Undergraduate Institution

[Wylde]

I've heard that where you did your undergraduate doesn't matter, but is it true that medical schools hold no weight to your undergraduate institution (their reputation, etc.)?

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[bubbachuck]

no i doubt this is true. it holds weight in that a difficult major at a very competitive school (let's go extreme and say you did EE at MIT) may make up for a lower GPA. how much weight this carries will vary from school to school.

 

[IHeartNerds]

I think that most medical school ADCOMs want to not favor one school over another, but in the end most classes are skewed in some way. This is complicated, though. Many of the best-testing students who blew away their PSAT then their SAT then had the finances/etc to get into super-name-brand-schools are still great students when applying to medical school. Therefore, you get a population bias towards schools like Yale and Princeton and Stanford, but not necessarily from the school -- from the students that happened to go there. This is the same argument as about Step 1 scores ... were the JHU med students made into supermen or did they start that way? Hard to tell.

Also, geographic influences are just going to happen. IU has an enormous amount of Indiana residents, many of whom stayed in-state for undergrad, and there aren't THAT many colleges in the state of Indiana. So, bias again. Same here at Penn, where lots of students are either from Penn UG, or Haverford, etc.

I'm speaking as a guy who went to a good but largely unknown LAC and ended up Ivy so hey, anything is possible. But be sure to tease out the real reason it looks like ADCOMs are "favoring" certain schools -- it may have nothing to do with the quality of education there.

 

[mikedc813]

Schools DO matter. Some schools are known to inflate their grades so that's important to take into consideration. ADCOMs generally know how each school grades just by looking at the history of previous applicants from each school. Like someone already said, MIT looks more impressive than others...

 

[mynamewastaken]

1. EVERY private school is comparable in price to Ivy's....the argument about being privileged, rich parents, etc.. is old and misinformed.

2. IMO grade inflation IS NOT the thing adcoms sit around the table and consider. I'd say it is much more likely that the *good* reputation of a school is given weight if anything.

I know neither of my comments contribute much to the OP's inquiry, but I thought i'd give my two cents.

 

[ADeadLois]

I wish there were more threads about this.


Two bottom lines:

(1) A higher GPA usually trumps a lower GPA, regardless of the school and/or major. Do the best you can and go from there.

(2) No one really knows how adcoms view undergraduate insitutions, their difficulty and their reputation except the adcoms themselves. People can get into from schools ranging from West Podunk University to Harvard. I'm sure considerations are given to schools based on previous applicant pools, but not enough to give any significant advantage to one school over another.


People love to cite anecdotal evidence ("but my advisor told me blah, blah"). The fact of the matter is that no one really knows because there's no evidence to support any conclusion with regards to how adcoms view undergraduate schools. It's all speculation.

 

[maestro1625]

some schools may adjust your GPA a bit, but the GPA is such a minor factor when compared to your MCAT, that it hardly matters. Once you get here you realize that there are students from both the highbrow pretentious schools and the real ****hole schools, and that the difference between them is pretty much nonexistent. We've got guys from Penn who are near failing, and guys from Penn State at the top of the class.