Vanderbilt for premed

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sure.

1. Look over prospective majors - what courses are required, how many hours, are the professors well-rated online. Pre-med requires a certain set of classes, but it is not a major, and major requirements can vary from campus to campus.
2. Pre-med population - are you 1 of 2000 students starting out pre-med or 1 of 400 and of what quality are those students? Average ACT, etc. are only directional but worth noting.
3. Social - is one more a party atmosphere that will suck a student in and away from their studies? Is the other a white knuckle cutthroat environment?
4. Pre-health advising - is there an advising office and is it well-rated online and by students - for example on other boards.
5. Some colleges show what % make it to med school - though they game the numbers at times. What if one school has a 60% med school acceptance for undergrads and the other 20%?
6. Does one school offer more opportunities for research and health-related activities that med schools want to see?

There are others - but I think this would be a good start.

Thank you. I appreciate that you took the time to write out this response and a lot of it was helpful. But it doesn’t actually answer the question that I asked, which is how would you know the GPAs of likely med school applicants?

For context, I’ve often heard the same advice given to perspective law school applicants. Go where you’re likely to achieve a 3.99 rather than a place like Hopkins or Chicago. But how do you really _know_ ? It seems like conjecture and the presents are absence of a good advisor. Doesn’t really tell us whether organic is graded on a tight curve or not.

You have to talk to students and faculty. Top schools such as Vanderbilt get lots of kids in who are “average” gpa at Vanderbilt. UMD does not get average kids in to med school. One would need to be top 10-25% there. Can your kid be average or above at Vanderbilt? Look at the pre -test optional test scores and asses whether the student is likely to be above average there. Premed classes are curved, and med schools compare applicants to their peers from their undergrad school first. The national comparison is the MCAt, which favors good standardized test takers. The rest is ECs or research or both. Smaller schools with lots of undergraduate funding that are close to a med school are easier to get the experience compared to large publics.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would agree, especially with the last piece. Some schools fast track their own, plus others have the BS/MD programs too.

The happiness part makes sense, but I do think the where matters also. UMD and Vanderbilt are very different.

If it helps, here are reports:

Vanderbilt - https://www.vanderbilt.edu/hpao/documents/2023%20Annual%20Report.pdf

Note that they, nor really any school, can precisely tell you how many students started out as pre-med as first-year students. So 78% accept rate is impressive but consider how many kids dropped out along the way. Also note the top major is Medicine, Health and Society, which allows more customization to student strengths. Biology is lower on the list of majors, which is different than some other schools.

And here is Maryland:

https://prehealth.umd.edu/prospective-students/facts-figures

Also this report might be helpful:
https://www.aamc.org/media/9636/download

This. The acceptance rate is not out of the kids who started as "pre-med" freshman year. It's out of the number of kids who complete all the pre-recs and apply to medical school. This number (the ones who actually apply) is probably 10% of the kids who enter college saying they are pre-med. The pre-med classes (at ANY university) are weed-out classes, aren't easy and if you get a B in any of them, you're pretty much out of the running for medical school, at least on a traditional path (some of these kids who get a B but desperately want to go to medical school will repeat a class or do an entire post-bac program or apply to a Caribbean med school, etc). The large majority of the pre-meds with a B (or more than one) will shift courses, never apply to medical school and are not counted in the university's medical school admission numbers.

This depends on the school. Premeds with some Bs but mostly As get into med school all the time from my kid’s T10. The average mcat score there is high. As long as they have the average gpa (3.7) and a good mcat score they get in to US med schools. Even some 3.5s get in as long as top mcat, which most of the students get easily, as most are excellent test takers. 3.9 is only needed if they are chasing a big name med school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You should really research placement stats for both schools. Also whether you want to spend that much $ on undergrad and then potentially med school if it comes to pass. Remember that college GPA and MCAT score need to be high, so consider where that is more likely to happen.

https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-medical-school

Didn’t realize Berkeley such a feeder

They are a feeder because they are so large. If you look at the list adjusted for undergraduate enrollment, Berkeley does not appear.