Balancing university education with elite skating

[Sylvia]

This article has updates on 3 U.S. skaters' college plans: https://usfigureskatingfanzone.com/...en-glide-into-ivy-leagues-after-gap-year.aspx

Karen Chen:

As a pre-med student majoring in human ecology, the Cornell freshman will have a heavy course load this fall in Ithaca, New York. Like many elite athletes, Chen has been homeschooled for much of her childhood. She has not step foot in a traditional classroom since the fifth grade, so she's looking forward to learning amongst peers again.
Chen hopes to find the balance between skating and school to stick it out for four straight years at the Big Red. "The connections and friends I make with classmates won't just take a semester. [I'd] leave and return to a completely different environment," she says. "I didn't want to go to college with other kids that are like four years younger than me, even though I look young. It'd just feel different."

Vincent Zhou:

"Brown was generous enough to offer me two gap years with an extra semester on top of that, so I only have to do this one semester and then I get to defer until after the 2022 Olympics," he elaborates. "[I've] been out of high school for two years and if I continue to wait until after 2022, then I'll have been out for five or six years and the top colleges are unlikely to find that attractive. My standardized test scores expire after this year."
... A short distance from Boston, Zhou will also spend some time training with Mark Mitchell and Peter Johansson of the Mitchell Johansson Method.

Gabriella Izzo:

Another one of their [MJM] students, Izzo, has a seat on hold for her at Harvard University. She deferred her admission until next year to concentrate on skating, take a variety of courses to hone in on what she'd like to major in, volunteer at a local hospital and dedicate time to her term paper editing business.

ETA:

I didn't feel like putting "Ivy League" or Vincent's and Karen's names in this thread title.

 

[Vagabond]

But, @Sylvia , you could have used Gabriella Izzo's name instead!

 

[Sylvia]

Izzo isn't attending Harvard this year. I did tweet about her, though.

 

[mag]

I find the term “Pre med” to be very self important. There is, as far as I know, no such thing as pre med. You can take anything thing you want as long as you take the required science courses. Then you apply to med school.

Karen Chen is in first year, planning a major in Human Ecology. She may or may not do well enough to be accepted into med school.

 

[Sylvia]

"Pre-med" was a commonly used term when I was a college student (and thankfully NOT a pre med )... maybe it's only used in the States?

ETA: I did a search in GSD and saw that there's been extensive discussion previously on this very topic, such as here when the news of Karen's Cornell plans first became known.

 

[MacMadame]

People who think they might want to go to med school need to be on the pre-med track from the first day. They can always change their mind later and stop taking the required courses but it's harder to decide to take them later as many have pre-reqs and there are a lot of them. The accepted and usual term for this is pre-med. There is nothing self-important about labeling yourself the way the system labels you.

 

[VGThuy]

Yeah pre-med is a common term. It just states what their intentions are. We all know that can change. My university also had a pre-law track even though that wasn’t a major either. Honestly, it was easier than saying I majored in Political Science and then having most people ask me what that was and then ask me what can I do with that and then me saying I intend to go to law school.

 

[Tinami Amori]

"Pre-med" was a commonly used term when I was a college student (and thankfully NOT a pre med )... maybe it's only used in the States?

as far as i remember (UC system), there is no such major as "Pre-Med". It's a specific list of required courses to take if one plans to apply to Medical School and to take the MCAT qualifying examination.

 

[VGThuy]

as far as i remember (UC system), there is no such major as "Pre-Med". It's a specific list of required courses to take if one plans to apply to Medical School and to take the MCAT qualifying examination.

Yeah, it's not a major. But many colleges do have counselors to keep students on the medical school track if they intend to go to medical school no matter what their major is. They even call it "Pre-Med". Karen is just stating she intends to go to medical school as of right now and saying she's majoring in Human Ecology. Now I'm interested in seeing how that differs from cultural or human geography.

 

[Tinami Amori]

Yeah, it's not a major. But many colleges do have counselors to keep students on the medical school track if they intend to go to medical school no matter what their major is. They even call it "Pre-Med". Karen is just stating she intends to go to medical school as of right now and saying she's majoring in Human Ecology. Now I'm interested in seeing how that differs from cultural or human geography.

Yes, it's more like an "educational course plan" to apply to Med School.

 

[VGThuy]

Under Cornell's website's pre-med/vet link:

Colleges, Schools, and Educational Paths | Undergraduate Admissions

Colleges & Schools Cornell University is both a privately endowed university and the federal land grant institution of New York State. Each individual college and school has its own faculty, academic requirements, and programs. Our eight undergraduate colleges and schools offer more than 4,000...

admissions.cornell.edu

So she's not just "showing off" and is using a term Cornell uses. I still find it a weird thing to complain about quite honestly.

