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Do better next time and continue to improve. I started undergrad with 2.5 and ended with a 3.8 and am in med school now
 
OrgoCoop said:
Do better next time and continue to improve. I started undergrad with 2.5 and ended with a 3.8 and am in med school now
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Wow. How did you deal with more difficult classes later on? Study more? I keep thinking that if I can't get an A in chem I am doomed for orgo...
 
Make use of office time, go to the tutoring center, khan academy, practice,practice,practice

Have to say my first year in college was rocky as well(did make honors 1st semester though fortunately), I was not used to having to actually do homework or study..(yay for a HS that never challenged me or taught me anything.)
 
SleepingPillow said:
Hi,

I recently finished my first semester at WashU with a 3.15 GPA. At all the highly ranked med schools their GPA is like 3.8, which is possible for me only if I get 4.0s from now on (which realistically speaking isn't possible). I thought I got my crap together mid way but then personal life happened and couldn't focus before finals and had to cram before my chem exams. I took 15 credits, including Chem (B), Chem Lab (B), Calc 3 (B-). There is no +- in chem so that B should probably be an A- if the grading system was more lenient.
So yeah, any advice for a freshman who doesn't know anything, and is a bit freaked out that he won't make it into the med schools he thought he could?

Thanks.
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First, drop the, "if the grading system was more lenient." For starters, freshman year at Wash U is not much more difficult than any other comparable institution. It is possible that if you were at a different institution you would have gotten a better grade in freshman chem. On the other hand, if you took every person at Wash U that got a B in freshman chem, plenty of them would have gotten a B at SLU, Mizzou or whatever school you want to pick. There is zero way of knowing which camp you would be in. Given your grades in other classes, it is slightly suspect that you would be performing much better at another school. Beyond that and more importantly, you aren't at another school and at this point there is nothing that you can do about it.

Second, what is far more worrying to me are the B in Chem Lab and B- in Calc 3. Both those classes have relatively straight forward course work with lab manuals/textbooks that walk you through how to do well on the tests. They are considered at Wash U (specifically) to be on the easier side in terms of pre-med course work. These are the classes that are supposed to fluff your GPA without looking like it is being fluffed. Both of those classes demand focus, discipline and time, but not a ton of 'higher level' thinking.

Third, it takes most people years to figure this out, so might as well learn it now. Life happens. It keeps going until you die. It is a common trap among pre-meds, medical students and residents that think that everything pauses because they are in school/training. There are always going to be distractions. There are always going to be wrenches thrown in the mix. There are certainly extenuating circumstances on a certain number of applications, but the majority of applicants will need to deal with some sorts of adversity along their path to medical school. Being able to deal with the crap life throws at you while still performing is a part of going into medicine. Why? Because, life happens. When you are a medical student, resident or practicing physician, when all that stuff happens, your patients are still going to expect you to perform. Call it unfair, on many different levels it is. But, it is the reality of going into medicine. This is not to say that patients come above all else and you must sacrifice everything for them. This is to say that things are only going to get busier, stressful and harder.

Fourth, constructively, stop thinking about medical school admissions and most importantly, stop thinking about "highly ranked medical schools." You are not in the admissions process, you are not constructing an application. You are a Freshman in college. Planning ahead is very important and a solid game plan is necessary, years in advance to optimize one's application. However, at the core of every good medical student is a good STUDENT. Which at present, you are not. Your only focus right now should be how to be a better student. Studying longer/more is not the answer. If it was, when you get to the harder material/classes, you would never have enough time. If you can't learn to be a good student, no matter what grades you get or GPA you attain, you will suffer on the MCAT, in medical school classes and then again on every single shelf, board exam etc. I know, especially at a school like Wash U, it is easy to get fixated on "highly ranked medical schools." But, for the sake of your future application, you really need to let it go and focus on things that matter in the present day.

Fifth and finally, Wash U spends a tremendous amount of resources on their tutoring, learning center and TAs. Students from other institutions would kill to have access to those resources. They certainly become less relevant with the advent of vast online resources, but they are still available to you. Use them.
 
Identify you weaknesses. Why did you perform badly? A lot of procrastination? Learn to manage your time better. Material too hard? Study more and reach out to professors and tutors. Personal life is a tough one so I can't help you out there but you gotta be critical on yourself and admit your weaknesses. It's your first semester and many people perform poorly so you still got this but only if you note your weaknesses and get past them.
 
I disagree a bit with Mimelim about those classes being fluffy, we both went to WashU but I think he was about a decade prior. ChemLab was a much harder A to get for me than GenChem or Bio, the lab reports are easy to score well and everyone does...but the two big exams for Lab were easily the toughest to make top X% outside of maybe Orgo and Biochem later on. I don't know if they've changed the grading but there were +/- grades for me just a few years ago, you might want to double check on that. Didn't take Calc so can't comment there.

