My advice to all high schoolers is still to go to the best school that you can afford
Really depends on the school in question. I know I will always advise some extreme caution before heading off to Hopkins, Chicago et al, because even if you
are in that minority that can survive you're gonna have a rough time. But for some place that takes great care of its premeds like Brown, would second your advice in a heartbeat.
Are you really denying the fact that undergrads are vastly different in terms of competitiveness?
If one student would perform way differently at different tiers of undergrads it follows that at a certain point, he/she is negatively impacting or even destroying his/her medical school chances since admissions care so much about GPA.
I too was surprised by SDN, many (perhaps even most) posters when I first became active here did argue all universities are comparable, and that the kid struggling to make a 3.3 at MIT would still have B+ grades at his state school system. You're right about the net negative impact though, unless you're in that top couple deciles you would have been better off elsewhere. At least in my experience, weedout really is weedout, with most people dropping because they can't get A's rather than because they decide medicine isn't for them.
I really wish this was something more on high schooler's radar when choosing colleges. At the handful of most intense schools, the majority of premed hopefuls are making a mistake by matriculating there. For some it's going to only have some minor consequence, like being competitive only for their state MD school instead of fancy private names, while for others it's going to mean year(s) of grade repair or cost them their shot at MD altogether. Grade repair is a huge help for people happy to go DO, but it's not easy to repair a GPA that is low because of many B and B- grades (rather than from a few C/C- or fail grades).
Yes, everyone should save themselves some stress by going to the easiest which tends to be also the cheapest school they can.
As someone else already said, the cheapest option for many is actually the fancy famous private name. My .02 is that scholarship to a solid LAC or a state school with an honors college system is the best option.
the fewer pre-meds your school produces, the bigger the boost
What? Why? Having a name like Hopkins, Duke, or Harvard on your app is not a reduced boost for sending off a lot of medical applicants. If anything, your school being well known as a premed powerhouse is going to help.
I was told by an admissions officer at a medical school that her office did absolutely nothing to normalize transcripts to account for the varying rigor of undergraduate colleges and majors. The fact is adcoms are lazy, stupid and cowardly.
There isn't a literal +x.x to GPA, but there is consideration of alma mater
for private med schools. Which is unfortunate to the people with low 3's from a famous undergrad, since most of the med schools with accessible stats are public schools that won't care at all about their college.
It's not as if the numbers they publish will get normalized. Even if it's a private school that considers alma maters, and they realize a 3.55 at Cornell demonstrates as much academic ability as a 3.85 at UC Santa Cruz, they all love themselves high numbers and aren't going to fill their class with mid 3's GPAs.
It was easier to get good grades at my "top 10 private school" than at a school like UCLA. What you can (and should) do is cherry pick some classes to take at a second tier state university when you "go home" for the summer. Physics, 2nd semester O-chem, etc.
Not really fair game to compare to UCLA or Cal though, is it, since many of the students there are the same caliber you'd see at a private top 20. I'd have to hazard a guess that adcoms will take note of people who dodge stuff like Ochem or Biochem at their own college.
Getting a 3.0 undergrad GPA doesn't suggest that you have what it takes academically to succeed in medical school.
Well, even people with a 3.0 and 30 have less than a 2% rate of academic withdrawal/dismissal from med school. Hell even the 2.9 / 22 bin made it through more than 95% of the time. The bars for admission are set much, much, much higher than they need to be in that regard, if I was a betting man I'd put quite a lot on a student with a 3.0 from a tough undergrad being able to academically survive in med school.
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Nerd.