<p>Basically my question is should I try my best to complete all my pre reqs by the end of sophmore year so I can take the MCAT the summer immediately after? I'm asking this because I will be studying abroad in France the fall of my junior year, and can't take any prereqs then, because med schools won't take it. I'm basically trying to figure out where to fit in physics. I could take both semesters in the spring of junior year (ours it autotutorial and you can do the class in either 4, 6, or 8 weeks, depending on how fast you want to move. </p>
<p>Has anyone here finished all the prereqs by sophomore year and taken the MCAT that summer? If so, was it good, bad, neither?</p>
<p>I'm just trying to get a general idea of how I want to arrange my courses, without having to take summer classes.</p>
<p>I personally didn´t take the MCAT early, but I did do my pre reqs in two years. While its possible to do all med school pre reqs in two years (you don´t really need calc or even the english classes to take the MCAT, though the english might help a little) the only realy pre reqs you need for the MCAT are bio, chem, o chem, and physics. Genetics and some other classes are USEFUL, but mainly by reinforcing your knowledge of the general classes and by expanding your understanding of the related science. Plenty of people prepare without them. So if you just do those 8 classes, it shouldn´t be too rough as long as you have plenty of study time. I would recommend doing the bio and gen chem together, then o chem and physics. This is going to be harder than if you did gen chem and physics plus bio and o chem (in my opinion), however it is my experience that having physics fresh in your mind is very helpful.</p>
<p>Hmm. What about having bio and chem first year, and then bio, o chem, and physics soph year? Texas med schools require 2 years of bio (not gonna be a problem anyway, I’m a bio major), so I kinda need to get bio both years. Is that gonna be too much?</p>
<p>My child took bio (1 sem. only) and gen. chem (1 sem. only) and orgo I freshman year. Orgo II, physics I and II and another bio soph year. He did not plan to take MCAT after sopho. He is definitely on a more relax schedule, so it may not be a good model for you. Yes…we know that only one sem. of gen. chem is a red flag for him He decided to be a bio major at the end of soph. year, and is now trying to catch up with all other bio courses required for his major.</p>
<p>Once again, it will vary on who you ask, but I just found organic chemistry and physics to be the most time intensive and demanding of the four (I personally found physics rougher, but many might feel the opposite. Lots of homework, lots of math. O chem got easier after the initial hump). Biology tends to be regarded as pretty on the soft side, especially if you took some in high school. Gen Chem is harder than bio, but I found it easier than physics and o chem. Now that I teach all four for MCAT prep, I definitely still feel the same way about the difficulty. Thus, according to the way I see it, it should be harder to do o chem and physics (the two hardest of the four) together than to do o chem and bio.</p>
<p>See my above post, but basically physics and O-chem are quite often weeder classes. They were at my school, about half of the pre-med population vanished after them. O-chem is also a higher level course. You would expect it to be harder than its pre-req gen chem. Physics itself isn’t hard to grasp usually, but there tends to be tons of busy work that you must do. Its one of the only classes that I rigidly attended office hours for, due to the fact that the enormous amounts of homework had to be perfect if you wanted to do well in the class.</p>
<p>I agree that O-chem is quite often a weeder class at most schools. My child said that there are much fewer students in his O-chem II than in his O-chem I.</p>
<p>He took O-chem II and Physics I at the same time, and he did not complain much about the workload. I guess that he might be more stressed when he took Physics II (which is usually more difficult/complicated than Physics I) together with Cell Bio, which is rumored to be the most demanding mid-level bio class at his school. They have a quiz every week for Cell Bio and he said the textbook is extremely “dense” and he said he really did not have a chance to understand a lot of course materials even though he got an A on it. (He said he just tried to memorize as much as he could.) It is not until his biochemistry class when he really started to understand many topics he had sort-of learned from his Cell Bio class.</p>
<p>He said that sophomore is the most fun year for him because, by sophomore year, the suite mates know each other well and tend to spend more fun time together. From this statement, I would guess that although he was busy in sophomore, he was not really overly overloaded. (In junior year, many of his suite mates either studied aboard and/or did research all the time so he thinks it is not that fun - as “everybody is too busy.”</p>
He decided to be a bio major at the end of soph. year, and is now trying to catch up with all other bio courses required for his major.</p>