I don' know anything about your university but SDN really downplays the difficulty of liberal arts classes. I have a major in both colleges (Sciences and Liberal Arts) and I see a lot of SDNers talking about humanities courses being jokes when all they have taken is "children's lit" or "intro to british lit" during their freshman year. If you can write a 15 page paper in 2 hours then more power to you but if I told my professor that's how much thought I put into a paper I wouldnt be surprised f they threw it directly in the trash.
I don't know anything about you so I have no idea how good of a student you are or what 24 credits is like at your university....but I do know that you have a 3.5 and I find it very hard to believe when B+/A- students say they are all of a sudden going to take a much harder course load and earn an "easy" 4.0. 24 hours of anything at my university would be absolutely brutal. I took 21 one semester and it was absolutely awful (with a pretty "balanced" course load in terms of class difficulty), I can't imagine having to handle one more class on top of that semester. If you believe that you can get a 4.0 taking 24 credit hours then all the more power to you, it's your life and I'm just some guy on the internet, but to be honest that just screams cognitive dissonance to me given your past academic performance. The B+ average you are confident in will drop your GPA but it might still be good enough to get in somewhere. Are you maxed on student loans? Has your financial aid been pulled or not offered for some reason? It might be more beneficial to go into a little bit more debt and take careful but sure steps forward rather than make a running leap over an abyss. If you can qualify for FAP then you might not need to save as much to apply as you think.
Look, I'm not meaning to downplay those kinds of courses THAT much. They do require some work and aren't just nothing classes. I understand why you're being defensive if you put genuine work into the type of classes you think I'm talking about. I don't mean to say that ALL liberal arts classes are a joke by any means and it certainly depends on the student and professor. But, from what I've experienced (taking into consideration the type of professor and what the individual is good at) the amount of work that would go into a class like Cellular Biochemistry or Advanced Inorganic Chemistry is above and beyond that of a class like Advanced Composition or Technical Writing. At least at my school, the amount of writing required for a Cellular Biochemistry course alone is more than the entirety of Advanced Composition (which I've also taken), and that's just the writing (which requires nearly every sentences to be backed up with citation or data).
I'm also a transfer from another major that was more in the line of liberal arts. There is no comparison in difficulty. None. Perhaps one or two classes in the liberal arts were more difficult, but overall...
If I were in it just for the pre-med game I would've taken the med school pre-reqs and kept my old major. In addition, I know about what my friends in other majors have to do for school and sometimes it's just laughable what they think is hard work. Some of which are at extremely prestigious schools. Whether or not you think I'm talking out of my tush or think that my sources must be flawed somehow is up to you. But, I'm going to continue to operate under the assumption that if I take a couple of liberal arts course instead of sciences my course load would be much lighter.
Attacks on my intelligence aside, yeah my passed performance is precisely why I wanted to ask others what they thought I should do. Maybe I should've elaborated on my situation a bit more. I've overloaded on courses four other semesters and took as many sciences as I possibly could in addition to working, shadowing, volunteering, a couple different research projects, and a couple internships. I LOVED the classes and did alright, but the work was just too much to get straight A's and I'm paying for it with a 3.5 GPA. So, instead of potentially making the same mistake again I asked if I should cut the pride in science crap and play the game that likes easy classes. The answer seemed pretty unanimous.
I'm sure about my financial situation, though your curiosity is interesting. Without elaborating too much I have exhausted all options. Yes, I'm sure of this. No, I can't just (insert solution here).
EDIT: Also, I'm not sure if you all took those writing courses for the grade or because you're interested. When I've taken courses in writing it's easy to just read the professor and write what I think he/she will agree with/enjoy the most. I don't write essays for these classes to express my own opinions or creativity. It takes the soul out of it, sure, but it's an easy A.
OH! This also doesn't say anything about the differences in time allocated to the classes for each major. Every science class requires a lab that can be 3-5 hours to it. Yet, for more than double the class time, science majors get the same credits (some labs are even treated as there own classes with their own homework and due dates with none of the extra transcript credits).
