Each year, students come to Ivy Coach hoping to get into top medical programs that offer both a bachelor’s and a medical degree. While we’ve helped many students get into these competitive programs, we strongly suggest they think twice. Yes, they should seriously think about applying to these programs. Why? Well, let’s break it down.
7 Critical Reasons to Avoid the BS/MD Program Route
1. Applying to combined Bachelor’s and Medical Doctorate (BS/MD) programs can lead to unfair treatment for many applicants during the admissions process, especially Indian American applicants. Ivy Coach works with many Indian American students, a lot of whom dream of becoming doctors. But if you had to guess how often we encourage our Indian American students to highlight their desire to become doctors on their college applications, what would you think? The answer is never. In highly selective college admissions, where being unique is crucial, admissions officers often feel uninterested and unimpressed when they see numerous applications from Indian American candidates aspiring to become doctors.
2. There are just too many people wanting to become doctors, and it’s dull. Remember those old lawyer jokes like, “What do you call a thousand lawyers chained to the bottom of the sea?” …A good start!”? Similar jokes could be made about aspiring doctors – especially in the competitive college admissions process. Why follow the crowd on your college applications? Why engage in the same boring activities like following doctors around and helping with cancer studies? We get that cancer research is important – really important! But if you’re only doing it to improve your chances of getting into a top university, you’re actually hurting yourself in the long run.
3. When you’re trying to get into combined bachelor’s and medical degree programs, it’s important to present yourself as someone who wants to be a doctor. At Ivy Coach, students who apply to top universities don’t talk about wanting to be doctors. They don’t join activities in high school that show an interest in medicine, and their teachers don’t mention their interest in becoming doctors in their recommendation letters. Their essays also don’t mention anything about medicine. However, this doesn’t mean our students won’t become doctors. They’re just following the rules and not explicitly saying they want to be doctors when applying to college.
4. Studying medicine isn’t offered as a main subject at top universities. So, showing interest in it on your application isn’t necessary. Instead, you can show interest in subjects like history, literature, or art. You can even choose to major in one of these subjects if you like. And if you’re unsure, you can switch your major every Tuesday in your first year.
That’s the flexibility of a liberal arts education. Plus, you can still take the classes needed for medical school no matter what you major in.
5. If a student’s parents are doctors, it seems like the student might want to become one too. But fancy colleges don’t prefer students who just copy what their parents do. If the mom is a heart doctor, the admissions people will think she let her daughter see what being a doctor is like, whether that’s really true or not. Instead, they want to accept students who are doing new things and finding their own interests.
6. Students who apply to combined Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Medicine (BS/MD) programs often get accepted to colleges that are not as selective as the ones they could have gotten into otherwise. Take a look at universities like Northeastern University, Boston University, and George Washington University. These schools aren’t as famous as Harvard University. Even the prestigious colleges that offer BS/MD programs, like Brown University and Northwestern University, know that applying to these programs makes it much harder to get accepted, for the reasons mentioned earlier. Sure, going through a BS/MD program saves a year of a student’s academic life and means they don’t have to apply to medical school separately after college. But is it really worth it to go to a less famous university?
7. Would you prefer to have brain surgery from a doctor who has a diploma from Harvard or Northeastern University on their wall? That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Some time ago, we had a student who got accepted into both Harvard and Northeastern’s combined BS/MD programs. He was really torn between the two options until we convinced his father to think sensibly. Eventually, the student chose Harvard and later attended Stanford University School of Medicine.
Choose BS/MD Programs At Your Peril
If you’re still considering applying to a combined BS/MD program, it’s unlikely anything we say or do will change your mind. You know the saying, “You can show someone the path, but you can’t force them to walk it.” And that’s true.
As you’re aiming to become a doctor, we suggest Ivy Coach’s PostMortem application service. When things don’t go as expected, and you’re questioning your decision not to follow our advice, we offer a one-hour analysis of your application after the Early round to help you understand what went wrong and what needs to change for your Regular Decision applications.
While some issues can still be fixed at that point, others may not. If most of your efforts have been focused on showing your interest in becoming a doctor, suddenly switching to wanting to study Classics won’t seem believable. However, we’ll develop a plan to improve your chances of admission after you’ve made the mistake of not following our previous recommendations.
