<p>
</p>
<p>From academics perhaps, though you could enroll in a graduate degree program, I suppose.</p>
<p>A glide or gap year is not a “year off”. It a period of time to engage in productive activities–like being a clinical study coordinator, a medical scribe at a hospital or private medical practice, ER dept tech, research lab assistant. (BTW, all of these activities are strongly valued by medical school adcomms so you’re not wasting your time. Med school admission is about so much more than just what courses you take.)</p>
<p>Depending on where you live (CA has its own requirement w/r/t transferring to state public unis) I’d avoid taking Ochem and biochem and any upper level biology coursework. Take your GEs (general education) requirements and other pre-reqs like freshman writing, calc, stats, psych, sociology. Gen chem will usually be OK so long as you follow it up with Ochem at a 4 year college.</p>
<p>There are number of colleges that offer challenging pre med coursework. You can find challenge at nearly any college in the US. (You just have to go looking for it.)</p>
<p>A personal tale: I have 2 kiddos: one to went to state uni ranked in the 150-200 range; one went to a top 30 research U. Guess what? Both are in medical school. Both had plentiful academic challenge; both had strong, mentoring relationships with professors; both had interesting research opportunities and publications; both had a wide range of meaningful volunteer service activities. It’s not the school that make a successful applicant–it’s the applicant him or herself.</p>
<p>BTW, USNWR’s rankings of medical schools is pretty bogus. Their methodology is suspect and not especially a good measure of quality. Don’t let it influence your thinking.</p>
<p>Take a look at this article from the Journal of Academic Medicine:</p>
<p>The Fallacy of Medical School Rankings</p>
<p><a href=“http://academicmedicineblog.org/2013/07/10/the-fallacy-of-medical-school-rankings/[/url]”>http://academicmedicineblog.org/2013/07/10/the-fallacy-of-medical-school-rankings/</a></p>