<p>I am in a tough situation and looking for advice. In high school, I did reasonably well and was in in top 5% of the class with 1500+ in SAT (Math + reading). I got admission into Cornell among others and decided to join that. After one year there my GPA is 3.2 which looks like is going to shatter my dream of becoming a Doctor. I did not think of 7 year med programs in high school thinking I will go for a good undergraduate school and MD/Phd programs and now I don't think with this GPA I can get in any medical school. Now the choices I have are either work hard and improve my GPA or take a transfer to some relatively easy school and improve my GPA there.</p>
<p>What would be your advice? Would transferring from Cornell to say Rutgers after 2 or 3 semester look bad on Medical application? Is it at all possible to get into medical school with 3.2 GPA? Are there any 7/8 year combined degree program which allow transferring into programs?</p>
<p>Secondly, HS achievements no longer matter. You’re in college now. Everyone could care less about your SAT or HS GPA or anything else you did before freshmen year of college.</p>
<p>Transferring won’t necessarily look terrible, although it instantly tells the adcoms you couldn’t handle a strong school and ran from it. Additionally, I doubt Rutgers is going to be significantly easier. You can be sure the average professor at Rutgers is FAR more difficult than the easiest at Cornell. The mean and median difficulties of professors probably aren’t far apart either.</p>
<p>If you do well (say, 32+) on the MCAT and have a strong upward trend on your GPA (ending with, say, a 3.6+), you should still be a good candidate (assuming other things are strong as well). Basically, you need to get off your butt and start working. If you have a 3.2 at Cornell, I wouldn’t expect better than a 3.4 anywhere at your current level. You simply need to work hard.</p>