I apologize for the long post, but I’m not sure how else to explain my situation.
So I’m a freshman engineer at Cornell with hopes of still being premed. However, this first semester went very poorly. At the end of this first semester I have a GPA of about 2.4 - 2.5. I took courses like biology, chemistry for engineers, calc I for engineers, and a writing seminar. Most of these courses, especially the STEM ones I had already taken before in high school. To be completely honest, I did let the ball drop this first semester and did not work nearly as hard as I did back in high school. For next semester I’ll have to take physics for engineers, calc II for engineers, comp sci, an engineering seminar, and a bio lab. All in all, courses that I have no familiarity with. I have already enrolled in extra help courses and plan on visiting as many TA hours as possible.
However, I wanna know is med school still a possibility given such a bad start?
Sorry, but I forgot to ask:
What should my next steps be to ensure that GPA is higher next semester?
I was in your shoes my 2nd semester of freshman year too.
I had a 3.0 and got my first ever C+ in my life.
What you need to do in make a spreadsheet with all your grades. I calculated that my GPA should be around a 3.7 (if I get 3.9+) when I apply to med schools junior year.
You just really need to strap yourself down and start studying. You know you didn’t work hard enough, but there’s time to fix that. A 2.5 GPA for your first semester is bad, but not dream crushing bad, especially if you plan on taking a gap year.
If you want to go to medical school, should you be in CoE? Maybe a transfer to another Cornell school? GPA is important for medical school. My younger wanted to go to law school, she worked hard to protect her GPA. If you are staying in CoE then you need to figure out how to balance your course load.
My older daughter was a math major in CAS, which was one of harder majors. She went to many office hours. She said she was very surprised how few students took advantage of it. There were times when she was the only person there.
Like many competitive schools, numerous Cornell students come in considering pre-med only to have their plans dashed in just this manner.
College is a time when you find out what you like, what you are good at, but also what you are not as good at as you thought.
The options are:
-See if you can do better there, pursuing the same path.
– Go someplace else and see if you can do better at that place, pursuing the same path.
The risk being that you can’t, or that the weakness of the subsequent school will mask your true qualification and ultimately you still won’t reach your goal.
FWIW, there was a CC poster from Cornell who went on the med school, he said [places like] Cornell were actually merciful in putting people who won’t ultimately make it out of their misery early, rather than have them hanging on to false hopes for their entire undergraduate career, only to come up short in the end.
-See if there’s something out there, at this school or another, that you are actually better suited for.
If it turns out that this is the best you can do there, if I were you I’d go someplace easier. even without premed. It is no fun going thru school worried that you are just hanging on.
But it may also be the case that you can do significantly better.
I bet one can overcome that early performance by stellar performance from there after.
The question is whether said stellar performance is realistically possible for you, there.
In many cases, it’s largely about study habits.
Sophomore BME here.
To be fair to yourself, it was your first semester and you were probably not used to Cornell engineering standards. To this day, my worst semester was my first semester. And if you took math, chemistry, biology, CS/ENGRI, and the FWS, you were taking 18 or 19 credits, I believe. Trust me, as someone who did that(15 in engineering classes and 4 from history) last semester, it’s a killer if you don’t have time management skills. This is not to say you couldn’t have done better, but it most certainly is understandable.
If you want to do better, figure out what went wrong last semester. Too many commitments? Poor study habits? Procrastination? Failure to go to office hours? Figure it out or history could repeat itself. Indeed, I got a freshman spring GPA 0.5 higher than the freshman fall GPA precisely because I figured out how to do better. So you certainly have hope still. You’re still a freshman, so you definitely can improve your GPA substantially.
@dib629
I would consider choosing between engineering and pre-med.
Engineering gpas are lower, and make it very difficult to achieve a good pre-med gpa. For most students, doing both is a mistake.
I was a first year engineer at Cornell 37 years ago. My first two semesters were the hardest period of my academic and professional career (hint: my first semester GPA was slightly lower than yours). I was an “easy A” high school student. Boy, did I learn what hard work was…
Cornell does a wonderful job of preparing you for the rigors of the future. Although I had no grad school aspirations, I changed direction from what I expected to do coming in to college, and it ended up being a great choice. Keep an open mind about what you want to do. What you think is your passion may turn out to be something different.
I now look back on the struggles of that first year as a wonderful and defining experience. I survived and found my passion. Since then, I have thrived. Thank you, Cornell.