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- May 29, 2019
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- Pre-Health (Field Undecided)
Hi everyone, long-time lurker, first-time poster here.
I attended a top-15 school for my undergraduate degree and majored in economics and absolutely hated it. I was pretty lost in my goals during undergrad and was never sure that I was doing what I wanted, so my GPA was really really bad since I never had any focus. There were some other personal confounding factors as well that affected me and I ended up finishing undergrad with ~2.8 cGPA. However, this didn't really include any science courses, other than two physics courses and two math courses I took my freshman year when I entered as a physics major –– my sGPA was about a 2.0.
Since graduating, I have taken time to work and volunteer in the medical setting and have recentered my goals on medical school. I went back to school at my state school doing a whole second degree in biochemistry, and have finished 80 credit hours of only science (all of my prereqs, social science, etc transferred in from my previous degree). I've finished all of the basic science courses along with some electives (microbiology, genetics, embryology) with a 3.96 GPA. I still have three semesters (summer, fall, spring) for which I have scheduled more advanced and graduate courses.
With this boost, my sGPA is now a 3.67 and my cGPA is a 3.28. If I stay on course, I should be at about an sGPA 3.74 of and a cGPA of 3.40. I also took the MCAT recently and scored a 516. In addition to my second degree, I have been volunteering at a children's hospital and working in a faculty research lab with any free time that I have. I'm hopeful that I might get into an allopathic medical school, but I was hoping that people might have advice for me. Will medical schools care about my first degree a lot? Obviously, I can explain reasons about why I did poorly, but the fact is still there that I did poorly. Also, I'm a little lost on which medical schools to apply to; I will apply to my in-state medical school, but is there any reason for me to apply to schools that have outlandish average cGPAs? Is there anything else I could do to improve my application?
Thanks for the help! 🙂
I attended a top-15 school for my undergraduate degree and majored in economics and absolutely hated it. I was pretty lost in my goals during undergrad and was never sure that I was doing what I wanted, so my GPA was really really bad since I never had any focus. There were some other personal confounding factors as well that affected me and I ended up finishing undergrad with ~2.8 cGPA. However, this didn't really include any science courses, other than two physics courses and two math courses I took my freshman year when I entered as a physics major –– my sGPA was about a 2.0.
Since graduating, I have taken time to work and volunteer in the medical setting and have recentered my goals on medical school. I went back to school at my state school doing a whole second degree in biochemistry, and have finished 80 credit hours of only science (all of my prereqs, social science, etc transferred in from my previous degree). I've finished all of the basic science courses along with some electives (microbiology, genetics, embryology) with a 3.96 GPA. I still have three semesters (summer, fall, spring) for which I have scheduled more advanced and graduate courses.
With this boost, my sGPA is now a 3.67 and my cGPA is a 3.28. If I stay on course, I should be at about an sGPA 3.74 of and a cGPA of 3.40. I also took the MCAT recently and scored a 516. In addition to my second degree, I have been volunteering at a children's hospital and working in a faculty research lab with any free time that I have. I'm hopeful that I might get into an allopathic medical school, but I was hoping that people might have advice for me. Will medical schools care about my first degree a lot? Obviously, I can explain reasons about why I did poorly, but the fact is still there that I did poorly. Also, I'm a little lost on which medical schools to apply to; I will apply to my in-state medical school, but is there any reason for me to apply to schools that have outlandish average cGPAs? Is there anything else I could do to improve my application?
Thanks for the help! 🙂
