Is Boston University as good as their ranking?

BU is a good school but I think the ranking is a little misleading because of huge amounts of research dollars that just started flowing into the school.

I would put BU with Tufts, Dartmouth, Brown etc. It is a really great place for clinical training. Look at the Residency directors ranking which is more indicative.

 

I had a really good experience there and liked it a lot. What kind of bad experiences did people have?

 

Well it's far from the T, but apparently it is serviced very well by buses. I think some people exaggerated it a lot, especially the students at Tufts that I met who went on and on about BUs terrible location. In fact I think it's in a much nicer location than Tufts. I didn't get a chance to explore what was in the area though.

 

funny, not like Tuft's NEMC is in a great place.... even if it has a T stop.

now if i could just get an interview at either of the two....

 

BU is still a great school, but I don't think it's a top 30 program (They NIH research money helped boost them up). When I rank schools i look at the Residency Director's score and Peer Score the most, and using those BU is more around 40ish, which is still a great school.

Furthermore rankings aren't everything. If someone really feels like they fit well at BU, love the curriculum, clincial teaching/experience, then it is the best school for them.

 

Where can you find the residency director's score?

 

US News & World Report


BU is a number *****, IMO

 

I don't think that is so true because I was given an interview with an MCAT below 30. I am also not an URM.

 

It happens. They are still number whores.

 

Rankings are given based on largely objective criteria, so they are ranked where they are ranked. BU's upward move is reportedly tied to a big influx of research grant dollars - Might be a one time thing, though. If they stay at that level for multiple years, then its a more legit ranking. But either way, all schools are playing the same ranking game and if BU's stats say it is in the top 30, then it is.

 

i actually think they put more emphasis on gpa than mcat. i saw a lot of ppl on sdn get rejected pre-secondary from them even with a high 35-plus score, and they had low gpa's. (i think the same goes for some places like georgetown and vanderbilt!) could be wrong though, who knows what's going on in the heads of those crazy adcoms.

 

Boston, quite frankly, sucks. I base this only on the fact that they rejected me post-secondary via email.

 

To clarify, in the past 4 years BU has been 28, 42, 40, 39. If anything they were dropping. The huge jump is due to a one time gigantic NIH grant to build a big BSL 4 research center and will be temporary. In fact, I hear there was a bit of controversy as to whether it was fair to include it at all. BU will probably return to the 40ish range once it is gone.

 

Yeah, BU is far from downtown if you consider 2 miles far! You can grab the Siverline express bus from BU for 90 cents and be downtown in 10 minutes. Plus there are cabs all over the place.

BU is on the edge of a great neighborhood and a not so great neighborhood. You could live in Back Bay which is a wealthy neighborhood and ride your bike to school everyday. You could even live at Harvard in Cambridge and take a bus in 20 minutes to be at school everyday.

 

Bingo.

Also see UTMB's rise due to their BSL4.

 

I don't know. But I do know that after receiving their secondary I was really put off by their tone. To me they just sounded like a bunch of assholes with, "our average gpa and mcat are so and so, highly competitive, we're a prestigious institution, blah blah blah..." It just turned me off, I knew there was no way I would fit in there, and so I withdrew.