Things HS students never consider

[3bamboo]

Hey everyone, I am a senior at a small-ish university and thought I'd offer some facts I had never even thought about when choosing a school:

1. Think about when college graduation is and when grades will be posted. This is super minor and shouldn't be your deciding factor but it is definitely relevant. When applying to medical school you need to get your transcripts sent ASAP as soon as finals end. Some schools are finished by late June, others like mine finish late May. For medical schools in Texas, this means you will be at least a month behind all other applicants who were able to submit their application when it opened on May 1st. Honestly, it kind of sucks.. and you never know just how much that extra month might have blown your chance of getting in. All universities have an academic calendar posted online, check it out. Late June/ early May is good.......... late May kind of sucks.

2. Liberal arts education vs regular state education. There are SO many unnecessary courses I have had to take at my liberal-arts Jesuit university. Essentially my degree was half science half random required classes. This worked out OK for me, I like learning about random stuff and it helped build my intelligence as a whole but it is definitely not for everyone. It also kind of sucked that I was not able to take more interesting science classes because I was too busy taking literature and foreign languages.. Bigger picture: if you like academic fulfillment as a whole then go liberal-arts, if you just want to focus on science and move on then go public university.

3. Small schools are a blessing and a curse. In my school, almost every teacher in the biology and chemistry department knew my name... and that is not uncommon at all. Small schools give you huge opportunity to talk with your teachers and have them get to know you, this is HUGE when it comes to asking for LOR but it also means there will be a very narrow field of study. If you are debating MD or PhD I would avoid small schools, just because there is so much more opportunity for specialized classes at bigger schools. If you are just getting a degree and then going straight to a health-professions school, a small-school shouldn't be a problem.

4. Go to a school that facilitates a solid backup plan. Being a freshman premed is sort of a joke at my school. Of the incoming 100-person freshman biology class, probably 90% raise their hands and say they are premed. After the first test a good 30% drop out of biology and change majors. After O-chem an additional 50% change career goals. Yet another 50% change plans when they can't do all the LOR, shadowing, volunteer work, etc etc. Out of an initial class of 90 people claiming premed, id say less than 15 end up applying and less than 10 get in. So plan for a backup, you may realize your heart is actually set on electrical engineering or some other major, it is VERY common.

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[SteinmetzMD]

Awesome advice man, I'll keep all that in mind for sure

 

[PapaGuava]

Hey everyone, I am a senior at a small-ish university and thought I'd offer some facts I had never even thought about when choosing a school:

1. Think about when college graduation is and when grades will be posted. This is super minor and shouldn't be your deciding factor but it is definitely relevant. When applying to medical school you need to get your transcripts sent ASAP as soon as finals end. Some schools are finished by late June, others like mine finish late May. For medical schools in Texas, this means you will be at least a month behind all other applicants who were able to submit their application when it opened on May 1st. Honestly, it kind of sucks.. and you never know just how much that extra month might have blown your chance of getting in. All universities have an academic calendar posted online, check it out. Late June/ early May is good.......... late May kind of sucks.

2. Liberal arts education vs regular state education. There are SO many unnecessary courses I have had to take at my liberal-arts Jesuit university. Essentially my degree was half science half random required classes. This worked out OK for me, I like learning about random stuff and it helped build my intelligence as a whole but it is definitely not for everyone. It also kind of sucked that I was not able to take more interesting science classes because I was too busy taking literature and foreign languages.. Bigger picture: if you like academic fulfillment as a whole then go liberal-arts, if you just want to focus on science and move on then go public university.

3. Small schools are a blessing and a curse. In my school, almost every teacher in the biology and chemistry department knew my name... and that is not uncommon at all. Small schools give you huge opportunity to talk with your teachers and have them get to know you, this is HUGE when it comes to asking for LOR but it also means there will be a very narrow field of study. If you are debating MD or PhD I would avoid small schools, just because there is so much more opportunity for specialized classes at bigger schools. If you are just getting a degree and then going straight to a health-professions school, a small-school shouldn't be a problem.

Good advice to be picked and looked at. Thanks for sharing! I chose to attend a smaller populated private university but its not "too" small. so it will be a perfect connection with my professors especially in core classes.

 

[3bamboo]

I might have been a little late, what month do most HS students get accepted into university?

 

[SteinmetzMD]

I might have been a little late, what month do most HS students get accepted into university?

I'd venture to say most are accepted by Christmas.... Most apply in the Fall

 

[3bamboo]

I'd venture to say most are accepted by Christmas.... Most apply in the Fall

Ha.. 4 years and I've already forgotten

 

[californicati0n]

I might have been a little late, what month do most HS students get accepted into university?

The regular decision results usually come out on April 1, although there are lots of schools that send them at a random time in the last week of March. You find out in December if you apply early action or early decision to a college.

 

[Apoplexy__]

Also, for those dead-set on medicine: Med school acceptance rates are BS. Use other sources than the self-reported admission statistics.

My alma mater only counted applicants that had a LOR written for them by the pre-med advisor. So yeah, we have a 97% med school acceptance rate, but it's only of the applicants the advisor chooses. That's about as valuable as saying "of great applicants, 97% got in". Well, no shyat.

 

[Iso4ane]

Also as I've said before, plan ahead. You should already know what classes you are taking every semester for your four years there. I know it seems a little extreme, but trust me surprises suck.

I was lucky and I had was the second one in my family to go down this path, and had some good advice.

