Best Pre Reading for Pre Req Classes

[oliverkahn]

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Hi all

I'm a non-trad kind of in a strange situation. I am a 29 year old banker and will be attending a formal 1 year post bacc program starting in late spring of 2017. I took all of the pre-req classes (besides bio 2 and orgo 2) back in 2007 or so, and did pretty well (3.65 science GPA). I can't wait to get back into it. The post bacc program is 1 year and most people take the MCAT at the end of the year and then either link or do a glide year. I'm not sure which I would prefer at this point.

Anyway, in the next year or so I'd like to spend some time re-familiarizing myself with the pre-reqs. This serves a few purposes:

- Will help me refresh my memory to perform well in post-bacc program (which I understand will be pretty intense)
- Will ultimately help me prepare for the MCAT - the more prepared I am going into the pre-reqs courses, the more time I can spend prepping for MCAT during the year
- Will keep me motivated and excited while working in finance for yet another year

This may sound crazy, but if I am feeling confident after 12 months of this I may spend 3-4 months studying and attempt the MCAT before the postbacc. If I can eke out a score good enough to link then I will save myself a lot of stress and hassle during the school year. If I bomb it and have to re-take after the post bacc I have a pretty good excuse.

My question: for each of the pre-reqs, can any of you recommend a text book or guide book that serves as a solid content review? Given it's been 10 years, it would have to basically start from scratch. Here's what I've heard so far:

- Chem: Schaum's College Chemistry
- Bio: Campbell
- Orgo: Pushing Electrons and Klein's Orgo
- Physics: Nova physics? Anything else?
- Biochem: The Oregon State textbook and lectures online look awesome
- Psychology: apparently Yale has a free course online that's good?

Can any of you recommend any alternate resources? Ideally if it's possible to find a whole course online, including textbook, lectures, lecture notes, problem sets, etc? Doesn't MIT have some of this available? What would you all do in my situation? How about wikipremed?

Thank you all!

 

[NotASerialKiller]

If you bomb the MCAT you don't simply wash your hands of it and rewrite, the first score will follow you (unless you void it before getting your score, which is expensive and frustrating). Keep that in mind before attempting it.

 

[oliverkahn]

If you bomb the MCAT you don't simply wash your hands of it and rewrite, the first score will follow you (unless you void it before getting your score, which is expensive and frustrating). Keep that in mind before attempting it.

Understood. I definitely don't want to bomb it, and would only attempt it if I felt quite confident. Given that my post bacc links, however, I am pretty sure it would be ok for me to re-take the exam.

Thanks

 

[tenblackalps]

This doesn't really answer your question, but one thing that I think has served me well is doing a bit of light reading on a subject outside of a class when I take it. For example, when I was doing the Physics 1/Physics 2 sequence, I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future and Hyperspace, and Brian Cox's Why Does E=MC^2 and The Quantum Universe. Although none of those books had really anything to do with Newtonian physics (except maybe The Elegant Universe which has a great chapter on the stark, almost unbelievable differences between Newtonian physics and special relativity) what they did for me was help me to appreciate the broader subject of the class, piquing my interest in the class material to the point that studying for the class no longer felt laboured, but rather, somewhat enjoyable.