Vicinihil is a cool guy both online and offline and I respect his opinion but in this case, I'll have to disagree.
You're smart enough to get into the VCU program and assuming that VCU is not your number one pick out of all the schools in the world, do you need the guarantee if you're applying out anyways? I'd think yes. With the application process as random as it is and given the possibility that you may stumble in undergrad (it happens to the best of us), its just much better to have the guarantee. If you want to come to VCU, its a dream come true and even if you don't, its a wonderful safety net.
Consider also that you can study things that you would otherwise not study. If I did not have the guarantee, I would have taken something easy like bio so I could get by with a good gpa and into med school. Instead, I decided to push myself to the limits to see how far I can go with the hardest curriculum that I could come up with. I could only do this knowing that if my GPA took a major hit, it wouldn't matter that much. You could just as easily take the time and slack off to have 4 years of "rest" before med school and travel abroad or do research at other schools. VCU lets you do what you want to do before med school and even lets you go somewhere else. What more can you ask for?
VCU's programs are a mixed bag with some being pretty crappy and some being very good. We have a relatively new engineering school with a brand new engineering building that was built across the street from the "old" school of engineering that was finished in 1998. Our biomedical engineering program is the only accredited undergrad BME program in Virginia. As someone mentioned before, we are "up and coming." and hope to be well known nationally as a very good school within 20 years. We strongly try to encourage undergraduate research participation through summer research programs both at the monroe park campus and the medical center. This year, four of our undergrads became Goldwater Scholars, that is more than the number that VA Tech, UVA, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and yes, even Emory can claim. Two of these were from our BME department.
VCU is not in the best of locations. Downtown richmond is kind of boring and can be unsafe at night. However, the campus is rapidly developing and there are all kinds of things being built. The area around the honors college is slated to be turned into townhouse style housing for students. and the remaining blocks at broad and belvedere are to be turned into student facilities and parking lots. A new life sciences engineering building is under construction behind the "old" school of engineering. On the med campus, a new 250 bed critical care hospital is nearly complete and so is the new student lounge, which is amazing. Sanger hall, which is the largest research building on campus, is undergoing renovations to revitalize the laboratory facilities and the nearby AD williams clinic and West Hospital will be replaced with a 10 story School of Medicine building that should be ready after 2010. As the campus expands, more of the problems associated with inner city richmond should be more distant as well.
VCU isn't for everybody but I had choices like you did, decided to go to VCU and never regretted my decision. I'm very proud of my school and even though I probably won't go to the med school here, I would not discourage anybody from doing the Gmed program.
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