How do medical schools feel about summer classes if they are at your main university? I heard that medical schools don’t like it when you take prerequites classes over summer, but I was wondering if that was true and if it is true, how big of a deal is it? Would it actually matter if you earned a good grade in the classes (A/A-)?
It’s not that they don’t like summer classes. It’s that they don’t like students taking required classes at other schools over the summer because it smacks of of avoiding the competition at their own school. You can take a pre-req over the summer at your own university.
This has been discussed ad nauseum.
Summer classes are problematic for multiple reasons:
- Like N's mom says, if it's a summer class at another institution (particularly a weaker institution) it shows an unwillingness to challenge yourself.
- Even if it's at your own institution, summer classes are different from main semester classes (e.g. enrollment may be more open - class is condensed, etc). If you must take summer classes to accommodate something else, I would take classes that are not pre-med pre-reqs.
- Missed opportunity. You take classes 9 months out of the year as a standard college student. That limits your opportunities to do anything that requires working a more standard full time schedule. The 3 summer months are your opportunity to do something full time (e.g. research, volunteer, work, etc). By using those 3 summer months to take more classes, you're missing out on an opportunity to devote yourself full time to something you couldn't otherwise do during the school year.