<p>Suppose I apply when applications first open, do med schools only see the first three year grades? Does that mean I can pursue other opportunities during senior year, and not care about my grades 100%?</p>
<p>You will end up inevitably on waitlists during the application season and will have to send update letters to get yourself off those waitlists. The most common thing people update with are their senior year grades.</p>
<p>You also have to provide a final transcript before you’re fully admitted to med school. (You’re only conditionally admitted when you receive an ‘acceptance.’ You have to provide a final transcript and proof of graduation.)</p>
<p>Med schools can rescind your conditional acceptance if your grades–esp if you have pre-reqs remaining-- are not satisfactory.</p>
<p>So for an acceptance they see first three years
then after you’re accepted, they look at your last year?</p>
<p>after acceptance, just dont get any Cs</p>
<p>Plus if you took any dual enrollment classes in high school they’ll see that too.</p>
<p>Alright. I guess its a good idea to put harder classes for senior year then</p>
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LOL. Only a true premed would think of this.</p>
<p>I heard a rumor that, at a particular top college (likely Penn, but not 100 percents sure here), a very high percentage of premeds (esp. those non-science majors) take orgo lab in senior year, because it is too time-consuming, has little relevance to MCAT (considering the amount of time needed for this lab) and it is not easy to schedule a time slot for such a long lab session in the first 3 years.</p>
<p>At some state schools, there may be a different problem: For some lab, you schedule it starting from the freshman year, it is not until senior year before it is your turn to take this lab. All these could help build characters needed for a doctor, I would think. When you need to deal with a bad TA or adjunct professor, you should consider it as a part of the training for a future doctor who needs to deal with the insurance company or difficult patients or their families on a daily basis.</p>
<p>Scheduling your hard classes for your senior year may not be possible for an engineering major.</p>
<p>The sequence of required courses for engineers is pretty rigid. You’ll be front-loading all your tough classes like all your math, modern/engineering physics, gen and Ochem, circuits, systems, and computer programming in your first 2 years. BMEs will also have genetics, physiology, biochem and 2 semesters of bio in their first 3 years.</p>
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<p>ALL labs are sink-holes of time. Not sure that the bio lab is any less time-sucking thatn organic. (Obviously, it depends on the college.) But don’t many profs add a question or two on the mid-term and final which incorporates material that is learned in the lab? Thus, it’s easy points if one ‘gets’ the purpose of the lab.</p>
<p>Then of course, some/many college enforce the co-reqs. Taking organic lecture requires that one take the lab simultaneously.</p>
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<p>I think that largely depends on the school. D1’s college (big state U) had twice as many kids in Ochem lecture as they had available lab slots. It often took up to 2-4 semesters to get enough seniority to finally get a lab slot. Obviously no lab questions were ever included on the exams.</p>
<p>At D2’s college, you get a completely separate grade for lab. Intro bio, gen chem and OChem (and possibly genetics) all have a 1 hour weekly lecture that’s part of lab. Some lab instructors even give their own written lab exams. No questions from lab ever get asked on the regular lecture sections exams.</p>
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I think WOWMOM has explained it well. What she has described is the difference between a public college and a private college by and large.</p>
<p>However, there is another spin regarding this issue: It is rumored that a high power (i.e. Nobel Prize caliber) professor teaches the lecture class in such a way that, if a student has not had extensive lab experience under his/her belt BEFORE he takes the class (maybe even before college!), he will be at a huge disadvantage. It requires years of a researcher’s experience (and researcher’s “IQ/gene”) in order to comfortably sit in his class and take his exam. Just studying hard from the textbook and handouts will not help much in this kind of class. This a one reason why many students who is only good at math while in high school but does not have much chances to really learn lab-based science before college suffer unless he avoids taking this kind of class or works in a research lab for some time before he takes this kind of class. (which is a core class for a biochem major which is taken in sophomore for a stronger student and in junior by a weaker student – weaker or stronger depending on the student’s high school preparation.) This kind of professor in general does not any premed; he is looking for the next academic star.</p>
<p>So basically…For initial acceptance, they see the first three years, so you should work really hard to make this very high. For the last year, it’s okay to slip a little, but they still check because they might rescind.</p>
<p>Therefore…some of the harder classes (if there are no pre-reqs) should be pushed to senior year as a buffer</p>
<p>Don’t forget that senior year is when you’d be traveling all over the country for your interviews.</p>
<p>what about statistic courses</p>
<p>What about them? Stats will be included on the new MCAT. Additionally it’s useful for research and in some bio/chemistry/physics/engineering/psych/neuro and comp sci classes. A course in statistics is part of the med school curriculum.</p>
<p>Are you asking if stats classes are counted in your sGPA?</p>
<p>It depends on the course prefix. If it’s designated as a math or statistics course on your transcript (the latter if your school has a separate stats dept), then yes it’s part of your sGPA. If it’s designated as some other dept like psych or business, then no.</p>
<p>AMCAS instruction for course classsification:</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.aamc.org/students/download/181694/data/amcas_course_classification_guide.pdf[/url]”>https://www.aamc.org/students/download/181694/data/amcas_course_classification_guide.pdf</a></p>
<p>Yeah, I was asking regarding sGPA</p>
<p>I believe statistics and biochemistry are exceptions to the rule that they must be designated in a BPCM department in order to count on the science GPA. I’ve seen statistics and biochem get counted into the science GPA even when they are econ stats or psych stats or nutritional biochem.</p>
<p>My D’s college is one of those where Stats must be taken within the departmental major, whether it be math, sociology, econ or psych or other social science. The Premed advising office lists the course as bcpm with a footnote that in their view, the course meets all the bcpm requirements.</p>
<p>^ S’s college is like this also. Being too paranoid at that time, he took the one that is associated with the biology department, even though it is rumored that the one associated with some other department is “better” because that professor is more into teaching more traditional stuff rather than quickly getting into details on many research-related topics the professor is interested in. (It is not the research topic that is not interesting. It is how well the professor covers the topics. S’s professors appears to include too many topics from the second or even third (applied, not theoretical) statistics classes into this statistics 101 class. I heard his slides warn the students that they need to work with “blood and sweats” like a marine before they could get it. (I happen to have an intermediate level applied statistics book at home and found from him later that most topics there were covered in his intro class.)</p>
<p>I heard he learned a lot about “microarray” in the second half of the class, while the basic stats 101 topics are reviewed in the first 1/3 of the class. (Most students have taken AP Stats anyway.) There is not much programming stuff (in S language?) like in some other variation of intro stats class.</p>
<p>I heard there is even one variation of intro stats that is associated with the medicine (taught partly by an old MD), which is likely among the easiest in terms of the depth and workload.</p>