Who is that guy to be giving anyone advice
None of the premed advisors where I attended undergrad had any real medical experience to my knowledge at least when I was there. They all did the usual predictable advice.
1) Take chemistry, calculus, and biology all in the first year (academic suicide at RU. They were all weed-out courses especially considering that even the freshman writing course rarely gave out As. I'm not kidding. We had a Rhodes Scholar when I attended RU who had a straight A GPA except for that freshman writing course).
2) Any GPA below a 3.5 or 3.8 depending on your advisor gave mention of quitting the attempt without any condolence, empathy, or inspiration. It was usually an EFF YOU attitude.
3) Any MCAT below a 30, forget it!
No advice given on the possibility of attending a foreign medical school or D.O. school. No advice given on possibly being a physician's assistant or a nurse practitioner for those that truly wanted to go into a clinical track but can't get into M.D. school.
I mean really. Geez, these people in that office had Ph.D.s in some frakkin liberal arts major (e.g. philosophy), and now they're a premed advisor and giving very two dimensional advice to premeds? Did I really have to have someone in a paid position that offered me information that could all fit on 5 index cards? They could offer no advice on what it's really like to work in the field, discussions with people on why they wanted to be a doctor, or anything else you'd expect a premed advisor to do for you. Did they really have to pay some Ph.D. professor to be in that position when they really didn't do anything other than the 3 things above, be able to state that you had to take the premed classes and the MCAT, read your letters of recommendation and ask you to give them a personal statement that they spent pretty much no time helping you on or time critiquing?
I figure someone in that position ought to 1) have some experience in medicine 2) try to encourage people and if people couldn't cut the mustard to give realistic advice with some empathy 3) offer alternatives for those that can't cut the mustard but still want to work clinically 4) be able to offer evidenced based data on the usefulness of things like Princeton Review and Kaplan 4) offer advice on writing personal statements 5) Advise you on getting the right types of letters of recommendation (from a science class, hopefully from a professor and not a TA you spend time with.) Nope. None of them to my knowledge could do the above, or at least they could do it and chose not to do so. Maybe things are different now but back then that's the way it was.
Just wasn't my opinion. I hardly knew anyone happy with the premed office and I knew a lot of premeds. I actually had one of the most favorite advisors there at the time. She wasn't bad, but I didn't think she was good either. I think she was the most favored only because she was attractive (and most of the premeds were guys in their late teens to early 20s go figure), and she wasn't outright mean. Plenty of people I knew had advisors telling them to drop out, even receive comments like "you'll amount to nothing."
My theory is that where I attended college was a heavy premed school and the premed office was probably told by the NJ medschools to weed out everybody because they were already getting over 100 applicants for one spot. (RU was connected to the NJ medschools). I've heard this same type of thing going on in other schools like NYU and UCLA at least when I was college.
I figure at least some of this is better now that we're in the age where everyone carries cell phones and can record surreptitiously. I'm wondering how many schools operate their premed office in the manner above in addition to the school I attended. I don't know how the premed office was in Syracuse because by the time I became convinced to become a doctor I transferred out of there.
