Gpa

[hurleygurl]

<p>Hi I go to Berkeley and I have been struggling a little with some of the premed classes. I got a C in Organic Chemistry and then recently a C in Biology. I am going into my third year with a gpa of 3.1. This is so discouraging and I thought that I would have done better. Is there no hope left for me to get into med school?</p>

[apumic]

<p>I wouldn’t say “no hope.” You still have 2 years to go, so if you start pulling As consistently, you could get your GPA back up into the 3.5+ range, but it’ll require some serious work! You may also end up needing to do some post-bacc work and/or an SMP (special masters program) to show you’re capable of the graduate-level science coursework required in the first 2 years of medical school.</p>

[ASMAJ]

<p>Ditto on what apumic stated. Even though I think it will be hard to raise it to over a 3.5 in 4 semesters. So really good mcat is required. If its average then you might want to look into DO schools or if you’re aiming for an allopathic school, then post-bac or SMP is needed.</p>

[Icarus]

<p>Yeah its going to be very difficult to get to 3.5 in two years. But hope is certainly not lost. Just finish strong, do well on the MCAT and apply broadly. Med schools like to see an upward trend in grades.</p>

<p>In case this strategy doesn’t work, apply to SMPs (like Georgetown, EVMS, UCincy) at the same time you apply to med schools.</p>

[BigRedSoldier]

<p>There could be mediating circumstances which might explain your grade slip. If not first start by trying to analyze what it was that made you struggle. Maybe you had study sessions with friends where more fun was had than material learned. Maybe you missed a lot of class. Maybe you need to consider a tutor or sit closer to the front and take better notes.</p>

<p>With that in mind improving your GPA to the medical school range is still very possible. With an A- average for next year (3.7) on an average courseload you could raise your overall GPA to a 3.3 which is a solid B+. This is not a great GPA for applying but it’s certainly possible to be successful with a B+ average. I’m not an expert, just looking at the facts. According to the MSAR more than 10% of successful applicants to the following 35 medical schools had a 3.3 overall GPA:</p>

<p>U of Arizona
U of Arkansas
UC Davis (CA)
George Washington U (D.C.)
Georgetown (D.C.)
Howard University (D.C.)
Mercer U (GA)
Morehouse SOM (GA)
U of Hawaii
Rosalind Franklin U (IL)
Southern Illinois
U of Illinois
U of Kansas
U of Kentucky
U of Louisville SOM (KY)
Tulane U (LA)
Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (MD)
Boston U (MA)
Michigan State U
Wayne State U (MI)
U of Mississippi
U of Nevada
U of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey (both campuses)
U of New Mexico
Albany Medical College (NY)
U of Buffalo SOM (NY)
State U of NY
Brody SOM at East Carolina U (NC)
U North Carolina Chapel Hill
U North Dakota
U of Toledo (OH)
Wright State (OH)
U of Oklahoma
Oregon Health and Science U
Drexel U ¶</p>

<p>Also, it’s your third year so some things work to your advantage. Your upper level classes may be easier than the so called “weed out” courses like Organic Chem. So that A- average for Junior year may be more within your reach than you think. Furthermore, many universities use “trending” data which would help you if your last year was your best, and if you get to know your professors this coming year you may get very good letters which will further play to your advantage. Pick one or two and go to every office hours and ask them about their research, it will help a lot.</p>

<p>Finally, I would buy some MCAT prep books and start working one day every week on practice tests and the like to improve your chances of scoring well on the test in the Spring or early Summer. If you score well it may also mediate some of your lower grades.</p>

<p>Keep your hope alive, if you work hard it’s never hopeless!</p>

[bluedevilmike]

<p>Undergrad school can sometimes save you here.</p>

[ASMAJ]

<p>

According to the MSAR more than 10% of successful applicants to the following 35 medical schools had a 3.3 overall GPA:

</p>

<p>I understand that, but how many were URMs or did a masters or SMP before applying. 3.3 will be stretching it for a Caucasian/Indian/Asian applicant.</p>

[ASMAJ]

<p>Here some recent SDN post that may interest you. Some have lower GPAs, so its not exactly like your situation.</p>

<p>

OP: I’ve been through this (graduated with a 2.8). This response is long, but read it through.</p>

<p>First, to clarify terms:</p>

<p>A formal post-bac: This is a fromal program, offered by a handful of universities, designed to let people who graduated without having fulfilled the premedical requirements complete those requirements in the shortest possible amount of time. The best of these programs also have linkages to top medical schools (and are geared towards people who graduated with near perfect GPAs). This is not what you want.</p>

<p>An informal post-bac program: This is a fancy way of saying that you’re staying in undergrad longer to get your GPA to a more respectable level. This is an option for you. Take more classes, or just retake the ones you screwed up the first time around.</p>

<p>Special Masters Programs: These are 1 year programs, offered at about half a dozen medical schools, which allow students to take classes with, and be graded against, medical students at that school. They have nothing to do wth a normal masters degree, and serve no purpose other than to help you get into medical school. These programs almost all run for 1 year, cost a lot of money, and are billed as an ‘audition’ for medical school. Most of these programs have very high (>75%) success rates at getting their students into medical school, which translates to just about 100% of the students that did well in the program. Most SMPs also have some sort of guarentee to admit, or at least interview, the very top students in the program. A few SMPs (generally refered to as ‘high linkage’ SMPs) admit more than 75% of their students into the followng year’s medical school class. For obvious reasons, these are some of the most competitive programs to get admitted to.</p>