The other things I'd advise I think Mimelim already said most of.

Firstly, go to TA hours and Cornerstone, do all practice exams under timed conditions, study with floormates, do whatever works for you to get as prepared as you possibly can.

Secondly, re-calibrate your expectations. Something like 2/3 premeds at WashU drop off altogether, and among the survivors only about 1/6 make a 3.8+ sGPA. Everyone there was top few percent of the country on entrance exams and straight As in highschool. The vast majority are going to keep being great students but no longer get perfect grades for their efforts.

Thirdly, once you've done the second step, keep in mind that low sGPA's are normal coming out of WashU, with the median sGPA among our MD applicants at 3.4x. You need better than B/B- grades, but not by all that much. If you can move up to even just a B+ average you will probably be in fine shape. People with a ~3.3 and 30-35 MCAT, the most common scores to get even with that lower sGPA, still get in about 70% of the time. You don't need to jump up to 4.0 from here on. A much smaller improvement that that will keep you in the running!
 
WedgeDawg said:
@efle
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efle said:
I disagree a bit with Mimelim about those classes being fluffy, we both went to WashU but I think he was about a decade prior. ChemLab was a much harder A to get for me than GenChem or Bio, the lab reports are easy to score well and everyone does...but the two big exams for Lab were easily the toughest to make top X% outside of maybe Orgo and Biochem later on. I don't know if they've changed the grading but there were +/- grades for me just a few years ago, you might want to double check on that. Didn't take Calc so can't comment there.

The other things I'd advise I think Mimelim already said most of.

Firstly, go to TA hours and Cornerstone, do all practice exams under timed conditions, study with floormates, do whatever works for you to get as prepared as you possibly can.

Secondly, re-calibrate your expectations. Something like 2/3 premeds at WashU drop off altogether, and among the survivors only about 1/6 make a 3.8+ sGPA. Everyone there was top few percent of the country on entrance exams and straight As in highschool. The vast majority are going to keep being great students but no longer get perfect grades for their efforts.

Thirdly, once you've done the second step, keep in mind that low sGPA's are normal coming out of WashU, with the median sGPA among our MD applicants at 3.4x. You need better than B/B- grades, but not by all that much. If you can move up to even just a B+ average you will probably be in fine shape. People with a ~3.3 and 30-35 MCAT, the most common scores to get even with that lower sGPA, still get in about 70% of the time. You don't need to jump up to 4.0 from here on. A much smaller improvement that that will keep you in the running!
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@efle
 
efle said:
I disagree a bit with Mimelim about those classes being fluffy, we both went to WashU but I think he was about a decade prior. ChemLab was a much harder A to get for me than GenChem or Bio, the lab reports are easy to score well and everyone does...but the two big exams for Lab were easily the toughest to make top X% outside of maybe Orgo and Biochem later on. I don't know if they've changed the grading but there were +/- grades for me just a few years ago, you might want to double check on that. Didn't take Calc so can't comment there.

The other things I'd advise I think Mimelim already said most of.

Firstly, go to TA hours and Cornerstone, do all practice exams under timed conditions, study with floormates, do whatever works for you to get as prepared as you possibly can.

Secondly, re-calibrate your expectations. Something like 2/3 premeds at WashU drop off altogether, and among the survivors only about 1/6 make a 3.8+ sGPA. Everyone there was top few percent of the country on entrance exams and straight As in highschool. The vast majority are going to keep being great students but no longer get perfect grades for their efforts.

Thirdly, once you've done the second step, keep in mind that low sGPA's are normal coming out of WashU, with the median sGPA among our MD applicants at 3.4x. You need better than B/B- grades, but not by all that much. If you can move up to even just a B+ average you will probably be in fine shape. People with a ~3.3 and 30-35 MCAT, the most common scores to get even with that lower sGPA, still get in about 70% of the time. You don't need to jump up to 4.0 from here on. A much smaller improvement that that will keep you in the running!
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Sorry, I didn't mean fluffy strictly as in easy A. You are still graded on a curve, mostly against other pre-meds. On the other hand, 60-70% of the people you are on the curve with will be dropping out of pre-med for various reasons, academics being a big one. But, in terms of 'figuring out the class', Chem Lab is straight forward which is why people do better on it than the Gen Chem class. I really think that the lab is a better marker of who has their study skills/discipline in line than the class because it is all about preparing and less synthesizing (hah chem pun). I was also mainly talking about Calc III, it is a hidden gem, most pre-meds don't take it because they don't 'need' to, but as pretty much anyone who took it can tell you, it is far easier subject matter and isn't graded on a pre-med curve.
 
