No, I'm not looking at Barry as a short cut - I have enrolled in an extra year of undergrad classes (upper level sciences etc) to hopefully show my true potential (my 2.9 GPA was due to medical issues I was dealing with during my college degree)... However, with the stats I posted in my original post I don't think I would be able to get into a "real" SMP program, hence Barry seemed to be the next best option to getting me into medical school
With a 3.0 (just a tenth of a point higher than your current GPA) and a great MCAT, you could certainly get into a "real" SMP. Maybe not Georgetown or University of Cincinnati, but you'd have a fine shot at getting in to EVMS, RFU, BU MAMS, or one of the DO SMPs.
What percentage of its grads does Barry get into medical school? Did those grads get into medical school because of Barry or because they had great stats in the first place?
If you can't get into a program that has a great track record of getting a large percentage of its class (at least half) into medical schools, you need more undergrad work to improve your GPA and/or you need to improve your MCAT.
I think that it might be helpful to realize that medical school admissions doesn't work the way that you think it should, it works the way that it works. There are some (a lot of) programs that regardless of how well you do, no matter how hard you work during the year of the program, your med school chances will still largely be determined by your undergrad record. In my opinion, every single program should be assumed to be like this until proven otherwise. That isn't me being paranoid, most one-year and even two-year graduate programs really DON'T help most people with low GPAs get into medical school. The ones that do are what DrMidlife is calling 'real SMPs'.
'Real SMPs' don't usually help people get into prestigious medical schools, or the medical schools that they want. Once you've screwed your GPA up, top-20 schools and California medical schools and California med schools are largely out of reach for you and there isn't a graduate program in the world that can change that. They don't help you do anything else except get into med school. Most of them (with the exception of maybe RFU) can't even help people with low MCAT scores get into med school. They don't fix your ECs either. And you have to do well in them for them to work, and if you do poorly, your dreams of medical school are over. But they do one thing, and they are the only graduate programs that do it: they get people with low GPAs (usually between 3.0 and 3.5) into med school.
What DrMidlife and I are trying to convey to you is that, to paraphrase Jesus, it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone with a 2.9 GPA to enter the kingdom of medical school. Just because you had medical issues, just because you've had a good year, just because you've done a terminal masters that most med school adcoms haven't even heard of doesn't mean that they're going to overlook your 2.9. Don't underestimate your competition. You need to find some way for a med school to pick you over someone with a higher GPA, who's had four good years at undergrad. So how can you do that? What you need to do is to show that you're better than the schools' students in anyway that's still available to you. You need to have better ECs. You need to beat those students on the MCAT. And you need to beat them in the classroom, in a real SMP at a real medical school.
The price of redemption is steep. But trying to get out of paying it or paying a price that you think is reasonable is going to make things harder for you, not easier.
