My husband is MD/PhD and works as a professor at a medical school in the South. I asked him your questions, and he said he would recommend Pomona for pre-med or bio graduate study. He thinks Pomona will offer your son more opportunities, especially if he is not particularly aggressive; like maybe he could find a great intellectual/professional mentor there.

Tufts is in Boston, which is good for pre-med, but he described that the Boston pre-med opportunities are a bit of feeding frenzy.

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Anonymous wrote:All of these schools have very good reputations with medical schools...research opportunities are honestly going to be harder and harder everywhere with federal funds drying up.

Pomona is not an R1 — they fund student stipend to work with professors out their endowment.

Which is very advantageous in this current landscape. They also have access to 3 other science departments for research. In terms of total opportunities, these are pretty similarly sized institutions, but The Claremont Colleges are not going to depend on exhaustive amounts of federal grants getting cut and they have more funding opportunities for 1-on-1 research with faculty. Tufts (#24) and Pomona (#12) are even similarly ranked for feeders to medical school. Pomona ranks 5th for feeders to top medical schools, while Tufts is 45th, which also isn't a dramatic difference.

Data source:https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/from-pre-med-to-md-understanding-the-pathways-to-medical-school/

Anonymous wrote:All of these schools have very good reputations with medical schools...research opportunities are honestly going to be harder and harder everywhere with federal funds drying up.

Pomona is not an R1 — they fund student stipend to work with professors out their endowment.

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Anonymous wrote:Wondering whether places like tufts that are known for premed offer more opportunities, but that it is really competitive to get them— if student comes to college interested in science/premed, has some health care related volunteering but hasn’t had research experience before, would a place like tufts or a Slac like Pomona be better? Wondering about pros and cons more generally for science/premed for this type of student at places known for premed (tufts, wash u, Emory) vs Slacs (wasp, Haverford, Wesleyan, bates).

oh gosh, if you are premed and go to Tufts, you have Tufts Medical Center, Mass Eye and Ear, Brigham and Womens, Mass General, Boston Childrens, Beth Israel, Dana Farber, and on and on. All offer internships, co-ops, volunteering. Being a pre-med in Boston is a major boost.

Most of the good opportunities like internships, much more common than co-ops, are during the summer-so you still have national competition. There's nothing really special about tufts medical acceptance rate compared to any other top school.

Anonymous wrote:Wondering whether places like tufts that are known for premed offer more opportunities, but that it is really competitive to get them— if student comes to college interested in science/premed, has some health care related volunteering but hasn’t had research experience before, would a place like tufts or a Slac like Pomona be better? Wondering about pros and cons more generally for science/premed for this type of student at places known for premed (tufts, wash u, Emory) vs Slacs (wasp, Haverford, Wesleyan, bates).

oh gosh, if you are premed and go to Tufts, you have Tufts Medical Center, Mass Eye and Ear, Brigham and Womens, Mass General, Boston Childrens, Beth Israel, Dana Farber, and on and on. All offer internships, co-ops, volunteering. Being a pre-med in Boston is a major boost.

Anonymous wrote:All of these schools have very good reputations with medical schools...research opportunities are honestly going to be harder and harder everywhere with federal funds drying up.

+1!

All of these schools have very good reputations with medical schools...research opportunities are honestly going to be harder and harder everywhere with federal funds drying up.

Wondering whether places like tufts that are known for premed offer more opportunities, but that it is really competitive to get them— if student comes to college interested in science/premed, has some health care related volunteering but hasn’t had research experience before, would a place like tufts or a Slac like Pomona be better? Wondering about pros and cons more generally for science/premed for this type of student at places known for premed (tufts, wash u, Emory) vs Slacs (wasp, Haverford, Wesleyan, bates).

OP where did he pick?

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Anonymous wrote:The advantages of tufts are its size and location. SLACs are great if you find your people relatively quickly but can be isolating if you don’t.

They're the same size.

Tufts is 6800, Pomona 1700.

Pomona is a part of continuous consortium of campus attached to the hip who participate in daily academic, sports, and social life- it has 6000 undergrads. Unless you think the separate colleges of tufts are islands where students between can’t interact, these schools are roughly equivalent in undergraduate size.

A consortium is not the same as a university. Stick to apples to apples comparisons.

Very fundamentally different. Cause in a normal university, people of different colleges can't take classes together or eat in the same dining hall...oh wait-

In a normal university, you don’t have to see if there is room left after all the kids from the home college have registered.

