Major: Public Health and French Lit
I’ve taken PreCalc I & II, Bio I & II, Chem I and have Cs in each one except PrecCalc I with a C+. No labs yet! These past two years of college (first year and sophomore)… I’m a junior now and really want to go to medical school.
I’m getting my act together and striving for As from now on. I want to apply to medical school but I want to know should I start with a fresh mentality or retake these classes? Like I feel like I should bring my terrible sGPA up at least to 3.0.
A sGPA of 3.0 is too low for medical school unless you have some sort of extraordinary story of overcoming terrible hardships to go with it–and even then it’ll be a long shot. A sGPA of 3.0 is an auto-screen out for med school.
The first thing you need to do is to do a thorough self-examination and figure out why you’re not doing well in your science and math classes. Then you need to fix the reasons for your poor performance. “Striving” is a wonderful idea, but you need a real plan of action for executing this academic turn-around. Frankly, you simply cannot afford any more sub-A science grades if you want to go to med school. (As it stands right now, you’ll need 12 4-credit or 15 3-credit science classes all with A grades just to raise your sGPA to about 3.45-3.5–which is what you need to be a reasonably viable candidate for med school.)
Given your BCMP grades, your best chance of becoming a physician is to retake your bio, chem and math classes and apply to osteopathic medical schools (DO programs allow grade replacement and will only consider the most recent grade when calculating GPAs.)
Even if you decide against applying to DO programs, I still strongly recommend that you retake all your math & science classes. You need to have a very strong foundational understanding of the basics in chem, math and bio if you want to have any hope of doing well in upper level science classes–and your Cs say that you don’t have a strong grasp of the fundamentals.
If you simply must have a MD, then you’re going to need a GPA-enhancing post-bacc where you’ll take a substantial number of upper level science courses to mitigate your poor sGPA from undergrad. However, most grade-enhancing post-baccs and all SMPs (Special Master’s Programs) require a minimum sGPA of 3.0 for admission.
Precalc is not a requirement of med school, so you cannot put it into sGPA.
IMHO, it is not worth your time pursuing medical school, with all sGPA are at C level. But if you insist, you need do very well, like mostly As in grade replacement even for the DO schools. Now-a-day, DO school have followed the footsteps of MD school, you need about 3.3 or even 3.4 to get in while the minimum have raised to about 3.6 for md schools/
BTW, SMP programs as WOWM described, require better than B average and certain level of MCAT to get in.
If you’re only capable of C work, you would drown in med school.
Mom2collegekids is savage, but right…if this is how you’ve been doing consistently in the sciences, unless your a URM you have no chance of being accepted. And then what?
What are u majoring I got?