MD & DO Is my terrible performance as a freshman salvageable?

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So long story short, I go to a top 10 engineering school as a probable bioengineer, and got destroyed freshman year. Altogether, 2.13 GPA with 29 credits, and Cs in my two prereq chemistry courses. I had terrible study habits, which didn't hurt me in high school but now are coming back to bite me. I should have known that I would need to change my habits, but what's done is done. I have to move on and kick ass now.

My question is, is this situation salvageable? Another important issue is that I received a letter of "Academic Warning" from my school, which I will have to talk about in my AMCAS application according to this:

"Were you ever the recipient of any institutional action by any college or medical school for unacceptable academic performance or conduct violation even though such action may not have interrupted your enrollment or required you to withdraw?"

and this:

"You must answer ‘Yes’ even if the action does not appear on or has been deleted from your official transcripts due to institutional policy or personal petition.”

Overall, how badly have I shot myself in the foot here? What do I need to do? What can I do?

If you completely turn it around, and I mean completely, you can recover.

Yea man, just get your act together and I'm sure you can salvage your gpa.

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2.13 on 29 credits with an academic warning? Going to be a long road back but you are only a freshman so certainly salvageable. But I am going to be very real with you on how hard it will be.

Even if you take 100 credits from here on and get a 4.0 FOR THE NEXT 3 YEARS that puts you at a 3.57 which is barely in the acceptable range for med school and thats WIHTOUT an academic warning bringing down your file.

Add to that the fact that you are in a top 10 engineering program and are considering bioengineering? Thats one of the toughest majors in what sounds like one of the toughest schools in the country coupled with engineering in general being very tough to begin with to score well in. Hence getting 3 years of straight As in what will be even tougher classes seems unlikely.

My best bet for you is to fight as hard as you can from here on and shoot for that 3.57. Try to get there or at least close (3.4+) and make sure to improve your app with ethics classes or ethics tutoring to show you learned from the academic warning violation and used it as a turning point in your academic career and to educate others to learn from your mistakes.

If you can pull that off, get solid volunteering and shadowing experience, find good leadership positions, do some tutoring/TAing, and write a compelling personal statement highlighting your transformation as a student from 1st year to 4th year I would give you maybe a 50/50 chance at an MD school if you score 34+ on the MCAT.

Thats what you have ahead of you to make it back. If you fall short of those expectations though, DO is always an option after 4 years depending on how short you end up (especially with grade forgiveness)

Post-bacs after your undergrad degree supplemented with research and publications will also help you if you do not mind spending more than 4 years trying to recover.

All hope is not lost but keep in mind realistically what it is you face on your way back.

thanks for the replies. Just a clarification, SpicyCurry-- the academic warning wasn't for any sort of ethics violation, or cheating, or anything like that. It was just because of general academic performance being subpar. In any case, I get that it's a difficult road ahead. I'll go nuts to fix it.