<p>Generally SMPs are geared towards people who have ‘unbalanced’ applications, meaning a high MCAT and low GPA or, more rarely, a low MCAT with multiple retakes and a high GPA. Obviously the lower your GPA the higher your MCAT needs to be to make up for it and vice versa. Most Special Masters programs won’t admit you with less than a 3.0 unless you have a truely stellar MCAT, and won’t admit you with less than a 2.75 under any cirumstances. So if you’re interested in doing this chances are you need to improve your cumulative GPA first. An SMP program doesn’t actually increase your undergraduate GPA, but your grades in the program will be weighted, by ADCOMs, as or more highly than your entire ugrad GPA combined.</p>

<p>BTW people who have screwed up in SMPs have reported back that after that their applications were basically unsalvagable, so if you go the SMP route view this as the very last thing you’re going to do to improve your application, one way or the other.</p>

<p>General Advice:</p>

<p>1) Don’t listen to your premedical advisor. Advisors are varying degrees of unhelpful if you’re a good candidate for medical school, but they’re all pretty much all equally and completely useless if your application sucks. They’ll either advise you to give up or tell you to do something that won’t help at all in terms of improving your app (like a traditional masters program). Politely ignore them.</p>

<p>2) Don’t do a tradiational masters or an MPH. The experience of the (many, many) people on SDN who have been in your situation is that medical school ADCOMs barely even consider grades from a Masters degree. It might help for an aplicant that was otherwise borderline, but if your GPA is awful it won’t help at all. For practical purposes the only grades ADCOMs care about are from undergrad and from other medical schools (via SMPs).</p>

<p>3) Don’t do ANYTHING until you’ve figured out why you got a 2.6 in the first place and have corrected the problem. Otherwise anything you do will only be digging the hole deeper.</p>

<p>Plans of attack:</p>

<p>the way I see it, you have 4 options</p>

<p>1) Get your GPA up to a 3.0 (or maybe a 2.8 if you can really kill the MCAT) over the next year or three calculating your GPA without grade replacement. Then do an SMP. Go to a US MD or DO school.</p>

<p>2) Redo all the classes you did really badly in. Get your GPA up to a 3.4 (or maybe a 3.2 if you can really kill the MCAT) calculated using only your most recent grade in a given course. Apply to, and go to, a DO school.</p>

<p>3) Finish your prereqs if you haven’t yet, get a decent MCAT, apply to the ‘big 4’ Caribbean schools, and start maybe as early as this coming spring. The problem here is that the Caribben has both high fail out rates (fail a single class and you’re done) and a very low match rate for residency (not getting a residency means your degree is pretty much worthless). If you’re not at the top of your game you’re going to burried under a mound of debt you’ll never escape from and you’ll never get another shot to be a doctor. The upside is, if you finish and get residency, your degree will be just as good as anyone else’s and you’ll be a doctor only 4 years from now. This is probably the best option if you come from money, otherwise I’d recommend against it.</p>

<p>4) Consider another career. Seriously, this job is good but it ain’t great. Have you looked at nursing? PA school? Business? Engineering? The military? Just getting in to medical school is going to take several years for you unless you go Caribbean, and then it’s at least 7 years until you can practice for a decent salary. Also if you try this every year of application improvement is going to cost quite a bit of $$, and you might not get in at all. Do you really care that much about a white coat?</p>

<p>Anyway, G’luck, whatever you choose.

</p>

<p>

Post #1- My GPA is 3.3. However I’m not sure if I want just work in a clinical job ( CNA) or do a master? Which will be better for admission? I know it depends on the applicant.</p>

<p>Post #2- You need uGPA work (post bacc) or SMP (Special Masters Program). Any other masters degree is not going to do much for you since you are under the uGPA average for matriculants. A clinical job isn’t going to offset that below average uGPA.</p>

<p>Post #3- Which route will better prepare you for the long-term job market if you don’t get into medical school? Given your gpa, I think that you need to prepare for that possibility.</p>

<p>Post #4- Graduate school programs (not counting SMPs) are infamous for grade inflation. Therfore, graduate school grades are not given much weight. That’s what njbmd was gettting at.</p>

<p>Post #5- Realistically, a gpa of 3.3 and a job as a CNA is going to get you… a job as a CNA. Without something further, it is very unlikely to lead to a successful application cycle.

</p>

<p>The second set of quotes are from ADCOMs directly.</p>

[BigRedSoldier]

<p>ASMAJ, your point is well taken.
The list was to show her that there are students with less than perfect grades who successfully apply to medical school. Her chances at any one school are probably not great but applying widely can be a savior and the list can also give examples of schools that she should include. Her grades are not ideal, that’s also why I encouraged her to do everything possible to score well on the MCAT and get a solid set of recommendations.
I just don’t want anyone to give up on their dream.</p>