing advice, running seminars, and punching out committee letters. they have statistics for where people from our school have applied, where they were accepted, and where they matriculated. the office is available for both undergrads and alumni. i found it to be an invaluable resource.

Hmm... actually I'd have to rate my Pre-Med program as C-. I attend the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and its mostly a "we'll tell you what the pre-med prerequisites are, and what classes here at UTK satisfies, but we can't answer any questions beyond that" Lets just say I'm severely dissatisfied. My premed advisor is a fellow undergrad, I kinda expect a faculty or someone with more experience. They have such a shortage of advisors, that they hire anyone who is a junior or above as a pre-med advisor. So therefore, I am severely skeptical of someone's advice who hasnt even applied/ experienced the application process/ or even taken the mcats yet or atleast helped other people successfully achieve this goal!!!!!! Sigh... oh well. Which may be one reason why I rely so heavily on the SDN boards :wink:

Oh, and getting to know the professors here... out of the question, school is so large and professors are so busy (almost all are research professors, and good researchers doesnt necessarily mean good teachers), so I can get maybe 1, possibly 2 good recs sigh.

Well my two cents, if you can't tell, what I'm trying to say is if you want to be a pre-med don't come to utk :wink:

SQB - I sent you a private message. Please check it my clicking on "my Profile"

I'm here at Baylor, and I think we have a great pre-med program. The advisors hold seminars almost every semester on what we need to do at this point in our pre-med career, they're very positive but honest, and the classes are well taught (well, there's at least two or three good teachers for every subject). There is an actually "pre-med" program here...there are separate bios, g-chems, o-chems, and physics classes for science-majors/pre-meds and non-science majors. We have four or five profs that are very up-to-date on the whole med school admission process, and even have a Johns Hopkins Med School graduate as a prof (he also helped with the research to find the vaccine for Hepatitis B!). Some of our profs are even practicing physicians within Waco. Not only that, all professors are required to keep at least 8 office hours a week, but most keep at least 12 or 13. Most of them love to talk to students, but there are those that are just bitter old men that didn't get into med school and now have to be bio teachers (no offense to bio teachers intended). I love it here...if there's anything else you needed to know, PM me.

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SqB said:

I would like to hear about various pre-med programs from around the country. I go to the University of Central Florida and it does not have a "premed" program. It's kind of a roll-your-own program but the prereqs for medschool are very accessable. I was actually a Computer Science/"premed" major up until this semester. Now I'm Micro and Molecular bio, minoring in C.S. How would you rate your school's premed program?

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well my school doesn't have a pre-med program either, but we are in the top 3 for applicants to medical school. as long as you do the prereqs and maintain a solid gpa you should be fine. i would otherwise rate my school's 'program' a 7/10.

LOL op is from ksmi, florida

Yeah I would say UCF's pre-med advising is alright. It's such a large school, that it;s very hard to get individual attention. My school is also very large (another Florida State school), and I would rate it 5-6/10.

In case anyone is curious, Emory has a strong but brutal program. Full of gunners, competition is fierce, and attrition is very high.

If you can make it though in one piece the name carries serious weight to adcoms, but many people who would've made fine candidates elsewhere get swayed away by the insane work load and cut-throat culture. If you can avoid having a depressive breakdown, then you have a good shot at acceptance.

My schools premed program was... "Get together, someone will tell you the classes that are madatory - or look them up yourself - hope our school even has those classes... Eat pizza... See you next week".

But my school was super small - purely engineering. I had to take a few classes at a different school and fudge the lines for "english classes".