Bad grades On Term Abroad,

[history _ice]

Hey Everyone,

i'm currently a junior and I just recieved my term abroad grades...and they are the worse grades i have obtained since the beginning of my college career (3.0), where in every other term i had at least (3.5), I just wanted to know how would I explain such a huge discrpency to medical schools. Specially since my term abroad is on health systems.

I would apperciate any insight.

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[lola]

does your school in the u.s. report the grades on your transcript? if not (i.e. they show up pass/fail), you will not report them to med schools on your primary application. i suppose individual med schools could ask for them later, but amcas does not.
as for how to explain them...tell them you were having fun? is there a reason for them being lower or were you just goofing off? mine were a tad lower b/c i was goofing off. if you were studying in a place with a different system (e.g. england had only 1 exam per course), you could tell them you had trouble adjusting to it.

 

[Neuronix]

My study abroad semester wasn't on par with my usual grades either. Did you get 2 Bs? If you did, that's really not bad. A 3.0 term abroad isn't a large deviation from your usual 3.5 GPA and I don't think it's really going to come up.

I've been asked a couple times what I did on my term abroad, and I always tell them sure I took 2 classes while I was there, but that I really was focused on having a good time because I'm a very non-traditional applicant from a poor family and I never got a chance to travel before that semester. If the grades come up in interviews, I'm sure you can pretty much say the same thing if you had never travelled before.

Still though, don't worry about it. Just try to keep your grades up over that 3.5!

 

[medicnas]

I tried to come at it the other way: I had 3.93 while abroad and I wanted it to count...but AMCAS beat me down and said "no." Maybe if my school had transferred grades instead of just P/F, but AMCAS didn't accept my overseas transcript for translation into their system.

Just a note: AMCAS does require transcripts from a few selected schools that are named specifically in the handbook. Every other school doesn't count unless the grades are on your home school's transx.

 

[history _ice]

thanx for all the insight....My school is the one that issued the grades because it was more like a field study...where we evaluated diff. medical facilites then wrote up a report and a professor for my school graded them. we did not study at a specific university....anyhow thanx for all the advice i'll try to keep up my grades....and try to make it up, since that is the past now.

 

[TroutBum]

Hey history_ice, I wouldn't sweat it--my study abroad grades looked exactly like yours compared to my usual GPA, and in fact my study abroad experience is one of the few things that EVERY interviewer has asked me about so far, so I'm pretty sure they thought it was a significant experience in spite of the slightly lower grades. The way I see it, study abroad is about a lot of things, and grades are way down at the bottom of the list--you learn during study abroad by being immersed in what's around you, not slaving over books, and I think most med schools (or at least the ones I would want to go to) should understand that and have the same philosophy when looking at study abroad grades.

If your abroad program is affiliated with a US school, you still have to report it to AMCAS, even if your undergrad doesn't include it on its transcript. For my abroad, it didn't appear anywhere on my undergrad transcript except as "credit granted" or something like that, but since the program was affiliated with a US school, I could get a transcript from that school and had to send it along to AMCAS.