Question about Stanford

[diosa428]

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For those who attend or have interviewed at Stanford:
My pre-med advisor told me that Stanford requires their students to declare their specialty in the 2nd year. I think that she's confusing this with declaring the Scholarly Concentration. Who's right? Also, how much does your Scholarly Concentration have to do with your future specialty choice? I'm very interested in public health and would probably do an MPH through that track, but have no idea what I want to specialize in and do not want to be limited b/c I didn't do research. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[NSMedStudent]

Hi Diosa,

I'm a second-year at Stanford. I would imagine that your advisor meant Scholarly Concentration, not specialty. No med school in the country would expect you to decide on your specialty before you hit clinics (that's really where you make your decision because you can't really know what things are like until you do them). My class was the first to go through the new curriculum and a lot has changed, so to be honest, I'm not sure when you are expected to declare your SC at this time. For us it was spring quarter of first year, but some people ended up changing their minds later anyway (just like in college) and as long as you meet the requirements for whichever SC you end up choosing in the end, it's fine. Your SC doesn't have to impact your future choice of specialty. I think it's a great idea to do an MPH (and if you aren't aware of how it works, our students go to Berkeley for a year to do an MPH - Berkeley has one of the best MPH programs in the country from what I understand). If you go the public health route in preclinical years and end up choosing a very specialized, competitive academic field once you've hit clinics, like dermatology or neurosurgery or opthalmology or something, then you might want to consider doing a little bit of research in that field before applying. You could take a few months off during your clinical years (we are required to do 15 and a half months of rotations out of 22 total, so there is time if you work it correctly), or you could take a whole year off between third and fourth (some people do this in order to figure out what they want to go into first and then do research in that). So you have a lot of options and a lot of flexibility at this school. Good luck with your applications! 🙂

For those who attend or have interviewed at Stanford:
My pre-med advisor told me that Stanford requires their students to declare their specialty in the 2nd year. I think that she's confusing this with declaring the Scholarly Concentration. Who's right? Also, how much does your Scholarly Concentration have to do with your future specialty choice? I'm very interested in public health and would probably do an MPH through that track, but have no idea what I want to specialize in and do not want to be limited b/c I didn't do research. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[diosa428]

That was really helpful, thanks!