A Post for the Pre-Meds: Low GPA? Low MCAT? There’s Still Hope!

A couple of people recently contacted me freaking out about the new AACOM Repeat Policy Coursework change that was recently announced, and it prompted me to write this post. I’ve always been transparent about the fact that I had extremely low undergraduate GPA and MCAT scores when applying to medical school, but outside of the MCAT, I never actually revealed how low my actual GPA was. I think now would probably be a good time to reveal those scores and explain why I think this new policy change is something that really shouldn’t be stressed about in the grand scheme of everything, especially when it comes to applying to osteopathic medical schools.

My AACOM GPA

My AAMC GPA

I graduated from my undergraduate institution with a 2.2 GPA and over 150 hours. No amount of retakes was going to raise my GPA above the 3-point-whatever GPA that everyone thinks you absolutely need to have when applying to medical school. Additionally, my school had a rule that you could not retake a course that you received a C or higher in, and the main reason for my low GPA was the fact that I made a lot of C’s in my courses. It was an absolute requirement to retake any course with a grade of a D or lower, and I will admit that I did have a few retakes in there. Additionally, I entered into college with a low GPA to start because I attended a full-time joint enrollment honors program at a university during my senior year of high school, didn’t take it seriously, and later found out that any and all college coursework would be included in my application. As you can see above, I barely scored above a 2.5 on my AACOMAS application with the retakes included, and my AMCAS GPA was absolutely abysmal! My graduate GPA was a huge saving grace for me (my GPA was higher when I graduated, but at the point of my application it was as listed), but even with that included, my AACOMAS GPA only went as high as a 2.7.

With that being said, I was still able to gain an acceptance into medical school, so it just goes to show that some schools really do more than just screen based on numbers. There are both MD and DO schools that will look at the last 30 or so hours of your coursework and only focus on that as your cumulative GPA which will still give an advantage to students taking post-bacc or graduate coursework. If you have been retaking courses and were counting on the DO grade replacement policy to help you get an acceptance, I wouldn’t give up hope. As stated on the AACOM website: “Osteopathic medical schools may continue recalculating and weighing applicant GPAs per their established admissions practices. The scope of this policy change is limited to the AACOMAS verified GPA calculation.” To me, this pretty much means schools will continue to look at applications in the same way as before, although now they might have to make a few adjustments. Just focus on continuing to improve both your GPA and overall application, and everything will work out the way it should in the end. Also, if you are applying to DO schools, keep in mind that the majority of them tend to focus on the entire applicant and not just the stats, which is a major reason why I applied. If every other part of your application is stellar, but your GPA and MCAT scores are lacking, just be able to explain it and prove that you would be able to excel in medical school despite your shortcomings.

My MCAT Scores

Speaking of the MCAT, this post wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t throw that in here as well. I know there is a new MCAT with a completely different scoring system than there was when I took it, but as you can see (and also as I previously mentioned HERE) my scores were even low with that! I was seriously a true underdog when it came to applying to medical school, but my passion wouldn’t let that stop me from pursuing my dreams.

To those of you applying to medical school, I think it is extremely important to avoid the negativity and continue to push hard and work towards achieving your dreams. I remember reading posts on SDN that said someone with my stats (and especially a single mother) would never make it through the first year of medical school or pass their board exams, and now I am sitting here as a third year medical student who not only made it through my first two years without any major issues, but managed to pass the first part of both my MD and DO board exams, and to date, I have not received less than an honors evaluation (with some final grades as high passes after the shelf exams LOL) on any of my clinical rotations. I say this not to brag, but to be a source of encouragement and inspiration for those of you who have the dream of becoming a physician, but do not think it’s possible. I still have another year and a half to go, along with more upcoming board exams (please pray for me!), but even I have the faith that if I continue to do my best, keep the faith, and push through, everything will fall into place as it should. I’ll end here, but I truly hope this post helped motivate, inspire, and put some of you at ease.

"Go confidently in the direction of your dream and live the life you've imagined" - Henry David Thoreau

A Post for the Pre-Meds: Check out PreMedStAR.com!

Happy Monday! It’s a super busy time, but I wanted to take a quick study break to make sure my premedical student readers know about PreMed StAR, the Online Recruitment Network for Pre-Medical Students. With PreMed StAR, students can be directly recruited online by medical schools. It just opened up for pre-registration, and for the time being one year membership is free for those who register during this period! The site is www.PreMedStAR.com and you can also find out more and like their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/PreMedStAR. Please share this with all your fellow premedical students so you can all get recruited!

