I actually did go to DeBakey. The thing about DeBakey is that it's pretty easy to get in, as long as you're not a complete idiot, but it's hard to stay in. It's a really stressful school, and they give you a ton of work. In fact, I find college easier than DeBakey, as many students have. It's definitly not as stressful and does not give as much work. Not every student in DeBakey is a genius or very smart, but they have to take more classes than the average student does. Every student in DeBakey must pass an AP science class and AP Calculus or they can't get a DeBakey Diploma. Also, the typical freshman class has about 250 students, but by the second semester, about 30% leave, and by graduation, there are only about 100-150 students left. My class had 155, and for the school that was a huge graduating class. I've actually heard of a student who moved from DeBakey to Bellaire High School and became salutatorian, whereas in DeBakey she was nowhere near the top. It's definitly very defficult to get to the top in DeBakey because the top students are very competitive.
Also the question about Baylor and DeBakey. It is true that every year, 10 students (or less if there are not enough deserving of the award) get picked to be in a "Pre-medical Academy" in which they are accepted into UH (with a full scholarship), and automatically accepted to Baylor College of Medicine (with very minimal requirements including, I think, at least a 3.2 GPA and 22 on MCATs). I was chosen as one of the top 23 to be a runner up for this. We were actually interviewed in Baylor College of Medicine by professors and students there in the same format that they interview medical student candidates. They used to also give a full scholarship through Baylor College of Medicine, but they stopped paying for Baylor tuition because it has been costing them too much.
Overall, to me, DeBakey was a difficult and stressful school. I had a teacher that taught at The Kinkaid School (a very good private school in Houston) and she said that DeBakey is just like Kinkaid except public and focuses on healthcare. You also have to take into consideration that the majority of students in DeBakey came from low income families, and many of the children there are first generation college students. Unlike Bellaire and St. John's, few students come from wealthy families. DeBakey did mean for the high school to help bring in more minorities into health professions. The building is also indeed old (but they are renovating it this year) and most of the laboratory equiptment many years old, which is in part also because there are no rich families to donate large sums of money to the school for new material.
I think you should try going to school in DeBakey before actually judging it, because it's not the typical high school, and every student there knows it. I have not met one student who attended DeBakey and said that it was easy or fun. I do know students who left DeBakey because they could not handle the work and went to other schools like Bellaire or Lamar and found it much easier. When other seniors in high school were getting out of school early, we had our faces in our books in the library studying for the Calculus or Physics test.
... and we did have a track (we did run around the track, but sometimes our teacher would have us run around the nearby neighborhood for... I don't know why. I guess the scene was nicer, LOL.), tennis court, and basketball court behind our gym, but DeBakey PE was much more than exercising. We wrote essays and studied kenesiology. My friends and I like to look back at it now and laugh at how dorky we were.
... I also don't know what 2 hallway building is being mentioned up there since DeBakey is a 3 story building (and has been since they built the school building itself... HSHP, before it was DeBakey, classes used to be held at Baylor College of Medicine).
BTW, most people don't recognize the school when I say "DeBakey'" since it was formerly called "High School for Health Professions." In fact, I had no idea who DeBakey was when I applied for the school. When I say I went to "HSHP," though, many people assume that I'm "socially ******ed," enjoy dissecting cats, love drawing blood from my classmates, like looking at my own urine and blood, and spent my last 2 years of high school in the Texas Medical Center, which is of course quite true
😛.
See
http://www.houstonpress.com/Issues/2006-03-02/news/feature.html
