Help a Rising Junior Pre-med Latina who’s very confused [CA resident, 4.0, <$30k?, pre-med]

Concretely, based on your it means you want to attend college in CA as well as Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington ; all states in New England; Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota; Maryland, New Jersey, New York State, Virginia.
Iowa, Kansas, Ohio are potentially possible but there are lots of choices if you look at the states above.

Your 1190 is fully 350 points above your school’s average: it IS very good. That would be taken into account by any top school but you’d definitely need to increase it if you choose to submit.
If you can make it to 1400 you’re golden but since they’ll use your school’s average score to see how far you deviate from it, a 1300 would be ok. Scoring National Recognition would be he cherry on the cake. :slight_smile:

CC, ASU Barrett, CSULB, UC Merced, UNM Honors are all safeties. I wouldn’t even apply to Merced because even if you fail to get into other UCs you’ll automatically get in through the top 9% scheme. UCR is another safety, apply early on + look at the special premed programs like https://msp.ucr.edu/

UCD is a match and perfect for a premed.
You’ll need more academic/financial matches.

I suppose that Brown PLME is your ultimate top choice but run the NPC to see what the financial aid looks like with just your mother’s income (probably a near full ride) and with both parents’ ( :grimacing: )

I suppose your guidance counselor is fully on board with trying to help you reach the colleges you want. There may be an obstacle in that most students at your school are not college bound (or attend CC), therefore s/he may not be aware of some of the intricacies expected from GC’s used to sending students to highly selective schools.
For instance, your teacher and GC will certainly check that you have the most rigorous curriculum available and are one of the top few they’ve encountered. But they’ll need to write little anecdotes that make you shine - and since UCs don’t require LORs, they may be rusty. (As you can imagine, it’s too easy to write “X is exceptional”. Adcoms will want proof, or, more accurately, what your recommender exactly means by it.)
In their recommendation, they’ll need to provide a way to measure how exceptional you are compared to the school profile, specific examples of the ways you are self motivated to achieve beyond anything they’ve seen in 10, 20, 30 years.
You’ll need to give them something called a “brag sheet”, where you list the moments, notions, readings, experiments… that stick out in your memory wrt their class or your HS career so their recommendation can be vivid and detailed.

At most private universities, you’ll need to “demonstrate interest”. It means creating an email you use for college communication like 1stNameLastName.College.2024 @ …; then you look up “join the mailing list”+ name of private colleges you’ve heard of or are listed on your thread; they’ll send you messages, which you need to faithfully open regularly; if you see something of interest, click on it: they actually track all of it and use it to determine whether you’re serious about them or not.

Note that DE Chem for Medical Sciences is likely to be very competitive and WILL count toward your MedSchool Science GPA and science GPA. Since you’re already taking Chemistry and AP Environmental and DE Anatomy and DE Physiology, it looks like overkill and it’s a class you simply can’t get anything but an A in… Since you’re taking AP Chem senior year, I would leave that DE class for college.
Your Junior year also badly needs a World Language, see if you can take Spanish 102 and 201 that year so you’re competitive everywhere.

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As an aside, you may also want to look at Cognitive Science as a possible major, especially at UCSD where this is a particularly robust department with multiple tracks, including one that emphasizes neuroscience: B.S. Spec. Neuroscience

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Yeah, I’ve looked into UC Davis and am pretty impressed by its premed program but never actually considered it a match and more of a reach, hence its absence from my already reach heavy list. I’ll probably replace UC Merced with either UC Davis or UC Riverside.

Oh I never actually heard of that, thank you for the advice! I’ll look into registering for the Brown emails and a couple of the other privates that have been recommended to me on this thread :))

Yeah someone earlier in the thread mentioned that and I’m rethinking taking those classes. I might drop DE Chem and DE Physiology considering that I need chem as a prereq for that. I’ll probably roll back on the Science DE classes after Anatomy which I already registered for.

Okay so I will totally add DE Spanish 102 to my junior schedule (probs spring), no problem there. Unfortunately, Spanish 201 is only offered once a semester at the community college I attend and I will not be able to take it since it interferes with my hs schedule. What worries me about foreign language is also that up to AP Spanish Literature is offered at my hs but its offered the same period as AP Calc so I can’t take it senior year so the only “third” year of Spanish (highest non AP Spanish lang/lit) I could take at the hs level would be Spanish 3 for non-native spanish speakers, a non-weighted class that has a reputation for being a ridiculously easy A. I just worry that it would look weird from a course rigor standpoint to take this class my senior year. So I’m left in a sticky situation where I could either a) take a Spanish class my senior year so technically have 3 years of spanish (4 for UC’s and CSU’s) but have a very noticeable decrease in rigor which could look suspicious or b) not take Spanish 3 and technically have only two years of Spanish for a lot of privates, making me ineligible/noncompetitive for several universities that might have been an otherwise good fit. Do you have any advice what I should do? Thanks for all the great insight by the way – I’ve received a lot of great advice! Very glad I posted this thread

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Ooo seems interesting - I’ll be sure to look into it!

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Oh okay, thank you for the clarification. Shoot, I posted in another reply my conundrum with getting the third semester of Spanish in another thread so I’m probably going to have to search for colleges that offer either the UC/CSU equivalency. Thank you!

Oh gosh darn I just looked it up and all PSAT is gonna be digital huh? Damn it, my school never mentioned anything about this :(( Thanks for the mention – I’ve been practicing on khan academy on questions that mimic the paper based exam I assume. Hopefully some of the skills transfer over :^(

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For UC and CSU, level is the only consideration for foreign language. So if you take college second semester Spanish that counts as level 3, then you need college third semester or high school fourth year or AP to count as level 4 to advance the number of years of foreign language for UC and CSU.

