<p>am i in for a rough ride? whats the average gpa of a premed at nu? how difficult are the courses required?</p>
<p>i don't think there is premed at nu... unless you're talking about HPME?</p>
<p>dewy, there's premed, its just not at "major". you have a certain track of courses to take.</p>
<p>anyways in general, it will be difficult since the classes are generally difficult (ie if you're a premed you have to take three quarters of organic chemistry. i've heard it described as the hardest orgo class in the world. whatever that means) but you will definitely not be the only premed kid.</p>
<p>ah, okay. thanks for the clarification (:</p>
<p>i have a friend who's a freshman this year, and one of his friends dropped orgo and will be taking it over the summer or something like that at Harvard because it's too hard at NU apparently. I think that's how the story went. So yeah, basically intense as hell.</p>
<p>From what I understand from my son (about to take organic himself), that in years past, NU would accept transfer credit for organic from Harvard only. A few years ago, they stopped accepting it from Harvard. Now you can only take it through NU. NU does offer an intensive version of organic over the summer. Each quarter of organic done in a 3 wk block of time. All day, 5 days a week for 9 wks to get all 3 required organic classes.</p>
<p>a coupel friends of mine tell me about orgo over the summer. just a couple points...
-each quarter is three weeks
-you're in class everday for 2+hrs?
-you have lab twice a week (this is i think either a 3 hr or 5 hr lab)
-the people who take orgo over the summer are a lot of the "extreme" premeds and grad students and stuff. My friends who took it over the summer said the average was high 80's/90's. which is amazing, considering its normally somewhere around 60 or so. They ended up getting something around a 90, but didnt get A's because other people scored higher.</p>
<p>just things to watch out for. and yes, mom2boys, they no longer accept other school's credit for orgo</p>
<p>lol…80/90s I wish that were true. I’m doing summer orgo here right now at NU. We just got our midterms back and average was a 51%. We all got owned by Dr. Priest…</p>
<p>Even NU doesn’t accept credit transfer from other places, you can use the grades for med school application. You just can’t count the credits towards graduation.</p>
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<p>I was about to say, I was under the impression that a lot of people took orgo at Harvard and transferred the credits. Though Sam Lee also makes a good point about this.</p>
<p>Pre-med is supposed to be hard, but all I can tell you is that at graduation I think 60-70% of the chemistry/biology majors graduated cum laude (compared with other diffucult majors at about 2-5%). Now, obviously this is because chemistry/biology majors work really hard (MMSS, despite its difficulty, had similar cum laude rates), but this also shows it’s possible to excel in the major, and also shows that they apparently don’t grade on that strict of a curve, because a large portion of the major is able to get honors.</p>
<p>My D (rising soph) is currently taking Biology at Harvard and two of her room mates in her summer apt are from NU and taking Orgo. Her opinion, and I tend to concur, is that this cramming a year’s worth of material in 7 weeks is a bit too concentrated. She indicated that this was even more so for her Orgo roommates. So while I don’t know anything about Orgo being transferable or not etc., from the standpoint of absorbing the material, the 7-wk Harvard option does have some serious drawbacks. For my D, taking Bio outside of NU means she can’t major in it.</p>
<p>She had hoped to have a chance to get to see Boston, but with the course work and exams, she’s done precious little sightseeing - we’ll probably do that when I pick her up.</p>
<p>^“a bit too concentrated” is an understatement. That’s 4x faster. Do they have labs everyday? I wonder if they skip some of the materials. The irony is you may get a better grade while not really absorbing the materials like you would at NU!</p>
<p>The material in orgo isn’t that hard it’s the god damn lab…1st quarter is pretty ez cuz u don’t have lab. You have lab lectures once a week with Dr. Priest and u learn about IR, Mass Spec, and NMR (crap like that) and u get tested @ the end of the quarter but you’re gonna need all that the 2nd and 3rd quarters so LEARN it. Second and third quarters blow because you have an alloted 5 hour lab time…make sure u have a good lab partner cuz u’re gonna be with them a lot lol (not to mention if u eff up u have to start over). You don’t always have a 5 hour experiment but the god damn writeups (if you want a good grade) take at least 1-3 hours depending on the experiment. You get quizzed sometimes during lab lecture. The way to go in my opinion is Wasielewski (don’t take Trzupek u will regret it), Lewis, and Trzupek (only teacher that teaches 3rd quarter). don’t take summer orgo if u want to stay sane</p>
<p>First quarter of bio with Holmgren blows too…Genetics FTL</p>
<p>while the materials don’t look difficult to read, what makes NU’s orgo difficult is that the teachers assign problems that would require you to go well beyond “understanding” the book. to them, you don’t really know the stuff if you can’t build on what you read and applies your knowledge to solve their problem sets and exam questions within reasonable timeframe or exam periods. not to mention they are not shy about giving C+/C to those that don’t meet their expectation. every premed in this country needs to take orgo so whatever in textbooks aren’t supposed to be that difficult to read. if you want to have any chance to do well in the exam at NU, you’d better know well enough to think the stuff in the book is basic. you shouldn’t be still looking to examples in the books before the exams; you should be doing problems. this is why when the exam grades come out at NU, the variance is high and the mean is low even for a pretty competitive class. considering the premeds have 80% admit rate and the average MCAT among the admitted students is 34, orgo grades at NU make many people look dumber than they actually are.</p>
<p>Summer orgo = 4 hour labs every other day…wOOt! As a matter of fact, I’m writing my 2 day lab write up right now…trying to get this done so I can study for the final this friday…-_-"</p>
<p>lol Strike srry bro… </p>
<p>Sam Lee I agree with you. The tests are difficult. Book problems do help you to some degree but if you can’t think past those problems you’re not going to do very well. There’s usually 3 tests and a final. The averages on the tests ranged from 60-70% with the majority in 60s range.</p>
<p>Regarding 7 wk Harvard biology course:
"The irony is you may get a better grade while not really absorbing the materials like you would at NU! " - Sam Lee.
D agrees. This week she had an exam on Monday, Lab finals yesterday, and overall finals tomorrow after desperately trying to finish the course materials today. Gave D option of redoing Bio at NU precisely because of the “absorbing the materials” issue. Would seriously recommend other NU students don’t do either Bio or Orgo in this manner even if it means it’s a rough sophomore year with both.</p>
<p>so i’m going to be an incoming freshman and i wanted to go premed
could anyone tell me what the general outline of classes that students who go premed take?</p>