How important is your undergrad univ?

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k12123

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I was just wondering how much of a disadvantage it is that i am going to a small state school, a CSU. Some say it doesn't matter but sometime soon i'm going to be competing with people who went to IVYs and other top-notch schools. Thanks.
 
I was just wondering how much of a disadvantage it is that i am going to a small state school, a CSU. Some say it doesn't matter but sometime soon i'm going to be competing with people who went to IVYs and other top-notch schools. Thanks.

I went to an elite school, I liked it and I had access to great resources but if I could do it over I'd probably have gone to my state school. There are some things you can't put a price on. A pretentious, errr, prestigious ungergrad isn't one of them.

Do adcoms completely ignore the fact that you're coming from a name brand school? They factor it in. But they know people are often limited by their finances and they know most of this pomp and arrogance doesn't mean much and you'll get your fair shake. If anything, being a bigger fish can be an advantage in classes that are on a curve.
 
I'm sure that no one has heard of the undergraduate university that I went to...unless you're Methodist.
 
I'm new, well relatively 🙂.

To avoid getting a whole ton of sarcastic and/or generally unhelpful responses to your future questions, try and do a quick search (there's a "Search this Forum" and "Search this Thread" button near the top right) .. chances are, if you're just starting off and have a lot of standard questions, they've been asked and answered over and over again. You'll save yourself some time waiting for responses and everyone on here from having to retype answers. They also recently launched this "Premed FAQ" section (I believe I gave my two cents on this same question, albeit in a slightly different form, on there a few weeks ago)

To briefly answer your question, every med school will take your undergrad institution into account differently, though (in my experience) more so in a situation opposite of yours .. if they know you're coming from a very competitive or rigorous program, they might cut you a little bit of slack. I've never heard of a school docking you for coming from a smaller university.

Also, the MCAT is a normalizing factor that helps schools make a more objective decision, i.e. if you have a very high GPA but scored quite poorly on the MCAT, it might draw attention to and put your high grades into context.

At the end of the day, though, if you have good grades, a solid MCAT and diverse clinical and nonclinical experiences, no one is going to reject you because you went to a CSU vs. a UC or some other school.
 
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