 

[kwanfan1818]

When I was in college, "Pre-med" was not just a list of courses: there was a meeting I attended during Freshman orientation (with what looked like 50% of my class) at which one of the professors, who chaired the recommendations committee, said outright that without the committee's recommendation, you had an icycle's chance in hall of getting into medical school. If you entered the track like friends did, you were assigned a "connected" advisor, not the one assigned to your dorm (until you chose a major), and you were expected to toe the line, ie, keep your grades up, or you were tossed back into the general population, and major in Biology.

That, my friends, is how the university could brag about their high-90's acceptance rate into medical school.

Even then it was bullshit, depending on the school you were from and the med school to which you were applying. Even top schools admitted people who went back to school, mostly at night, to take/fill-in pre-requisites, if they did well on the MCATs. Columbia in particular took older, more well-rounded students, like a friend of my ex who earned a masters in Art History before applying. This was in the late '70's and '80's, not just something recent.

 

[Vagabond]

From the article quoted in the first post:

As a pre-med student majoring in human ecology, the Cornell freshman will have a heavy course load this fall in Ithaca, New York.

Human Ecology is not a major at Cornell. It is one of the University's colleges and offers nine majors, including Human Biology and Health Sciences, which is probably going to be Karen Chen's major.

The College of Human Ecology is one of Cornell's land grant or "statutory" colleges" and, as such, is partially funded by the State of New York, in distinct contrast with the College of Arts and Sciences, which is private and offers dozens of majors.

 

[Sylvia]

At least the Cornell Daily Sun article got it right (article published on April 29, 2019 & originally posted in the U.S. Ladies thread): https://cornellsun.com/2019/04/29/o...-karen-chen-looks-forward-to-life-at-cornell/

"On Thursday, she [Karen Chen] visited Cornell for the first time to see the campus and attend events at the College of Human Ecology, where she’ll be majoring in Human Biology, Health, and Society."

 

[MacMadame]

That's how it worked at my college, @kwanfan1818. Certain courses that pre-med students took were designed to weed them out, which was annoying for those of us majoring in those subjects because we liked them. But the college had a 90-95% acceptance rate to med school so people put up with it.

 

[bardtoob]

I was "pre-med" along with my psych major until I realized I preferred balancing my gen chem equations using linear algebra to doing lab work, where it is poisonous, smelly, and you have to do dishes for wet and squishy stuff you can't even consume.

Give me equations, data, and a computer to program.

 

[Carolla5501]

Do some of you have to beat this "pre-med" to death EVERY time it comes up? We get it, you are all much more knowledgeable than anyone else and want us to know it. (But it certainly makes you look "self important" when you appoint yourself "moderator of what is correct".)

 

[platniumangel]

Yeah, it's not a major. But many colleges do have counselors to keep students on the medical school track if they intend to go to medical school no matter what their major is. They even call it "Pre-Med". Karen is just stating she intends to go to medical school as of right now and saying she's majoring in Human Ecology. Now I'm interested in seeing how that differs from cultural or human geography.

Exactly.

 

[Sylvia]

Local Massachusetts article Worcester native Heidi Munger excels on ice and in classroom: https://www.telegram.com/news/20190817/worcester-native-heidi-munger-excels-on-ice-and-in-classroom

The previous two years, Munger finished second in the U.S. Collegiate Figure Skating Championships, the only figure skating event open solely to full-time college students. Her victory last month earned her a $5,000 college scholarship and her runner-up finishes the previous two years earned her $2,500 each.
She’s also helped BU win the championship in the separate U.S. Collegiate Figure Skating Team Championships the past two springs. Figure skating is a club sport at BU.
“I think Heidi’s strengths,” her father Bruce said, “are a combination of passion for the sport, incredible work ethic – four hours a day year round – and extremely coachable with a great attitude.”
Meanwhile in the classroom, Munger majors in pre-med [] and has earned mostly A’s, including one in organic chemistry. Her lowest grade has been a B-plus in statistics.
When school is in session, she skates for three hours each morning at the Cronin Ice Arena in Revere and attends classes in the afternoon.

Joonsoo Kim won the Senior men's Collegiate title representing UCLA. He is the 2019 U.S. Junior bronze medalist (has aged out of ISU Junior this season) and made his senior international debut immediately after Collegiates at the Philadelphia comp. earlier this month. Link to his updated Team USA bio: https://usfigureskatingfanzone.com/roster.aspx?rp_id=173

 

[Rob]

I think pre-med is just short for "prerequisites for medical school," but some schools refer to it as a pre-med or pre-medical currriculum, which must be followed if you want to continue on to medical school in addition to completing the requirements for the major. So it is a "thing" even if it isn't the major itself.

For example, https://medicine.yale.edu/education/admissions/requirements/