SleepingPillow said:
There are no +- in genchem specifically, but are in lab. So if you are even a point off of the A cut off you get a B (I was under 20 pts off, so I got a B). For calc 3, I agree it's supposed to be a fluff class, and at one point I scored 90 when the average was a 79 but then on the final I didn't cope well with unexpected problems that made me extremely depressed (and still am but almost there). Same with the rest of my finals. So yeah what @mimelim said was right, I can't let life get between me and my studies, and I learned that the hard way. When I get depressed I can't just feel miserable and do nothing. It could be worse if I didn't find someone to talk to and study with.
My hope is to make it into UWSOM because I am in-state. It says on their website that 3.5 is "competitive" and avg of 9 on the MCAT.
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Glad I checked the thread from my phone before going to sleep. I should have put this in my original post. Your health, both physical and mental are key for your future success. You can not survive the training without being in a good place mentally and even if you survived, you would be miserable.

First, get help. Second beef up your support structure. Third, consider if taking a little extra time to focus on yourself (while doing some ECs of course) is possible and a good idea for you. You should not feel ashamed for not being a good studier when depressed, or surprised for that matter. Most people see a big dip in productivity.

If you havent already, go to the S40 health clinic, they have very good mental health professiobals. If you struggle to find someone, PM me and I'll be more than happy to give you a name or two.
 
SleepingPillow said:
There are no +- in genchem specifically, but are in lab. So if you are even a point off of the A cut off you get a B (I was under 20 pts off, so I got a B). For calc 3, I agree it's supposed to be a fluff class, and at one point I scored 90 when the average was a 79 but then on the final I didn't cope well with unexpected problems that made me extremely depressed (and still am but almost there). Same with the rest of my finals. So yeah what @mimelim said was right, I can't let life get between me and my studies, and I learned that the hard way. When I get depressed I can't just feel miserable and do nothing. It could be worse if I didn't find someone to talk to and study with.
My hope is to make it into UWSOM because I am in-state. It says on their website that 3.5 is "competitive" and avg of 9 on the MCAT.
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Depression needs to be addressed NOW. Med school will absolutely eat you alive if you don't, trust me on this. You absolutely need to learn how to compartmentalize and not allow personal stuff to absolutely kill you grades (which then makes the depression worse..). Life getting in the way is a bigger problem in med school and I struggled big time with that. So, do yourself a favor and start seeing someone to try and fix that. You go to WashU so I imagine they offer plenty of services for that. And yes, isolation absolutely makes it worse so try your best to make sure you keep in contact with your friends, it helps.
 
Washington is a nice state to be from, they interview over half of their instate applicants and have very accessible median numbers (3.7 median but ranging down to 3.2, and a 31 median MCAT)

Definitely go get into a healthy state first and foremost. A lot of people, at WashU and in college in general, hit an extremely rough patch at the start with all the stress of changing location, missing friends and family, having much harder classes and so on. If that means a semester of gen eds without more premed classes, so be it! Plenty of people switch into premed a little late, you won't be hindering yourself much. Check out the school mental health resources, there are literally hundreds of people every year that use them.
 
Just to echo what @efle and @mimelim said, take care of yourself first and the rest will follow. SHS has good mental health resources and though I've heard the wait to see a counselor is on the longer side, put your name down now so if you find yourself needing it more in the new year you won't have to wait as long for an appointment. I believe they give 9 free sessions, so it doesn't hurt to at least try it.

With regards to your classes, don't worry quite yet. Take the advice of the other guys above (go to office hours, PLTL, cornerstone, etc.) and you'll be able to turn around your grades in the second half of chem. I've seen several people improve second semester. When I took the classes 3 years ago, they did give +/-, but if they've stopped doing that...well that just sucks. I'd recommend doing a POGIL recitation section if you just did a regular chem recitation in the fall, since for me it helped me talk out problem solving in small groups and made exams more manageable. For lab, work with others on the reports and don't be afraid to stop your group if you need clarification on something, since just copying down lab report answers will come back to bite you on those 200 point exams.

For calc 3, I would just move on. Unless you're taking diffeq (don't recommend it unless you need it for your major), it's done. WashU doesn't have a great track record for introductory math class professors, so that might be part of it, but I'm not sure who taught it this year.

Finally, it's great that you're a Washington resident, but be careful of setting your sights on a single med school. It's ok to have a preference but be sure to look elsewhere as well. It's probably a good time to mention that UW weights your sophomore year GPA twice as much as your frosh GPA and weights your junior year GPA as 3x your frosh GPA (see their admissions website), so chin up! Best of luck!
 
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