<p>Hi everyone, I wrote about my first year as a pre-med at NYU over two and a half years ago in a thread that is practically ancient in Internet time. Some of you may have seen it before:</p>
<p>Anyway, I just graduated last December after 3 & 1/2 years in CAS. Right now I have some time to kill, so I thought I would provide some additional info about the later pre-med courses at NYU. I remember when I was a senior in high school who had no idea about what was in store for me academically once I arrived here. It is my hope that this information will help people down the road who are in a similar position that I was in and allow those of you in the coming years to know ahead of time what to expect and to prepare for each situation as you see fit. I know that this will only appeal to a select group of students, so I apologize for the fact that I cant answer every single question about NYU in general. I will also apologize ahead of time if anything is missing, unclear, disorganized, excessively long, or needlessly descriptive; to be honest, my writing skills have not improved much since high school (not that it's very important as a science major lol). Seriously though, keep in mind that my academic experiences are limited to pre-med and a specific subset of the biology track but if there's something relevant that I might have left out, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer it. Ill also try to keep this shorter than the last thread, partly because I dont want to have to write the most horribly written story ever, and partly because I dont remember a whole lot of specific details from sophomore or junior year.</p>
<p>So, to begin: Ive already gone over the courses that the majority of 1st year pre-meds take in the thread that I linked to above. Im just going to highlight a few relatively inconsequential changes (From what I know, most of it still applies today but if anyone has updates, feel free to correct me). Conversations of the West is now Texts and Ideas, and World Cultures is now Cultures & Contexts. The courses are taught in a similar manner, with Texts and Ideas being more philosophically inclined and Cultures & Contexts being more historical in nature. In addition, the labs for General Chemistry have merged with the lectures so the same professor is now responsible for the entire General Chemistry curriculum, as opposed to one professor doing the lectures and another overseeing lab when I was a freshman (From what I know, the labs and lectures are still running in a similar manner, so I dont think that this changed anything significantly).</p>
<p>Now, onto the new information. After freshman year (Just for reference, based on my own VERY rough estimates after looking at the number of students in Organic Chemistry, comparing it to General Chemistry, and finally taking into account the proportion of students who decided to take Organic and General Chemistry a year later), I would say that at least 1/3 of all freshmen who were pre-meds had given up after Principles of Biology and General Chemistry.</p>
<p>Despite the seemingly grim statistic that I just estimated, I would say that sophomore year at NYU is, for the majority of the serious pre-meds here, the defining year, the year that they take a long hard look at their progress and decide whether or not they are cut out for the pre-med track. An even larger percentage of students decide to discontinue pre-med by the end of this year. For most, sophomore year is probably one of the most academically challenging years out of all 4 (although this may depend on your major). As a Biology major, sophomore year was (in my opinion) the worst out of all 4 years. My GPA took a decent hit, partly due to the workload in science courses, and partly due to the fact that I made very poor choices in terms of my Conversations of the West and English courses (pre-meds are required to take a second semester of English in order to satisfy the one year English requirement; Writing the Essay counts for the first semester). In general, most pre-meds who are not Biology majors take both General Physics and Organic Chemistry in their sophomore year, both of which are one year, two semester courses. Biology majors generally only take Organic Chemistry because we also have to take Molecular & Cell Biology, which was arguably the most challenging Biology course that I took at NYU. The professor has changed since then (I believe the current one is Stephen Small, who was also my departmental advisor for a period of time) and I believe it is a bit more bearable now since Small is actually reasonable (My professor refused to allow recording devices/electronics, did not post lecture notes online, and during lecture gave us an average of 20-30 seconds per slide, half of which only contained figures without any descriptions). Nevertheless, the course is exceedingly difficult, and I think the use of a graduate-level textbook is quite fitting. Regarding my other course choices, I chose Intro to Archaeology in order to satisfy my Social Sciences MAP requirement (Interesting course and relatively easy as long as youre good at memorizing places and dates), Conversations of the West: Animal Humans, Medical Anthropology, and 19th Century English Novel. I recommend taking Medical Anthropology at some point as an elective if you have the space for it in your schedule. The course load is relatively light and I learned about the cultural interactions involved in how medicine is viewed and practiced around the world, a consideration that I believe is severely lacking in the practice of Western medicine. If Animal Humans or some variation of it is still offered as a Texts & Ideas course, dont take it unless youre extremely interested in debating philosophy. For the record, the main idea at the end is that were similar to animals in some ways and distinctly different in others, but there are still some questions about our relationship that are difficult to answer (which is something that a high-functioning child in primary school can tell you for free). Also, do not take 19th Century English Novel unless you are genuinely interested in 19th Century English Novels AND you want to compete with a room that is 95% English majors for that A (No offense to English or philosophy majors, I admit that I am just personally very bad at those two subjects, and Im sure that some people reading this that are majoring in the sciences would like to take easier courses in those subject areas). For what its worth, I heard later on that Asian-American literature is a relatively easy English course that a lot of pre-meds take, but its appeal might be limited to those who are interested in Asian-American culture.</p>