And find people you trust in the class ahead of you to give you advice on professors. When people say a class is hard/easy, you have to factor who is giving you said advice, your average bloke who thinks D=Diploma telling you a class is hard and that triple major engineering whiz telling you a class is hard are two different things.

And be honest with yourself, depending on your school there are a lot of smart people around and you should know where you stack up against your competition.

And this is for all the lazy folk like me, don't do more than you have to and 93% is an A as much as 99% (unless you school does +/-; then i feel sorry for you.) And the reason I didn't say 90%, is so you give yourself a little wiggle room. As a corollary, if you have a 87.5% and need a 100% on the final, sorry to say that unless you literally missed one exam and got perfect scores on the rest, don't waste your time studying for that final, take that B like a man. use your time elsewhere. It's also helpful to know how many points your need on the final to keep your grade. Assuming all the test are worth the same (100pts); your wiggle room for an A is 10+any number of points you got above a 90 on previous exams; no need to pull out a calculator, and even if the exams are not worth the same it's still not hard math.

If you have trouble, talk to the professor or the TA's, go to office hours etc. Actually go to office hours even if you do not need the help, those LoRs will be much easier to come by. (I wish I knew this.)

Sorry for the ramblings...but that's all i have for now.

 

[Apoplexy__]

don't do more than you have to and 93% is an A as much as 99% (unless you school does +/-; then i feel sorry for you.)

THIS. Oh god, this. I can't tell you how much incredibly harder it makes getting a 3.5+ GPA for med school when an A- = 3.67 GPA. Absolutely ask about this with every school you consider matriculating in.

 

[3bamboo]

THIS. Oh god, this. I can't tell you how much incredibly harder it makes getting a 3.5+ GPA for med school when an A- = 3.67 GPA. Absolutely ask about this with every school you consider matriculating in.

Medical school applications count A- as 3.7 so your GPA should be boosted a little bit from what your school has calculated, right?

 

[Apoplexy__]

Medical school applications count A- as 3.7 so your GPA should be boosted a little bit from what your school has calculated, right?

Going from 3.67 to 3.7 is less than a 1% increase. It would make a 3.5 GPA turn into 3.52, assuming 2/3 of the credits were A-'s. Not to mention that if they round like that, then my school's 3.33 for B+'s would round down to 3.3 and probably only "boost" the total GPA by 0.01 at most.

On this note of looking into your school's individual grading system, also check it out for applying to med school. For some reason I had this silly notion that almost every med school was a pass/fail grading system. Turns out my school rigorously calculates GPAs, and bars anyone from extracurriculars if it's below 3.00. Surprise!

 

[3bamboo]

unless of course you are at my school who has made regulations preventing you from fulfilling your cores at cheaper schools. Ugh my school is making so much bank.

 

[OCDOCDOCD]

Some more advice:

- Get a back up major. The odds are very against you getting into medical school. The reality is that 92% of starry eyed freshman pre-meds, all sure they'll become a doctor one day, never make it to med school. Your biology BS/BA isn't going to get you a job beyond being a lab tech (not a job you can make a career out of), a PhD is also a bad idea unless you were set on that to begin with, and only certain MS degrees will have a chance at landing you an industry job. With a degree in business, computer science, or engineering you'll have excellent career choices even if you fail to get into med school.

- Go to a school with lots of active research. It'll make getting research experience a lot easier. If you go to a small LAC you're probably going to have to rely on summer research internships which are extremely competitive and still inferior to a long term research project conducted over several years. Likewise, going to a school with a university affiliated hospital will make your life much easier when getting shadowing and clinical experience.

- Don't listen to bs about "small class sizes" and "professor interaction". If a school is so small that every class is truly that intimate, you're going to have crap for research and clinical opportunities. Larger schools that boast about their "small" class sizes are lying to your face. I went to a top 20 that liked to brag about how most of its classes had 15 or fewer people in them. What they failed to mention is that this only held true in the humanities. When it came to the sciences class sizes were 30-60 students, at least. The pre-reqs and required major classes were always lecture halls filled with hundreds of students, which is pretty common at most other colleges. Professors were easy to get a hold of though; the thing about "professor interaction" is that even at the largest colleges with the most swollen class sizes, professors still have office hours and most people don't attend them. If you want, you can have a 1 on 1 chat with your professors any time you wish, and in all honesty it'll be the exact same at small LACs as well.

- Do worry about cost of attendance. Unless you're attending HYPSM, debt should be your primary concern. As a teenager you're most likely hand waving away the issue of student loan debt, because everyone around you is telling you not to worry about it. They're wrong. I would strongly recommend not going more than $15,000 into debt over college. Not only does this make your life easier down the road, but should you fail to get into med school (remember, 92% of pre-meds don't) it also means you aren't one of those poor SOBs stuck paying back loans until they're dead. You do NOT want to be the Starbucks barrista with $120,000 of 12% interest private loan debt.

- School prestige stops mattering after you exit the top 25 (and you get decreasing returns going from top 5 to top 10 to top 25). In terms of med school, prestige doesn't matter at all. If you think anyone knows that (small private college) is ranked 40 places higher than (in-state public school) you're kidding yourself.

 

[bearlolz]

Some more advice:

- School prestige stops mattering after you exit the top 25 (and you get decreasing returns going from top 5 to top 10 to top 25). In terms of med school, prestige doesn't matter at all. If you think anyone knows that (small private college) is ranked 40 places higher than (in-state public school) you're kidding yourself.

Medical school prestige is irrelevant in a different factor: if everything works out you can repay all debt in a year.