I’m swamped with essays, tests, and homework. I’m stressed and sad all the time. Every time I get a B+ or A- on an assignment, my hope for medical school diminishes. Any advice or words of encouragement will be greatly appreciated.
These days, top Universities like Vanderbilt have counseling centers designed for use at exactly these times. I would seek this out at Vandy. Not only might they help you with your feelings, they be able to provide strategies for sorting through all the demands you have on your time, i.e. time management and other skills. Best of luck to you. By the way, B+'s and A-'s and Vanderbilt will not eliminate you from med school. By my calculation the average of those two grades is a 3.6 which would still make you competitive.
The secret is making easy schedules and taking an easy major so that you don’t spread yourself too thin.
Unfortunately though, if you’re pre-med, you’ll just have to learn to relax, enjoy life a little bit, and just do your best. Although it lets up some after you get through the tough weed-out classes, it doesn’t get a whole lot better. It’s a difficult career path. You’re stressed now about getting to med school, you’ll be stressed in med school about residency, you’ll be stressed in residency about fellowship, you’ll be stressed in fellowship about getting a job, you’ll be stressed as an attending by your work. This would be true even if you went to an easy school for undergrad. It’s a never ending cycle, and you kind of just have to figure out a better work life balance, and learn to prevent having things get to you so much. If you feed into your neuroticism too much, you’ll never really be able to enjoy the journey.
An A- is a 3.7 which would give you a shot at getting you into most med schools if you have the required ECs, etc as well
Suffer is right. Also, it might be a little bit difficult now because you probably don’t know any recent graduates who are in med school at the moment, so it seems like a huge frightening mystery. But from the people I know, kids who were able to pull a 3.6+/32+ were able to get into med school at a pretty high rate without even taking a gap year.
Also, people usually majorly pull up their GPA in junior and senior year. Upper levels aren’t that hard and you know your way around so you can find the easiest classes, and you know how to study. So freshman GPA is by no means what you’ll be applying with.
Not sure if this will help, but here ya go, Vandy’s premed outcomes:
http://as.vanderbilt.edu/hpao/documents/2015_Annual_Report_2016-01-18.pdf
@fdgjfg : That range is pretty normal right, especially coming from an elite school. Anyone with a remotely competitive GPA (3.5+ overall) and MCAT(31-32+) should be admitted somewhere if they play their cards right.