The best undergrad school is your state university, unless you live in one of the four states that do not have state university medical schools and then it’s the University of Washington.

By statute, state university systems have to give admission preference to a state resident, so your own state university and its medical school provide your best chance.

All medical schools in the US and Canada are accredited by the same authority (the AMA’s LCME). In addition, all US students have to pass the same exam, called the USMLE. The scores from these exams are watched closely and if there is a variation in score results from a particular school, the authorities know about it and investigate. To date, no state university has ever lost its accreditation, so a student is assured of a quality education. On that basis, there is a common saying that the best medical school is the one that accepts you.

Learning medicine is a little like learning a foreign language. Would you pay one school $200/semester hour to teach you or would you rather pay $10/semester hour at a junior college? If you ended up speaking that language at the end of the course, would it matter where you learned it? That’s pretty much the whole issue with medical schools…they’re all teaching you the same thing. Now, some may argue that the quality of instruction impacts the education. I don’t agree with that at all. Now, I might enjoy one instructor over another, but I never learned anything from an instructor that wasn’t already in my textbook–and let me tell you a little secret. It’s called the 80% attendance rule. All medical schools use it and it simply states that in order to graduate/pass a class, you must have attended 80% of the classes. Now, why would they come up with that rule? Well, medical students were skipping classes to stay home to study because they learned more that way. In case you didn’t know it, medical schools are a business–they don’t have scholarships or give away free seats. They couldn’t have students not coming to class or otherwise people could just buy the books and become doctors! So, they developed the 80% attendance rule. Now, if medical students learned better by studying the books instead of attending classes, how can one medical school be better than another?

I would ignore any advice that suggested an ‘easy way’ to get through undergrad and into med school. The sooner you make the decision to hit the books and obtain the superior grades, the better your chances of becoming a doctor. It doesn’t get any more basic than that.

Medical schools will look at what undergraduate school you have attended, for its quality. However that doesn’t limit your choices much as there are many high quality undergraduate schools and many people forget that many disciplines end up going to medical school. Lots of engineers as an example end up in medical school as do some philosophy majors. So …Georgetown University, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, UCLA, Stanford, Haverford College, Bryn Maur College, Purdue University, Reed, etc…US News and World Report has listings for all the top tier schools and who is considered best for Undergraduate and Graduate studies. I would check that out and remember even Rose Holman is an OK premed program.