grouse said:
What do you mean not a pre-med factory? And, they don't hold your hand through admissions process? By the way stats are 3.6 gpa in good liberal arts school; lib arts major; won a couple of academic awards; haven't taken GRE's yet. No science courses in college to speak of.
I'm there now, and I can affirm Koko's point. Our PD is an excellent practitioner of her discipline, and knows her way around the admissions process, but she has explicitly stated that the purpose of the program is to give us an
opportunity to prepare, it's not to do the preparing for us. We get pointed in the right directions, we get advice, but at the end of the day we call our own shots, and we sink or swim based on the work we've done within the program as well as the preparation we've done on ourselves.
What that means in day-to-day terms can be a benefit: graduates tend to be confident, independent people who know their stuff. It can also be a little bit of a nerve-rattler -- it's highly recommended you do a Kaplan or other MCAT prep course right after finishing, because not everything that's on the MCAT is necessarily part of the courses we take. And if your learning style is not on a wavelength with the teaching style of one of the key faculty, the small program means you need to learn to deal with it. Then again, this is a skill that will serve you for the rest of your
career.
Summer term (if you do the one-year version of the program) is intense and, frankly, insane. But it's very similar to what a med school workload is like. I consider the above to be benefits, which just shows how deep I am into this!
In general, my perception is that we deal with some of the slings and arrows of studenthood that some others might get to avoid until med school itself. We are NOT in a happy warm coccoon expecting the program to turn us into butterflies. I believe this makes us more attractive as applicants, because we can talk meaningfully about what we're getting into, why we're doing it, and what it's been like to get this far. Every pre-med students' day and advising session I've been to tells me that's what adcoms want: a realistic and thoughtful view of what we're getting into. But everyone's experience is different, which is why you can't generalize any more than that.
Grain of salt: I took the independence thing so far that I've decided to point at PA school rather than MD school. The fact that the program is able to adapt and still offer me the structure and the advising/ committee letter just underlines what I like about this place.