<p>However, Im sure that most of you dont care about my MAP course choices, electives, or my Biology major-specific courses; not everyone will take those. Every pre-med will, though, end up taking Organic Chemistry, and I think its appropriate that I give it its own section. Maitland Jones Jr., a hot shot Organic chemist that formerly taught at Princeton, is the primary professor for this course. Depending on who you are and how much you interact with him, you will have very different opinions about him as a person, so Im going to leave that up to you to decide whether or not you like his real personality. Im only going to cover the important academic aspects of the course. The first thing he tells you on the first day of class is that there is no curve, so there is no competition between the students. THIS IS A LIE. Assuming that the grading system has not changed, a 65 raw score is approximately the B/B- divide, which sounds very reasonable. He claims that this is the historic average and theoretically, if everyone can score in the mid 80s on every exam, everyone will get an A. What he fails to tell you (and what some of you have probably deduced by now) is that his goal is to ALWAYS make the final grade average out to be as close to 65 as possible. Since he writes the tests, all he has to do is generate exams based on how the class is performing. If the average for one exam is extremely high, he will make the next test ridiculously difficult in order to get his 65 average. Sometimes he is horrible at doing this and ridiculous things happen. In the first semester of fall 2009, the average for our first 3 exams was approximately a 70, which to him was too high. He made an extremely difficult final exam, far more difficult than the one that he gave in 2008. According to my TA, the average for the final exam was somewhere in the low to mid 40s. Since the final was worth approximately 30% of our grade, this brought the final grade average down to around a 64 65. In my spring semester, the average grade on 2 out of the 3 midterm exams was atrocious, somewhere in the 50-55 range. As a result, he made the final ridiculously easy by asking you to write just the basic sample reactions that are literally written in his textbook. The average for that final was somewhere around 80.</p>
<p>So why am I telling you all of this? The reason is that I dont want anyone to believe his lies when he says that there is no curve and no competition. Due to the way that he manipulates his exams, your grade will be determined by how well you do relative to your classmates, which is more or less how a curve functions. If you are inherently good at Orgo like a handful of the students are every year, then this wont apply to you; there are a number of students who can consistently obtain raw scores of 90 and above. However, the vast majority of students will be scoring lower than that on most exams. Im not advocating that you should try to actively sabotage your classmates, but you should be very aware of the amount of work that you need to do in order to stay above the average. The majority of the questions will be synthesis-related and the entire exam is written. In order to understand how these types of problems work, you need to understand how to do the problems at the end of each chapter. Its a considerable amount of work, but the fact is that the reading in the textbook only tells you the basic mechanisms that you need to know. Youre responsible for figuring out how they can be used in a variety of situations in order to generate specific products, and it is only through practice that youll learn to think like an organic chemist. </p>
<p>The lab component of Organic Chemistry is pretty abysmal and very similar to General Chemistry Lab. However, it can be bearable if you luck out and get a good TA. The majority of the TAs consist grad students that recently came from China and their English is very poor. Most of the time they huddle together in groups next to a counter or bench and talk to each other in Chinese. I even overheard several of them on numerous occasions asking each other in Chinese what the lab was about, and these were the people who were supposed to help us and answer our questions regarding that days lab (For the record, I am ethnically Chinese as well, so please do not misconstrue any of this as me being racist). I really dont understand why the grad school chemistry program forces these individuals to TA when they are clearly not qualified for the job. Some tips for doing well in the class: Always read the labs thoroughly beforehand and plan ahead as much as possible in order to minimize the chances of error; most of the experiments are not salvageable and you will need to repeat the experiment from the start should you fail at any step. Failure to generate the final product will usually cause you to lose points unless your TA is extra generous. In addition, always have either you or your lab partner watching your equipment and lock your lab lockers after youre done; students break things all the time and some of the parts cost $30-$40 to replace. As a result, people tend to try to steal those items from others around them. In general, being both meticulous and efficient in everything you do should minimize the amount of issues that you might run into.</p>
