Does "prestige" of post-bacc matter?

[Tommyguns89]

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Some background on me:
I'm a 23 yr old humanities/liberal arts major who attended law school for a semester before dropping out. I didnt mind law school but before I went I was deciding between pursuing a post-bacc or attending law school and ultimately chose law school for the wrong reasons. It was cheaper(full scholarship) and much faster. All throughout the first semester I had med school on my mind. Ultimately I decided that you only get one shot at life so it makes sense to do what you want with it rather than settle for the easy way. Ill save my reasons for liking medicine over law for the interviews if I get any.Ultimately if I had a choice I would choose to Stonybrook Med School because it is close to home and I would be paying in state tuition.

Now I know gaining admissions to med school is a lot harder than it is for law school. Will the prestige of the program I select play a significant role? Also do the programs help you in getting opportunities for clinical experience? My undergrad GPA as it stands is around a 3.6, hopefully it is higher after the post-bacc. Would it make sense to try to get into the best program I can? Or will going to say Stony Brook's post-bacc program suffice? I know linkage is rare, Id be happy just getting in as a regular applicant. Price is a concern as I have 35k in undergrad/law school debt, but imo it doesnt make sense to cheap out here as medical school is going to be extremely expensive regardless.

Thank You

 

[Goucher2013]

The prestige of a program doesn't matter - the quality of the applicant does. Selective programs simply screen for who they believe will be the best med school applicants. But that's a subjective notion, and it also ignores the many people who will rise to become the most applicants during their time as postbacs.

I should also note that many, many highly-suitable people never apply, either out of choice or ignorance that these programs exist.

The most "prestigious" postbacs offer certain advantages, such as brevity (1 year for all requirements) and linkages. But they derive their prestige from the quality of their applicants, so it's the opposite, for instance, of someone coasting on the prestige of their undergraduate degree.

Go the route that's the best fit for your goals. As long as you are an interesting candidate and meet a certain baseline for rigor in your pre-med classes, that's pretty much all you need.

To answer about clinical opportunities, most postbac programs have lists of opportunities, and the better ones ensure that those opportunities are easily available from year to year. But ever year, you'll also get people who do their own thing, just like someone in an unstructured program would. Getting clinical opportunities is actually very, very easy.

 

[darkjedi]

Yes and no.

I can only specifically talk about Bryn Mawr, but our program director has very good relationships with many adcoms. I have heard more than once from adcoms that they really love people from the Bryn Mawr program specifically.

While it is true that most of the applicants coming from these program have been pre-selected to be great candidates, the advising and support that a respected formal program provides is unparalleled as compared to lesser known programs. If you take advantage of them, you are able to set yourself in a better position to leverage your application. For example, I was able to easily pick up volunteering gigs as well as research positions established by past Bryn Mawr postbacs. Many postbacs (even in places like Columbia or UPenn) are set up as ways to just collect tuition money from additional postbacs who pay full price for tuition. Whether or not you drop out or decide not to apply really does not matter to them. At the very least, in these formal programs, because the administration prides themselves on being able to get nearly all of their students into medical school, it is in their best interest for you to succeed.

I am at a top 5 institution now and 14 of the ~160 people in the MS1 class are graduates of the Bryn Mawr program, outnumbering the kids from places like Harvard ugrad. I think this speaks volumes as what my medical school's adcom thinks about Bryn Mawr postbacs. This is however largely in part due to the linkage programs that 'prestigious' post bacs have set up.