I’m studying social anthropology with a secondary in global health and a French citation. I’m also pre-med and want to knock out some reqs during sophomore year. Right now I’m thinking of taking organic chemistry, intro to anthropology, and poverty, race, and health (for my secondary). I’m debating for my fourth class if I should take physics, stat, or math 19a. I’ve already taken calculus but didn’t get as high a grade as I wanted so I was considered taking Math 19A to increase my math grade average. I was also considering taking Physical Science 2 but is it common/recommended for students to take orgo and physics at the same time? I was also considering taking a statistics class but I am not familiar with coding or R, so I was considering postponing taking stat. Any thoughts?
Harvard has a very active pre-medical advising program; I strongly suggest you give them a visit next time you’re on campus:
https://ocs.fas.harvard.edu/files/ocs/files/premed-academic-publication.pdf
The course description for Stat 102 (Statistics for the Life Sciences):
[quote]
The course will make extensive use of the statistical software package R, which runs on both PCs and Macs. The software is free and available online through www. r-project.org. You will be taught everything you need to know how to run R. R is straightforward to learn, but is sufficiently powerful and versatile to be useful for real projects that you might carry out after this course./quote
I learned computer programming as an English grad student with no prior exposure to computer programming and minimal math. Coding is mostly learning to use a set of rules. In some ways it’s more like learning grammar or how to parse sentence structure than anything else. There is bit of a learning curve, but it’s not a steep one.
Some functions in R are plug & chug.
Ochem is a huge time suck. Physics can be too unless you are strong math student. Taking them together also means you will have 2 science labs--which is another time suck. It's not a impossible combination, but it a time-consuming one. I like the link provided by @crankyoldman which provides a very detailed listing of acceptable coursework to meet the premed requirements. There is no such thing as improving MATH GPA since the GPAs for medical schools point to either Cumulative or Science GPA which includes Math classes.