@Dontskipthemoose : Meh, pre-med is a double edged sword. At a place like Emory, you can come up with professor and course selection schemes to maximize GPA much like everywhere else, but then often there is a severe tradeoff in quality (you know the thing most are supposedly shelling out 10s or even 100s of thousands of dollars for even after financial aid) if you are overly strategic and this can cost in terms of making it easier to prep for the MCAT. If you take crappy courses, then even a good SAT/ACT taker may under-perform on the MCAT despite the correlation. The trick at Emory, is to take the best instructors you can (or that your abilities allow you to try) in the key pre-health courses(ochem, bchem,gchem, physics, biology, psyche 110/111) that offer some preparation for MCAT sections and then maybe be less selective in terms of quality in other courses that go towards science GPA )Many students who take this higher road for pre-med cores employ classes like physiology, evolutionary biology, and developmental to pad their GPAs outside of those courses. NBB and chemistry majors pretty much have it a bit tougher because the curricula are more stringent and challenging in general than say biology). At elite, pre-med is an optimization game because in theory you should get better preparation, but getting that preparation too often is a risky proposition. If ultra fortunate, you just take all standardized exams so well such that you can waste your money, take all the easy instructors, and then easily get a great MCAT lol. The point of going to Emory in such a case is? Don’t know…
@bernie12 who said I wasn’t taking AP credit? I’m talking about the sciences like AP Chem and AP bio. I won’t be taking credit for those even though USF will take them because medical schools won’t. I will be taking credit for everything else like history classes, economics, government, calculus. There’s really no way to avoid the gen Chem and gen bio without it biting me later on when I apply to Med school.
@Syd340 : That is what I meant. And that is mostly a myth unless you only apply to UCs (and even then). At Emory I have seen in the past many folks who did not take both gen. biologies or gen. chem at all and they are at very top medical schools today. Even with the UCs, they will ignore that you skipped them in light of you taking more advanced courses in the area. So if you are a biology or life sciences major, it does not hurt to use AP credit in biology to maybe take an honors section of general biology or other courses in it that may have a lab component later or starting that year if possible For example, Emory has had several freshman start off with this course called organismal biology with a popular instructor (very good course, taught students data analysis and experimental design before potentially taking “big boy” classes like Eisen’s Epigenetics or Cell biology class which require those skills in addition to creativity). They never took general biology 1 with lab and only took general biology 2 with lab (again they took just organismal the first semester). I can tell you where 5 of these folks are at. One at Michigan for MDPhD (was admitted Harvard MD), one at Stanford for MD, one at Pittsburgh for MDPhD, one at UCSF for MDPhD, and one at Cornell for MD. These were all excellent students who because they were majoring in one or 2 of those areas (or related ones with similar intro. course requirements), skipped 3/4 of general chemistry and biology for the most part (3/5 of this crew took freshman organic and all skipoed gen. biology 1 which is the only semester the biology department allows people to skip). Please avoid buying into some myths.
I have never seen students taking such pathways who had good credentials (even some who did not say, “compensate” for freshman ochem by taking an upper division) flop at getting into medical school, especially good ones.
It is clear that Harvard has a special place in their heart for students who stretched themselves a little bit: https://hms.harvard.edu/departments/admissions/applying/requirements-admission
Suggesting that students can and maybe should do more advanced things than a pre-health would usually be recommended. While it is the only one that explicitly states it on the website, it is not the only top tier medical this way. I remember when Stanford used to list on their website: “We like students who have taken at least a semester of pchem”
The idea is: If in a cushy position to at least try a challenge early on in one area and just take an intermediate or advanced to compensate, why not? If USF is supposedly less competitive than a place like some top tier publics and privates there may actually be less risk associated with it (often the risk at a top tier is that even in say a freshman organic class, students are opting to compete with abnormally motivated students, some who may have even won awards or have done research in a related field. If the instructor pitches a tough course and grades on a curve, then there could be trouble for some. But usually opting into other intro. biology options is not the same type of risk).
One friend of mines was an NBB major who never took an upper division lab to compensate for not taking biol 141 (he did take frosh ochem and then organometallics and analytical, but those were partially for fun) and was interviewed everywhere he applied. If I had to guess it is because basically all of the schools regarded his strong grades in NBB 301, NBB 302, NBB 401, Human Brain, Human Physiology, and biochemistry as evidence that he probably knew introductory biology. He even interviewed at elite medical schools (landed at a very good one, University of Miami) and he actually a C and some Bs on his transcript. I suspect him not following the super traditional pathway and performing very strongly otherwise actually helped him some (he had a pretty strong MCAT and his 14/15 in the physical sciences more than made up for his not taking gen. chem).
Also, some schools like H do not actually even have a gen. chem course (Harvard does this integrated life sciences type of curriculum and they completely dismantled general chemistry). Many liberal arts colleges and now Emory (the upcoming fall) have gone down to one general chemistry course instead of 2 with the 2nd semester basically being organic chemistry. I have not heard of these students being at any particular disadvantage.
@bernie12 You are probably right about that, thanks for the insight. I have not been through the system yet so I am just going by what I have been told, but I will definitely keep that in mind when I meet with an advisor at USF. My science scores will get me into higher classes so I may do that because it is easier than at a top 20 university such as Emory. I guess that would be an advantage of attending USF.
@Syd340 It is your education, do not let even a pre-health advisor claim you should play it safe if you actually are good and want to learn at a higher level. They tend to take a one size fits all approach. You need to gauge yourself and optimize your experience.