your thoughts?

[tryin2suxede]

What are your thoughts on the sheer amounts of premed students at your university, if there is one?
I currently attend Wayne State University and am a sophomore, and i have seen that the number of premed students almost triple in the last couple of years at this university. This is getting to the point that the science classes are usually the ones that fill up the fastest during registration and have the most number of people (until most of them drop, of course)
I want to discuss why this kind of scene is existing, and whether it is good or bad for the future. Statistically speaking, more than half of these students will try forever to get into med school and never will. Some of these students, in my opinion, are probably never going to make good doctors anyway. (I don't mean to say that they are stupid, just that they lack other characteristics which will make them good doctors)

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[torshi]

Yea there's so many...I don't like it.

 

[mitchlucker]

Yeah, there were quite a bit at my school, but I kept getting As regardless of how many kids there were so obviously competition isn't too stiff.

There's a surprising amount of kids out there who are still pre-meds with a 3.2 GPA, just testing the waters, or pre-med for the sake of conversation.

It'll increase competition but for the right reasons, health care in general I think is one of the only solid professions that won't have too much trouble finding a job when all the baby boomers are retired.

 

[LoveTheRunner]

YEAH! how dare these people think they are worthy of entering the hallowed hospital halls. clearly only we sdn'ers have what it takes to be the true doctors. don't these other people know they're bound for failure?! they can't compete with us in academics, compassion and work ethic!

edit: dang. 3 semesters and the number tripled? that is impressive...

 

[Forthegood]

To be fair, I'd say most medical students don't make great doctors. Or even good ones. They make doctors, and for 99.99% of cases they will handle, that will suffice. They will have good practices and will be successful.

I am not a resident yet, but I've seen my opinion on the matter change from premed to med. It seems the closer you get, the more you see, the more distinct some physicians get. Calling someone a good doctor as a premed means almost nothing. It may mean slightly more (but not much) as a med student , because you work with them more and see differences. It will mean much more as a resident.

The truth of the matter is we shouldn't be so confident that we know what a good candidate looks like going in.

 

[StudyShy]

I hope all those Wayne Staters fail out, except for you OP, you're on SDN so you're cool.

I've noticed all the premeders coming out of the woodwork also. It's really scaring me. There are only so many spots available. Why do we all think that we can get in?

 

[oldyogurt]

i met a lot of pre meds when i was doing my post bac. it is mind boggling. but by the time I finished, some were still pre med, and some decided other careers in health care were better fits for them. nothing wrong with that. but sometimes I wonder what the equivalent of pre-med was like in the 19th century, if it was similar to today's situation with high competition and standardized testing at each stage.

 

[Frazier]

I hate all pre-meds that are without the scarlet letters 'SDN' on their sleeve.

 

[StudyShy]

i met a lot of pre meds when i was doing my post bac. it is mind boggling. but by the time I finished, some were still pre med, and some decided other careers in health care were better fits for them. nothing wrong with that. but sometimes I wonder what the equivalent of pre-med was like in the 19th century, if it was similar to today's situation with high competition and standardized testing at each stage.

You're funny. During the 1800s some didn't even go to med school; some simply declared themselves physicians. There wasn't much in the way of standardized testing, and there was far less regulation. The AMA wasn't even established until around 1850.

The Flexner Report of 1910 promulgated higher standards of medical education in the United States.

 

[Geneticist]

It seems to me like the number of pre-meds are decreasing rapidly at my school. Obviously that's going to change with the massive influx of freshman in the fall semester but many of my friends who were pre-meds are now business majors.

 

[em3761]

A lot of people start out as pre-med but the vast majority drop out somewhere along the way....I remember reading one article saying that 1/3 of incoming freshmen at WashU are premed. Pretty sure it doesn't stay that way for long.

here's the link if you're interested btw http://www.studlife.com/archives/Scene/2005/04/18/WashUspremedmortalityrate/

 

[cheesier]

I think that the vast majority of them are operating at a real disadvantage to people who know about SDN. Most people in the 'real world' don't know what goes into making a successful application (only something like 70% of applicants have clinical experience). I think that if you find this site early enough in your undergrad career, an acceptance is yours to mess up.

BTW, my school is about 8% science majors, and easily 25% of the incoming class was premed.

 

[Geneticist]

I think that the vast majority of them are operating at a real disadvantage to people who know about SDN. Most people in the 'real world' don't know what goes into making a successful application (only something like 70% of applicants have clinical experience). I think that if you find this site early enough in your undergrad career, an acceptance is yours to mess up.

I feel very fortunate to have stumbled upon this site. It already seems like I have the upper hand on most other pre-meds.

I actually started doing undergraduate research a couple of weeks ago partially because I discovered research was looked very positively upon by med schools. And honestly, I didn't know they cared about volunteer experience either. I was completely in the dark. Thanks, adviser.

 

[MCATism]

My school is full of premeds, in the traditional "I major in biomedical sciences" way.

I am a premed-hopeful with a more atypical major. It's hard to know who is premed really. Most people think I want to do things that are nothing like medicine. I haven't corrected them, mostly because listening to all of these overambitious first years telling me how they're going to go to Harvard for Cardiology - and "will not settle for less" - is ridiculous, and I hope not to be one of them. Although clearly, there's tons of people just going through the motions of what they think they are supposed to do, and you can spot them from a mile away. This number tends to decrease with each passing year

I didn't enter college with the intent in being a doctor, so it was weird sitting in 1000-student first year biology classes, where one of my professors slyly cracked the joke, "I'm sure only 5 or 6 of you want to become doctors.... the rest, research scientists, I bet."

No one laughed except me. Too bad.

 

[Frazier]

My school is full of premeds, in the traditional "I major in biomedical sciences" way.

I am a premed-hopeful with a more atypical major. It's hard to know who is premed really. Most people think I want to do things that are nothing like medicine. I haven't corrected them, mostly because listening to all of these overambitious first years telling me how they're going to go to Harvard for Cardiology - and "will not settle for less" - is ridiculous, and I hope not to be one of them. Although clearly, there's tons of people just going through the motions of what they think they are supposed to do, and you can spot them from a mile away. This number tends to decrease with each passing year

I didn't enter college with the intent in being a doctor, so it was weird sitting in 1000-student first year biology classes, where one of my professors slyly cracked the joke, "I'm sure only 5 or 6 of you want to become doctors.... the rest, research scientists, I bet."

No one laughed except me. Too bad.

1000 students? I am impressed. My largest section was 310 or so. The hall must be huge.

 

[Bombrainiac]

Economy sucks = more people applying to graduate and professional schools.
Don't worry about the numbers. A lot of those premeds aren't for real. They'll drop or have such terrible grades that they will end up selecting themselves out of the pool of applicants.

As an aside that you may be interested to know:
Your premed dean is only going to care about those students applying straight out of college. If you take a year to do research after college, or do a job, or go to graduate school and then to medical school, you don't figure into the acceptance statistics and your premed dean won't really give a hoot about what you do. BUT, when you apply to med school, you'll also be competing against those same graduates who took time after college to accomplish other things and THEN apply.