So for starters, telling anyone other than my parents that I want to become a doctor someday is laughable, truly a joke considering the high school I go to, every other student has a nice 3.8 - 4.0 gpa with a plethora of them getting accepted into top undergrad schools. I definitely slacked in my early years of high school, I’m starting to get in the groove for studying (better late than never) all because reality is starting to bite me in the back with my current status. I’m realizing that if I keep up the current pace I won’t become a doctor let alone anything in life with my “winging it” mentality.
Now that I’ve established some backstory on my current status, what is seriously bothering me is how I will stand in college. I plan on taking Calc AB + Ap chem next year to get a feel for the types of courses that I will be having to take in college if I do take the pre-med track. EVERYONE says its hard, and it must be, but I don’t know how a person who is finally learning how to actually study in junior year could take the infamous pre-med track many students drop out of in college. Are the dropouts just not dedicated? Or studying far less than the ones that are making it to med school? I mean a 3.5 weighted gpa in high school, so far is not good, and I don’t know what extent of studying could get me prepared for college where I should have at least a 3.7 -3.8 gpa if I even want to consider becoming a docotor.
This might be all over the place, I’m just scared and excited at the same time and truly don’t want to fail my first semester of college. My first semester avg was a 84 weighted with all honors classes (extremely bad) and I can’t imagine having to repeat the same mistakes in an even more difficult and possibly a irreversible (meaning if I mess up its over) situation. High school can easily be bs’d till the end whereas college will require knowledge of the information throughout especially till the MCAT happens…
Just any advice would be beneficial to me. ex. what any pre-meds think the difficulty would be like for me or advice on how can just prevent this. (What also sparked this post was me blindly listening to friends at school or teachers even claiming that “you need to be an exceptional science + math student (in high school) to succeed at completing the pre-med track, and that I’ll most likely end up as one of the many that drop out of taking the rigorous track”
A tl;dr for those who don’t want to read is, is pre-med doable for someone with poor high school performance like mine, and how can I prepare for freshman year of college with the pre-med track in my schedule.
I’m in high school but I’m taking my classes at a local 4-year university. I mention this because my school is a mostly commuter school which attracts some older people returning to college. Some of those people are in my chem class working on the premed track. One for example, slacked off in high school then later in like discovered he loved learning and went back to college. I’m not saying its easy, but it is possible.
The first thing I would do is learn to study. You need to know the why (Why does this work? Why does this happen? etc) and the how (How do I solve this problem?) for math and science classes. The why often helps with the how. You need to learn how to take charge of your learning and making sure you really understand the material, because even if you can scrape by in one class without really understanding it, it will hurt you later in these types of classes. Also, go to class, do the assigned homework plus recommended homework if you need it , and if you need help, get it (office hours, tutor, peer study group, whatever); most professors want you to succeed. Practice studying efficiently and effectively next year even if you don’t have to, because it will save you in freshman university classes.
Another thing I would recommend is doing pre-med with a bachelors in some field that would be interesting to you that you could get a job in right after your bachelors, if you decide you don’t wanna continue. I’m not interested in medicine so I don’t know specifics, but their are plenty of jobs in the field that don’t require a doctorate. I’m not saying give up, but its good to have a safety net.
Current pre-med student here (senior in college). I’m done with all of the coursework (got all A’s in all of my pre-med/science courses), so now I’m just studying for the MCAT. How much work you put in largely depends on the professor that you have. In general, be prepared to put in at least 8 hours a week for studying and practicing.
The “why does this happen” is the difference between college and high school science. Instead of just rote memorization, you have to take the skills and apply them to new situations so that you can solve new problems. This is especially the case in Organic Chemistry and upper-level Biology classes. My school used this approach even in intro-Bio (you couldn’t opt out using AP credit for that reason; we went over the concepts, and then we had to apply them to specific scenarios and make presentations on biology literature).
Another thing that I would advise is to not get yourself overwhelmed. Pre-med coursework can be daunting if you let it get to you. Just take it one day at a time, and use whatever resources you can (the science learning center, YouTube videos, books, your professor’s office hours, etc). Let me know if you have any more questions.
what would you reccomend my freshman year schedule look like? any tips would be great.