A Post for the Pre-Meds: Choosing Your Major as a Pre-Medical Student

Happy Sunday! I recently wrote a post for DiverseMedicine, Inc. that focused on choosing the right major as a pre-medical student. The link can be found HERE, so let me know what you think!

A Post for the Pre-Meds: Newly Accepted, but Afraid of Future Failure

@D Ward Something has been plaguing me. How did you adjust to your first year? I got accepted to WVSOM and I'm trying to think of good studying techniques before starting my first year. How do you know when you are ready? I'm just afraid of having a bad exam lol losing it. I just guess I'm just a little scared of the unknown lol

Sorry to go out of order from answering the questions I have received, but even though this one was asked more recently, I feel it’s a question that many newly accepted students are having at the moment. In my opinion, I don’t think any student entering medical school feels completely ready at the beginning. I mean, sure you might have advanced degrees, honored your way through college, and/or a whole bunch of other things that affirm your ability to handle what is to come, but like any new thing in life, you will still be entering into the unknown. You really won’t know you’re ready until you’re actually in the midst of everything, but you would not have been accepted if your school didn’t feel you were ready for the challenge. Now I am just a first year student myself and still adjusting, but I have felt the same anxiety with each new term, and probably will continue to with each new step.

As for being afraid of having a bad exam, I think it would be pretty hard to complete medical school without having had at least one bad exam. For some people, the word “bad” could mean not making an A on an exam, and for others it could mean failing an exam, so I think the word is pretty subjective. I think it is more important to stay positive and focus on the good, rather than the bad. It just doesn’t make sense to plant negativity in your mind and set yourself up for failure before you even start.

 For what it’s worth, I have already had the experience of having failed an exam, and even though I thought it was the end of the world at the time, I still ended up being fine. My second term of medical school was a great one for me, but it was a lot harder for me to adjust to my first term. My worst exam occurred a couple days after the white coat ceremony, and I performed so poorly on it that I was called into a meeting with the Student Progress Evaluation Committee (SPEC). At the time, I thought students were only called into a meeting with this committee if they were a part of the bottom ten percent of the class and in danger of being kicked out, so I completely freaked out. Apparently, this was not the case, but it still really stressed me out. When I walked in the door, the first thing one of the professors asked was “what the hell happened?,” and I was given the opportunity to explain why my performance was so low on that particular exam. At the end, I was basically told to go back to doing what previously worked for me, but I took away a few important points from the entire experience that I have shared below.

Don’t get bogged down with resources

I might be a bit biased, but I’m pretty sure my class beats out any medical school class out there. Not only am I surrounded by a bunch of wonderful, intelligent individuals, but everyone is always willing to help out each other in any way possible. Whether it’s sharing textbooks, websites, notes or anything else needed to succeed, there is always someone in the class willing to go out of their way to help the next person. With that being said, it is so easy to become overwhelmed with all the resources offered! It is so important to identify the best (and least amount) of resources possible that can help you achieve your goals. If you try to use every resource that you are offered, not only will it add more time to your studies, but it might burn you out even faster.    

  

Don’t focus on what (or how) other students are doing

This bounces off the last point, and I know I’ve said it before, but it is so important to do what works for you! You might have a classmate who only studies the PowerPoint slides the night before an exam, and somehow ends up acing everything, or another who spends at least twelve hours a day studying to do well. The reason why I failed the exam that I previously mentioned was because I started focusing on what everyone else was doing. I asked my classmates what worked for them, and then I tried to incorporate everything into my studying which turned into a disaster. Plus, if everyone around you seems to be doing well, and you aren’t, it can cause you to become slightly depressed which will negatively affect your grades.  

Study smarter, not harder

The first term of medical school I studied a minimum of five hours every day and tried to at least get in sixteen hours on the weekend. Looking back now, this was overkill. I was studying my notes, reading textbooks, doing practice problems, and using board review resources. If I had identified the best resources early on, then my studying time would have been cut in half. I also sacrificed a lot of sleep, which is always a no-no. It doesn’t matter how many hours of studying you accomplish in a day if you have nothing to show for it, so figure out how to make your time most effective. This will also allow for things like exercise and free time which will help you feel like school is not completely consuming your life.

Don’t be afraid to reexamine and change study habits

Going into medical school, you have to be willing to completely change your study habits. Even if you were able to study an hour before an exam in college and always make an A, that is probably not going to cut it in medical school. If simply reading a textbook has always helped you do well, you might have to change that as well, unless you’re able to read through thousands of pages a night, every night. If you tend to spend a lot of time on social media sites or watching television in between studying, you might even have to cut that out if you start to struggle. Medical school is a constant adjustment, with new terms and new professors, so you have to be willing to adapt and go with the flow in order to achieve the best results. In the future, you won’t be treating every patient the same, so there is no reason why you should treat every class the same.   

