Hi all,
Long-time lurker, first-time poster here. I'm a senior this year and planning to apply in the 2021 cycle. I think my application overall is strong (top 10 undergrad, 518 MCAT, 2 years of research experience + my PI has already agreed to take me on in my gap year), but unfortunately I have a few bad grades in core science classes from my freshman and sophomore years - I have a C- in both Orgo I and II, C+ in Bio I and B+ in Bio II. I'm not going to try to sell a sob story like my grandma died or I was going through stuff or anything like that; I take full responsibility for them. Really what happened was I went to small independent schools from K-12 that just didn't *do* high-stakes testing, not even APs. All of my high school classes were 10 person seminars with final projects instead of exams.
My first experience with real *tests* (besides the SATs, which don't count as they are not hard) were in Orgo and Bio, which at my school are notorious premed "weeder" classes, and for my first two years I struggled to get the hang of taking tests under time pressure with questions that seemed engineered to trip students up, which was totally alien to me. I worked my butt off going to office hours, reading textbooks cover to cover, doing practice problems, and finally I "got it" sometime in the middle of sophomore year. Last fall I took Biochem, another weeder class, but got an A. Unfortunately by this point I already had those grades on my transcript, and as I am not a science major these really tanked my sGPA (2.9), although my overall GPA is a 3.7.
I'm wondering, how screwed am I because of this? Will med schools be willing to weight the improvement in my academic performance, or no? Also, ideally I would want to go MD-PhD, but it would not be the end of the world for me if I end up doing MD-only somewhere.
Thanks!
Long-time lurker, first-time poster here. I'm a senior this year and planning to apply in the 2021 cycle. I think my application overall is strong (top 10 undergrad, 518 MCAT, 2 years of research experience + my PI has already agreed to take me on in my gap year), but unfortunately I have a few bad grades in core science classes from my freshman and sophomore years - I have a C- in both Orgo I and II, C+ in Bio I and B+ in Bio II. I'm not going to try to sell a sob story like my grandma died or I was going through stuff or anything like that; I take full responsibility for them. Really what happened was I went to small independent schools from K-12 that just didn't *do* high-stakes testing, not even APs. All of my high school classes were 10 person seminars with final projects instead of exams.
My first experience with real *tests* (besides the SATs, which don't count as they are not hard) were in Orgo and Bio, which at my school are notorious premed "weeder" classes, and for my first two years I struggled to get the hang of taking tests under time pressure with questions that seemed engineered to trip students up, which was totally alien to me. I worked my butt off going to office hours, reading textbooks cover to cover, doing practice problems, and finally I "got it" sometime in the middle of sophomore year. Last fall I took Biochem, another weeder class, but got an A. Unfortunately by this point I already had those grades on my transcript, and as I am not a science major these really tanked my sGPA (2.9), although my overall GPA is a 3.7.
I'm wondering, how screwed am I because of this? Will med schools be willing to weight the improvement in my academic performance, or no? Also, ideally I would want to go MD-PhD, but it would not be the end of the world for me if I end up doing MD-only somewhere.
Thanks!