That's not how registration works at the 5Cs. Everyone registers at the same time for the same classes.
Also, that statement isn't even true. There's colleges where you have to wait for there to be space available if you are looking for a competitive class in another college.
A Pitzer student will enter a Pomona history class at the same time as a Pomona student.

Students complain about priority registration, i.e. priority to students from that college. Interestingly, Pomona does not do this as much as the other consortium colleges so their students get the worst of both worlds, losing out to kids from other colleges when registering for a Pomona class and then getting block from a H-M or C-M class because they do give priority to their students.

Harvey mudd gives priority to core classes, because the kids need to graduate. DD has taken multiple physics and math courses-there’s no priority. You’ll run into priority issues with cmc Econ but Pomona students aren’t supposed to be taking cmc Econ classes in the first place. This is not an actual issue according to DD

If there are classes thar are off limits to other members of the consortium, then it isn’t comparable to a single university at all.

Didn’t go to either of these schools, but hard disagree. There were so many courses you couldn’t take if
you weren’t in a certain college/major at my university. Universities aren’t a free for all.

+1, people here would say Oxford isn’t a university with these ridiculous ideas of registration. Almost every university has restrictions on intra college registration. Good luck taking engineering courses or cs classes at most universities as a completely different major.

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The advantages of tufts are its size and location. SLACs are great if you find your people relatively quickly but can be isolating if you don’t.

They're the same size.

Tufts is 6800, Pomona 1700.

Pomona is a part of continuous consortium of campus attached to the hip who participate in daily academic, sports, and social life- it has 6000 undergrads. Unless you think the separate colleges of tufts are islands where students between can’t interact, these schools are roughly equivalent in undergraduate size.

A consortium is not the same as a university. Stick to apples to apples comparisons.

Very fundamentally different. Cause in a normal university, people of different colleges can't take classes together or eat in the same dining hall...oh wait-

In a normal university, you don’t have to see if there is room left after all the kids from the home college have registered.

That's not how registration works at the 5Cs. Everyone registers at the same time for the same classes.
Also, that statement isn't even true. There's colleges where you have to wait for there to be space available if you are looking for a competitive class in another college.
A Pitzer student will enter a Pomona history class at the same time as a Pomona student.

Students complain about priority registration, i.e. priority to students from that college. Interestingly, Pomona does not do this as much as the other consortium colleges so their students get the worst of both worlds, losing out to kids from other colleges when registering for a Pomona class and then getting block from a H-M or C-M class because they do give priority to their students.

Harvey mudd gives priority to core classes, because the kids need to graduate. DD has taken multiple physics and math courses-there’s no priority. You’ll run into priority issues with cmc Econ but Pomona students aren’t supposed to be taking cmc Econ classes in the first place. This is not an actual issue according to DD

If there are classes thar are off limits to other members of the consortium, then it isn’t comparable to a single university at all.

Didn’t go to either of these schools, but hard disagree. There were so many courses you couldn’t take if you weren’t in a certain college/major at my university. Universities aren’t a free for all.

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The advantages of tufts are its size and location. SLACs are great if you find your people relatively quickly but can be isolating if you don’t.

They're the same size.

Tufts is 6800, Pomona 1700.

Pomona is a part of continuous consortium of campus attached to the hip who participate in daily academic, sports, and social life- it has 6000 undergrads. Unless you think the separate colleges of tufts are islands where students between can’t interact, these schools are roughly equivalent in undergraduate size.

A consortium is not the same as a university. Stick to apples to apples comparisons.

Very fundamentally different. Cause in a normal university, people of different colleges can't take classes together or eat in the same dining hall...oh wait-

In a normal university, you don’t have to see if there is room left after all the kids from the home college have registered.

That's not how registration works at the 5Cs. Everyone registers at the same time for the same classes.
Also, that statement isn't even true. There's colleges where you have to wait for there to be space available if you are looking for a competitive class in another college.
A Pitzer student will enter a Pomona history class at the same time as a Pomona student.

Students complain about priority registration, i.e. priority to students from that college. Interestingly, Pomona does not do this as much as the other consortium colleges so their students get the worst of both worlds, losing out to kids from other colleges when registering for a Pomona class and then getting block from a H-M or C-M class because they do give priority to their students.

Harvey mudd gives priority to core classes, because the kids need to graduate. DD has taken multiple physics and math courses-there’s no priority. You’ll run into priority issues with cmc Econ but Pomona students aren’t supposed to be taking cmc Econ classes in the first place. This is not an actual issue according to DD

If there are classes thar are off limits to other members of the consortium, then it isn’t comparable to a single university at all.