@SGates Adding to post #11, both GPAs are also broken down by year with med schools being easily able to spot upward trends (a positive) and downward trends (a red flag). Also one’s sGPAs (BCPM) are considered to carry more weight.
You can study admission rates for medical schools for months. They’re not standardized how they say who applied and who got in, so you eventually just give up and choose a school. Also, UCSD doesn’t like admitting people to their medical school who went to UCSD, so if you want to go to UCSD Medical School go somewhere else.
I chose Berkeley because if I don’t get into medical school, then at least I have the name recognition of Berkeley to move on with my life. Good backup plans. Plus, the people are cool.
Note: For every class like 25-30% get As, top 50-70% get at least Bs.
@Walter924 Hi, thank you so much for replying!!! Just curious, how were the weeder courses for you? Is it easy to find downtime or is it just like 24/7 studying? Also, are other students more on the collaborative side or competitive side, is it easy to socialize with others, as I heard a lot of students just keep to themselves.
@SGates The weeder courses are fun, except for Biochem, which fine, isn’t terribly unfair (everything is in the powerpoints), it’s just SUCH a pain to study for.
Downtime is easy to get. Seriously, I watch Netflix every night from 9 to 10:30 and I sleep 8 hours a night unless I stay up late talking to my roommate (it generally takes a few roommates to get to the talking to your roommate every night point).
If you ever want to socialize, you just wander around the lounges or go to the dining hall. People talk. People who stay inside their rooms all the time, you just don’t meet. So if you leave your room, you’ll meet everyone else who leaves their rooms.
Collaborative. Really, how many truly competitive people are there in the world? The most competitive guy I ever met went to UCLA. But yeah, we have a bit of schadenfreude sometimes. Labs up to Chem 3B are all partner labs, so that’s collaboration. There’s study groups organize by the SLC. Plus, any competition just inspires us to do better, apply for more internships, actually put in the effort to get research, etc.
That last post probably didn’t make much sense. Sorry. Please ask for any clarifications. I keep writing these things in the 10 minutes passing periods.
You only need a 2.0 to declare bio. It’s not capped.
Everyone is generally premed until further notice. How premed you are fluctuates drastically. No one is really truly premed until they take the MCAT.
Taking the AP class totally helps, but don’t forget that it’s still Berkeley and you should study.
I’ve taken 5 labs. I’ve written about 2 lab reports (one might have been a group lab report). It’s just worksheets every week. Super easy, although sometimes they’re nit-picky when grading. Basically high school because you have regularly scheduled assignments due every week. Plus labs have easy curves.
Hi, thank you so much for your reply! It definitely helped me feel better. Kind of off topic but how was your experience with office hours? Is hard to find like research opportunities through professors?
A lot of classes have Piazza where you post your questions and students and teachers crowd source answers, so that helps with big classes.
I’m not a great person to ask those questions, because the only office hours that I got to regularly are the 3B GSI office hours, Tuesday after class, which is basically just 15 people all working on the pre and post lab together with a GSI answering questions. I also don’t do research. I know people who do. I just really hate applying to things and I don’t really have enough time right now and I just don’t want to figure that out.
Big clave GSI office hours almost all the time. Professor office hours are unfortunately only like 1-3 hours a week, so I’ve heard of people switching classes so that they can go to office hours, but it’s a bit difficult if you have a packed schedule
I’ll ask 3BL people in 5 minutes. Lab until 5.