<p>In my junior year, the only pre-med course that I had left was General Physics. Again, a good number of pre-meds end up taking this course in their sophomore year in conjunction with Organic Chemistry so if your schedule allows it, I would suggest you take them simultaneously if you think you can handle the workload as this will give you more choices later on to possibly pursue another major/minor or perhaps even graduate early. The General Physics course at NYU is also a yearlong course separated into two semesters, General Physics I and II. Historically, General Physics I can only be described as a train wreck. In the years before I took it, most of the professors were horrible, and according to my friend who took it the year before, the best one was over 80 years old and going senile. Luckily he retired and for my year, a single professor taught the course by the name of Burton Budick. As nice of a person as he may have been, his lectures were utterly pointless. The majority of the information given during lecture was at the level of a high school physics class, but the exams required thinking and problem solving skills that were not emphasized during lecture at all. Like Orgo, Physics requires you to learn how to solve problems yourself, a skill that must be self-taught. Homework sets were not graded, but for most people it was necessary to know how to do them in order to succeed on the exams. Unlike Orgo, the final grade average is not designed to hit a specific number. However, like Orgo, your performance relative to the average will decide what grade you get (the grades are curved). Generally, 15-20 points above the average is a safe A. All exams were multiple choice with 20 questions per exam (no partial credit). From my knowledge, the professor for this course may have changed once again, so perhaps none of this is applicable anymore. It seems as if they can never find an effective professor for General Physics I.</p>
<p>The professors for General Physics II were much more competent. I believe Andre Adler has taught it for several years and will continue to do so in the near future. There is also another Chinese professor whose name I cant remember but from what I heard, he was also much better than Budick. This course does not assign a textbook, so the professor distributes handouts with problem sets for students to solve. Most of the problem sets are relatively straightforward and he goes over important problem solving skills that are necessary for performing well on the exams. The test format and grading is virtually identical to General Physics I.</p>
<p>Both semesters of physics also come with a lab component, which is fairly straightforward. Like all labs, the quality varies wildly depending on your TA, but unlike General and Organic Chemistry labs, these are divided into small sections of approximately 20-25 students each. In my experience, they were run more efficiently than any of the chemistry labs, although I have friends who have very different opinions due to the fact that we had different TAs.</p>
<p>I wont go into the Biology major-specific courses that I took since I seem to have again produced a post of epic proportions. If anyone has questions regarding the Biology major, I will do my best to answer them in separate posts. If anyone who has been through any of these classes and discover something wrong or outdated, please feel free to correct me. I personally believe that in conjunction with my previous post from 2 & 1/2 years ago, this represents a relatively accurate and (hopefully) unbiased depiction of the pre-med courses offered at NYU. After writing all of this, it has not escaped my notice that in general, my descriptions here are significantly more negative compared to those in my original post after freshman year. Pre-med is perhaps one of the most academically challenging tracks that exist at most universities, and the numbers reflect that. Most universities of NYUs caliber and higher depict rosy pictures of the future to prospective freshmen by showing that they have 80-90% of students who apply to med school being accepted to at least one. What they fail to tell us is what percentage of students who enter as pre-meds actually survive to see the application process. In my year, there were roughly 500 or so freshmen that entered with the desire to pursue pre-med. I believe that after junior year ended, approximately 100, maybe a maximum of 150 students remained pre-med. Many students chose to switch to other health-related fields such as pre-dental, while others decided to do research instead or something else entirely unrelated to healthcare or science. The fact of the matter is that a large number of students cannot keep up with the workload, which I believe is at least in part due to their inability to properly judge the amount of work required for them to remain ahead of the curve. As a result, some of them do not end up with a GPA that is respectable enough to apply to med school. If there is one main lesson to be learned from this post, it is the fact that things in college generally do not become easier over time; professors tend to teach less and less while increasingly requiring us to learn by ourselves the skills required to succeed as well as implement those skills in order to make the necessary connections. In the end, although innate intelligence may help, like in all aspects of life it comes down to how dedicated and passionate you are about merely earning the privilege to apply to medical school.</p>