Pre-med Classes over the Summer

Pre-Med & Medical School
21

FYI, MCAT scores are only good for 3 years (2 years at some schools).

If your daughter hasn’t gotten a good start on her ECs already, it’s unlikely she’ll be ready to apply to med school next year. If that’s the case, she can defer taking her MCAT until after graduation and wait to schedule physics until her senior instead trying to cram everything in junior year.

Re: pre-reqs

In addition to sociology, med schools recommend (and in med school speak recommend = require ) a semester of intro psychology. Sociology and psychology (along with some behavioral biology) have their own entire section on the MCAT so even if psych isn’t required, she’ll need it for her MCAT.

She’ll also need a semester of stats or bio stats. Stats is a required/recommended course at almost every med school in the country. And, again, stats is heavily tested in the MCAT. Stats question appear in every section of the exam. And bio stats is a major component of many first and second year med school classes.

Lastly, a large number of med schools have hard or soft requirements for some UL bio classes: genetics, anatomy & physiology, and cellular or molecular bio are the most common.

Your daughter needs to research the requirements for all the med schools she hopes to apply to as well as all of her in-state public options.

And don’t be fooled just because a med school admissions page says it has no required courses. That doesn’t mean they don’t have some pretty firm expectations on what kind coursework they expect in applicants. Remember in med school speaks recommended = required.

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22

Adcomms are aware of the issues Covid is causing. (Heck as physicians they’re dealing with them on a daily basis…) Still without 150+ hours of in-person clinical volunteering her application isn’t going to be taken seriously.

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23

Oh yeah- forgot about the stats. She already did that too and got an A. She does have psychology left but I think she will do that next year.

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24

Seems like psychology may be less problematic to take during a summer at another college than physics.

Also, if she needs two physics courses, she may not be able to take both of them in one summer if physics 2 has a prerequisite of physics 1. So it may be more doable to take psychology and physics 1 in the summer, then physics 2 during a regular session at her main college. That would still be a demerit for pre-med purposes, but perhaps less of a demerit than doing both physics courses in the summer at another college.

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