Future Doctors Of The World, I Need Your Help

[clex_monkie89]

Say that Sam wanted to be Pre-Med instead of the fake Pre-Law that Stanford doesn't have.

What would be the best undergrad and medical schools for him to go to?

Comments

[setissma]

The general idea these days is that it's typically a pretty bad idea to major in premed. (Most schools are phasing that out.) Instead, you take a pre-med curriculum in addition to your major requirements - so a year of biology, a year of english, a year of general chemistry, a year of orgo, a year of physics, and at least a semester of calculus.

You can get in to med school coming from just about anywhere with a good enough MCAT score, but it helps to have gone to a strong college, e.g. ivies (Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, etc.), sisters (The Seven Sisters, some of which are still women's only, but Vassar is now co-ed), "public ivies," (really strong state schools like University of Michigan, UT Austin, some of the University of California schools, etc.) and strong liberal arts schools (Williams, Amherst, Carlton, Swarthmore, Oberlin, other schools in that group). There's also the like - UChicago, Stanford, MIT type schools, which are larger and not necessarily liberal arts, but still very prestigious. If you want help picking one, let me know tonight and I'll give you a hand.

The issue that drives me nuts with SPN is funding - most prestigious private colleges operate on a need-based financial aid system, so a "full ride" scholarship to a place like Stanford isn't possible because they don't offer merit-based aid, which is what a full ride scholarship is. Your two options are to send Sam to a school that does offer merit funding - like UT Austin, U Michigan, etc. - OR you can have the total cost covered by need-based aid from a private college, which is completely possible.

[setissma]

I agree that Stanford could have paid Sam's full tuition, but there actually is a distinction in what it's called; "full ride" colloquially implies a full merit scholarship, whereas "full financial aid" is what it's called when a school is paying your way on need based aid, which is what Stanford's policy does. I know it seems nitpicky, but there's actually a big difference, because it implies a major difference in how schools distribute aid.