I’m a premed bio and chem major at a top ranked school with a 3.2 gpa (pretty strong positive trend, 1st year was 2.7). Everything else, volunteering, clinical experience, MCAT, LORs, all that I’m sure is good, it’s just my gpa that’s the problem. Should I go to a postbacc program like Washu/duke/umichigan, to get my undergrad gpa up, or enter a masters program before applying to med school? The argument for the MA is that because I have good research experience and my LORs will be from some big names in my field, i’d have a shot at getting in a top MA program, like Princeton Chem&Bio Engineering, Yale/Hopkins Biomedical engineering, Stanford Bioengineering, etc, and I’m guessing a grad degree from one of them might be a bigger bonus than a boost in undergrad gpa from some postbac. Oh and I should mention I’d like to enter an MD/PhD program. Thanks for your thoughts!
Ordinarily I’d suggest a SMP for someone who has a low GPA, but whose MCAT and other factors are med school worthy, but I’m not sure if a SMP is viable path for potential MD/PhDs. It would probably be your shortest path to a med school admission.
@Iwannabe_Brown @plumazul Opinions?
You have a tough decision.
A post-bacc will need 60 credits of straight As to raise your GPA to 3.5 and 80 credits to increase it to a 3.6.
A grad degree program in engineering will raise questions about your commitment to medicine. Also med school admissions typically don’t consider grad GPAs during the initial screening process for med school admissions. Your uGPA will still be used for screening purposes and is low enough to get you screened out at many schools.
There are a few schools that re-weigh uGPAs, de-valuing freshman year grades, as part of their admissions process. It might be worth your time to seek them out.
Good luck!
In your other thread, you state that you’ve just finished your freshman year of college and that your GPA is “below 3.0”.
So which is it? Are you a rising college sophomore or a rising senior who has already taken the MCAT?
^ One is me the other is my roommate posting with a similar situation. Do you know any of those schools that de-value freshman grades off the top of your head? So far my search is just giving me a bunch of schools in Canada, which I’m not really considering. Another possible path I’ve read are “PREP” programs which I’d qualify for as a URM, some good ones are at hopkins, yale, mayo clinic, but I’m guessing they are looking for people with strong academic backgrounds but lacking research experience so if that’s the case my gpa could prevent me from getting in.
What is your MCAT score exactly? Remember MD/PhD programs (and this isn’t separating out the MSTPs, which are only more competitive) have a mean GPA/MCAT of 3.8/35.0 (MD only is 3.69/31.4). The top 15% of MD/PhD students have GPA/MCAT of 4.0/38.5 or better.
If you’re interested in MD/PhDs then your best best is a master’s degree with research. This will allow you to gain more research experience and prove that you can actually handle graduate level work (both in the classroom and sort of in the lab - masters level work is obviously not PhD level work but it’s certainly more than UG level).
Definitely look into those, and with your grades you may need to look beyond those 3 (because I know for a fact there are plenty of very good ones beyond them). I have no idea if you could get into one (they probably all have different requirements), but these programs, honestly more so than prepping you for medical/graduate school, are about recruiting URMs to the host institution, so you should be targeting a wide range of them.
I don’t think this is right in this case. I think it will depend on what your research topic is for your masters thesis. If it’s something that can be tied to medicine (e.g chem engineering and drug design. I imagine BME would be no issue) then I think you’d be fine. Remember MD/PhDs are about training researchers for the biomedical sciences but that doesn’t mean the background prior to the degree needs to be entirely biomedicine. She’s a straight PhD, not an MD/PhD, but I have a friend from high school who did her PhD in fluid mechanics and just got a job as a post-doc at a medical school in their microbiology department studying aerosol transmission of viruses. It’s not hard to imagine an MD/PhD program taking someone with a strong engineering background that can be ported into the biomedical sciences.
@iwannabe_Brown he just finished soph year. I don’t think he has an MCAT score yet.
He’s at a Top 5 school.