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Re: the Spanish scheduling issues and DE classes: you can always check for online sections at other CCC’s - you don’t have to be limited to your local one if there are scheduling issues. Especially check whether your CC is in a district with one or more others, since you’d already be in their system and all courses would go on a single transcript. But others would be okay too!

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See, that would be a good idea and I’d initially considered it by my local cc is the only one where I get books free (the textbooks required at the other cc I was looking at totals to $250 :sob:) and also the other nearest one is about a 35 minutes without socal traffic. I don’t really feel I would preform well in Spanish literature online considering it’s a very difficult class and my Spanish knowledge is limited to Spanglish/not very formal. Thanks for the suggestion though. I’ll keep searching for alternative cc’s.

Argh. I seriously don’t know why CC’s do this to students who mostly don’t have a pile of cash to buy textbooks with! When my nephew was at CC, the textbook costs were ridonkulous. There are so many low cost and open-source options now; it makes me wonder if the CC’s get a kickback for expensive textbooks or something. Anyway, sorry, sounds like you’ve thought this through already!!

Nothing to contribute but that it seems you’re planning on taking more English classes than you’d need. I counted six. You’re taking both an AP and a DE in at least one year. Is there a reason for that?

But I agree with others in that you are on track to be very successful and I think you’ve got a great personality and sense of humor!

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Just to guarantee that I actually get the college credits for the English classes since I don’t really trust myself to pass the exam but still want the credit to save money when I get to whatever higher education institution I ultimately end up at lmao. I totally get that it does seem a little like I’m an aspiring poet or smth tho, maybe I’m better off applying as an english major hehe.

Thank you!!!

You can take all the DE’s you can handle but there is ZERO guarantee that the college you end up in will give you credit or that it will save you money. Every institution decides their own policy on courses taken at another institution AND that includes AP courses in HS.

Take these classes because you enjoy the challenge, but you need to check every single college you’re interested in to see if there’s even a chance it will save you money.

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you should be ok. Just switch over now. You can also download the bluebook app. That is direct from college board and has 4 digital practice exams on it.

My d25 is practicing for the paper SAT for August and will switch over to digital practice once that is complete. She is also a rising junior.

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The top schools do tend to use the CSS, will take into account both parents’ income, and with your F making 300K (and I presume paying significant child support according to the court’s sliding scale), that may make you completely ineligible for financial aid. The schools will view that your parents, with a combined income of over 400K, can afford to pay for college for you, even though your father probably doesn’t want to. Hey, that happens to kids whose parents aren’t divorced, too.

For this reason, I think that your top 3 concerns are: massive merit money, massive merit money, massive merit money. You can go to med school from any 4 yr college, so I suggest that you follow the money. There’s a thread on here about massive merit money schools for high GPAs (that’s you). Search for a school that will give you at least a full tuition scholarship, preferably a full ride. That is by far the most important thing, since you cannot afford to go into debt. Arizona. ASU. U NM. Alabama. I forget the others, but they’re in that recent thread. Follow the money, then get a really high GPA there, and you’ll get into med school.

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Also, some colleges charge a lump sum for full time tuition instead of by the credit hour. One of my daughters had credit accepted for AP Calc and DE English (but not AP stats, APES, or AP Chem because the first two didn’t meet any of her major or gen Ed requirements and the third wasn’t a high enough score for her engineering curriculum). So she just ended up having a lower course load for a couple of semesters instead of saving any money for tuition.

My other daughter attended a private college that required 32 credits to graduate. Students were not given credit for AP or DE courses, instead, they were only given the option to start with higher level courses.

If the OP thinks she is likely to attend a CA public university, I’d advise her to look at the credit transfer policies for DE credits if passing the AP tests is iffy. A student with a large number of DE classes might be able to graduate in less than 4 years depending on their major requirements.

California publics are super generous with accepting DE credit, just fyi for OP.

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Spanish 201 wouldn’t be literature, it’s just more advanced vocabulary&grammar that you need to apply to read&write more autonomously + a little bit more of culture, history, film.
Wouldn’t your CC offer it in an online version at some point?
Spanish 3 for non native speakers would not help - you need a “Level 4” class. Does your HS offer Spanish 4 or AP Spanish language?

CSUs and UCs will accept the DE credits but top private colleges consider these are just the basic pre-reqs for their classes (ie., you can take an equivalent at their college but it’s a bit “remedial” sorta). At these colleges, many students took AP Chem and just take General Chemistry (ie., for Chemistry major) 101. Students who haven’t, take a class titled like “Introduction to…”, “Elementary …”, “Principles of …”; there may also be gen ed classes that the description makes clear are not for science majors (“Physics&Meteorology in Film”…)

Are you getting A’s in your DE classes?

After reviewing your “map”, unfortunately Vanderbilt is out (TN). So that leaves UChicago as a university that doesn’t consider noncustodial parent income. Look into their curriculum carefully: there’s a heavy core in both science and humanities; it’s also quite hard for premeds.

Clearly your focus should be UCs and CSUs.
Keep in mind that premed-related majors are among the hardest to get into. :s

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Be aware that there are various issues to consider with AP credit and courses taken at community colleges for pre-med course requirements: FAQ Pre-med courses, AP/IB/etc. credit and college/DE courses, etc. . Unfortunately, choices to be made as a new college frosh pre-med can be complicated and can be speculative (since different medical schools may have different requirements or preferences that contradict each other). The bottom line is that, for pre-med courses, AP credit and community college courses may be looked down on by medical schools, repeating AP credit and college courses looks like grade grubbing to medical schools, and acceptance of substitution of more advanced courses to “validate” AP credit and community college courses varies by medical school.