Pre-Med/Pre-Health: Prospective Students

UMass Amherst offers dedicated pre-med/pre-health advising for students and alumni. Read on for suggestions of what to consider when selecting the right college for you if you plan to enter the health professions.

Choosing the Right College

How do you decide where to go to college if you plan to go to medical or dental school? While your first inclination may be to look at statistics, you should consider the following when selecting a college:

  • Pick a school where you’ll succeed. Graduate schools (i.e., medical, dental, and PA schools) care about your undergraduate GPA, so pick a school that is a good fit. Consider what learning environment (class sizes, teaching style) will be best for you and what resources you will need to excel in classes, such as tutoring, availability of faculty, and advising.
  • Choose a college where you can get involved. Graduate schools want to see that you have been learning outside of the classroom, so look for a school that has extracurricular activities that interest you and that offers abundant research opportunities for undergraduates (like UMass Amherst!).
  • Select a school where you will be happy. Doing well in your classes and excitedly engaging in extracurricular activities becomes difficult if you are unhappy, so find a school that fits you. Consider location, student body, campus resources, and student support services.
  • Determine a program that aligns with your finances. Graduate schools in the health professions are typically very expensive, so minimize the debt that you accrue as an undergraduate.

UMass Amherst Resources

UMass Amherst offers a wide range of resources for pre-med/pre-dental/pre-PA students.

Students pursuing a graduate degree in a health field are encouraged to take advantage of advising throughout college. For first-year students, this means utilizing PreHealth Peer Advising and First-Year Friday meetings in the fall and spring semesters. PreHealth Peer Advisors can help you with what courses to take and how to be competitive for medical/dental/PA school admissions. First-year students also have access to their major advisors and other department-level resource. Students in their sophomore year and through matriculation to medical school are encouraged to meet one-on-one with a PreHealth Professional Advisor each semester to track progress.

Beyond advising, pre-health students at UMass Amherst have access to all of the resources offered by the commonwealth’s flagship university:

How to Interpret Admissions Rates

A school’s reported percentage of admits to medical/dental school can be difficult to interpret. Statistics can be misleading. Most medical and dental schools strongly encourage applicants to get a committee letter—a letter of recommendation from the PreHealth Advising office of their undergraduate institution. Schools that want to be able to say that 100 percent of their students who applied to medical school were admitted can simply decline to write a committee letter for anyone who is unlikely to be admitted. Nationally, about 40 percent of applicants get accepted to medical school.

UMass Amherst, being a public institution of higher learning and committed to transparency and flexibility, writes a committee letter for any student or alum who meets our deadlines (listed on our Applying to Schools page). PreHealth Advisors coach students who are not on track for admission to fill the gaps in their application before applying but do not stop anyone from applying.

That said, approximately 80% of UMass Amherst students and alumni with science GPAs of 3.7 or higher and who score at or above the 80th percentile on the MCAT (511) were admitted to MD programs. The rate of admission increases substantially when students have meaningful, sustained service and patient care experience before applying and when they are genuinely open to attending DO programs. For this reason, students are coached as early as orientation about what admissions committees will expect.