Otherwise, I disagree completely with his “advice.” Med school is very difficult to get into. In general, if you get in anywhere, you’re pretty happy. One of my biggest beefs is his claim that they’re attached to “not too great” med schools. They’re not. USC and Northwestern have them and they are quite prestigious.

I had two friends go to Northwestern’s program. They could still have applied to other med schools if they wanted to. They both chose to go to Northwestern cuz it’s a really good med school and they got their admissions already. No real reason to expend precious time and money applying to other schools when they’re already accepted to a really good one.

The other reason why I think Alan L gave horrible advice is just because you apply to those 7 yr programs doesn’t mean you can’t apply to other colleges. Yes, they have very low admissions rates, but that’s true of all prestigious colleges. Whether or not they have a 7 yr med program or not. He makes it sound like it’s an exclusive choice and you can’t pick any other school if you apply to it and get accepted.

Oh, and my two friends did just fine. One’s doing his residency for plastic surgery. I’m not sure what specialty the other friend is doing, but she did her residency at UCLA, one of the top ranked hospitals in the country. Coming from 7 yr med programs didn’t hurt them at all. Alan L must be pulling crap from his ***.

For the past 17 years, Boston University has a combined program called ENGMEDIC where a student can obtain a BS degree in Biomedical Engineering and a MD from BU’s med school in 6-8 years depending on how many AP credits the student can transfer into the program.

It’s intense though. And you are going to med school for sure if you get in so make the decision wisely 🙂 Bonne chance monsieur.

That’s why there’s usually only a small handful of students that get into each program (I’ve heard from 4-10).

As for schools that have the programs, I know that USC has a 7-year medical school track. So does UC San Diego. NYU has a dentist school program. Caltech has a joint program with UCSD that lets you go to Caltech for your undergrad and guarantees you get into UCSD medical school. I know there’s a couple of more programs out there.

But the biggest problems with the programs is that they’re only offered by medical schools that aren’t too great to begin with. So by having these programs, the schools can attract very brilliant candidates who would otherwise never want to go to their medical school. Plus, I personally know a surgeon who was interviewing for residencies and rejected everyone who graduated from one of these programs simply because they went to one.

So good luck if you want to apply, but my conclusion is that it’s not worth the effort. It’s probably better to go to a small liberal arts school and apply for med school from there. (Check medical school acceptance rates at Williams, Amherst, Pomona, etc. for their medical school acceptance rates versus that of state schools). The problem with that is you’ll have to explain yourself whenever someone asks you where you go to school.

The University of Maryland has three undergrad schools that account for the majority of the 77% of state-resident matriculants and they are UMCP, UMBC and JHU.