Very interesting perspective. I appreciate your thoughts.
Sure thing. I was thinking about our conversation as I was falling asleep last night and I just wanted to pull back from the self-indulgent exuberance of my generalizations with the intention of being useful to you.
As I understand it, you are considering traversing the country with the idea of picking up science classes ala carte and maybe their endorsement after you take the core classes at your location. Verdad?
I tried to give you enough personal excrement so that you would be able to transpose my biases effectively against my observations. So to be clear my ideal educational experience if I could do it over would be: Chico State University on the 6 year plan while getting my paramedic license and playing bass in a reggae band on weekends while eeking out a 3.5 and then pour it on for the MCAT to land coveted state of california-2nd tier school followed by residency and practice in Cali.
In Boston/Cambridge what you have is the heavy hitters in science. You've got MIT nerds designing the stuff for the Pentagon that will be consumer products in 30 years, you've got one of the biggest names in hospitals in the country, a huge medical/research/industrial complex second to none in funding or prestige, and series of prestigious universities with her majesty's sense of destiny to rule.
So what this means for you, is that your colleagues in upper division classes are mainly grad students who work in labs during the day or something of that sort and whereas premeds at your local school are almost invariably the stiffest competition here your competing against people who's knowledge base will be bigger than yours and who take this **** deadly serious, as they want to follow in the footsteps of the phd's writing the tests. Some of these people are wicked smart not s=just people like me who have learned just the necessary moves to make the grade in premed stuff.
So that changes the game. I was not prepared for this shift. I was in my last semester of undergrad, recovering from a major surgery, and ready to be moving onto other things. But you may be right for this climate. And if you want to mix it up with the academic world you'd be in the right place to do it concurrently.
The curves after some thinking about it must have been such that most of the grad students were in the B/C range if not higher because I don't think they get credit for less than a B. Not sure. But it's also key to note that htese classes are tough A's. At my old school i knew all the players and could sit at the right tables for my hand. Here I was blind. And I wandered into science nerd death matches quite by accident.
This is why i take the time to describe to you in detail. Because if you're like me and trying to recover from previous gpa transgression the lay of the land is essential as errors at this point are too costly. For me at this point my gpa is not moving but I still would have liked to finish with all A's and not one A a B+ and a B. But c'est la vie.
Good luck and let me know if I can be of any more use to you. Not that I presuming usefulness at this point.
Good luck.
P.s. In processing my review...keep in mind I'm not in the least a slacker. I like working hard. It's just my view of education at these levels is that it is capricious and arbitrary. I will be a diligent student in medical school--the professional educational goal makes sense to me. Otherwise I tend to my own education as I see fit. So following syllabi are just mechanical hoops that eventually tire me. OK back to MCAT.
