| > 3. The goal of admitting someone to Harvard Med isn’t having them excel at Harvard Med — it’s having them succeed as significant researchers in the medical field after they graduate from Harvard Med. I'm not sure I would agree with this. I was a postdoc @ Harvard Med, so I knew a fair number of med students there as well as grad students. I don't want to dismiss your assertion out of hand, but I think the truth is a little murky here. > Do you think that the students from your undergrad could do this? In short: yes. > Do you think that they aim to? This is a key question and here the answer would often be "no." One key differentiator that I saw between HYPS and my state school is that EVERYONE at the HYPS places was _driven_. They were not looking for occupations where they would 'take orders.'
In contrast, many (not all!) of my friends at the state school were roughly as smart as the people I met at the Ivies, but they were not necessarily _driven_. For example, I knew plenty of remarkably intelligent nursing majors at my state school. No one I met at the Ivies would ever consider being a nurse.
That being said, I knew several people at my state school who were quite talented and driven pre-meds and the elite schools barely sniffed at them. Obviously, I didn't know everything about the Ivy undergrads that I taught, but I knew enough of them well enough to have a sense of how talented they were with respect to research (my classmates and I supervised many undergrads doing research). There is an inherent difficulty in these types of discussions: we are both basing our opinions on small amounts of subjective data. |
Agreed. It’s not as clean as that, but I think that it’s directionally correct (at least for this particular thread).
I agree with all of your other points as well.
I would be really curious about why the driven and talented students at the state school didn’t even get a look. I imagine there’s a good reason. Probably something like lack of research, studying under a dud professor (this can sort of be a kiss of death in some fields), studying under a prof with Ivy envy (basically crabs pulling their own back down — strange, but it happens), etc.
Any ideas?