Seek help before it becomes a problem

If you enter school and you feel like you are drowning from the start, seek help! Most (if not all) schools have learning centers designed to help you succeed. They can help you discover your learning style, find you a tutor, and just about anything else you can think of. Don’t wait until you are failing to seek help, but instead get help before you even need it. At the very worse, if you do end up having an entirely bad term, at least it will be on the record that you actively sought out help and it could end up being the difference between being dismissed from a school or given the opportunity to come back and try another year.

Take a moment to sulk (but get back up and try again)

If you do end up having a bad exam, it is ok to take a moment and be upset about it. If that means fifteen minutes of crying in your car or stopping everything to take a nap, then do whatever it is you need to do. After that, brush yourself off and try again. Medical school truly is a marathon and not a sprint, so don’t dwell on one bad moment. Use it as an opportunity to figure out your weaknesses and how you can improve. Lastly, realize chances are high that you are not the only one in your class going through the same thing. Failing an exam might seem like the end of the world when it first happens, but I can promise you that years from now when you are finally a physician, it won’t even matter.

I hope this fully answers the question, but as always, let me know if I need to clarify anything. I answered the question about study habits in a previous post (which can be found HERE), so I tried not to be too redundant. But basically, my main point is to not worry about failing out of medical school before you even start, and always be willing to adjust. For the newly accepted students, take this time now to celebrate and relax, because it won’t be too long before you’re in my shoes.

A Post for the Pre-Meds: Do Upper Level Undergraduate Courses Really Help in Medical School?

Sounds like the workload is super intense! Does it really help to have taken undergrad classes like microbio, immunology, etc.? Or are you referring to your master's level classes? It seems like a lot of people say not to bother with taking more science classes in undergrad because the focus and volume in med school will be very different... but I'm wondering if it's true?

I was asked this question about a month ago, and I promised I would expand further upon my initial answer. The workload in medical school will be intense regardless of whether or not you have had previous exposure. I took anatomy and microbiology solely on an undergraduate level, and the exposure did help, but very little. Understanding the terminology is a huge part of anatomy, and without any previous knowledge, it can make things a bit harder once you hit medical school, although you will probably make out just fine. I previously took anatomy back in 2006 and retained very little of the information I was taught. What did help was being familiar with terms such as prone, supine, origin, insertion, etc. This was not taught to us in lecture in medical school, but instead it was provided as a very large word document full of common terms. Since I remembered these terms, I was able to spend more time actually learning and retaining the material than trying to understand what every other word meant. The same applies for microbiology. We are now taking it this term, and I can say with almost one hundred percent certainty that I retained less than 1% of the material taught in undergrad, but being familiar with it helps.

When it comes to classes I took in my master’s program, I can say that they are super helpful! Last term, practically every course (with the exception of anatomy) was brand new to me, and I actually had to force myself to really learn the material. This term, practically every single subject we are covering (minus pathology) was taught to me in my master’s program. In my graduate program, I focused more on learning than memorizing, and it is paying off really well for me this term. I actually feel like I have more free time this term, because I get to skip the basics. I can also say that medical school is not more difficult than graduate school in the level of the course work. In grad school, I had to literally write out mechanisms in biochemistry and I needed to learn, what felt like to me, every single, small detail about a subject. Biochemistry is way more enjoyable when you only have to know the major steps and components of glycolysis, versus having to know and be able to draw out the complete mechanisms like I did in grad school.

So what is it that makes medical school so intense? THE WORKLOAD!!!!!! Pretty much what might have taken me a month or two of graduate school to learn, we cover in about two weeks or less. This pretty much applies to every subject, so imagine an entire month of maybe 19 credit hours in undergrad, double that, condense it into one week, and you have how fast we cover everything in medical school. It is extremely overwhelming, and enough to make even the brightest students struggle. The focus is also different, but only in the sense that everything is now more clinically-oriented. This is a positive aspect to me though, because I feel like I am actually learning about stuff that is relevant to my goals as a future physician.

So, if you’re currently a pre-medical student considering taking advanced science courses, my recommendations are below. If you are not able to take some of these courses, please do not stress about it. Even if it means you will have to put in a little more effort than your peers, chances are that you will make out just fine with or without taking them. I hope this helped answer the question, and if there is anything else you want to know, feel free to ask!

Recommended Courses to Take Before Medical School

Anatomy

Embryology

Histology

Microbiology

Biochemistry

Cell Biology

Genetics

Immunology

And I’ll add to the list as the terms progress!