- Joined
- Nov 11, 2015
- Messages
- 20
- Reaction score
- 23
I'm a sophomore at a second tier public college, with a physics major and a math minor. When I signed up for classes at the end of last semester, I hadn't planned on having any extracurriculars besides one research project which wasn't eating up too much of my time. So I decided to take Cell Bio, Organic 2, English, DiffEq, and Linear Algebra (LA). However, this semester, I earned a job at the tutoring center and was given an additional research position in the physics department, which recently blossomed into my own project (which has taken a huge amount of my time). Because of my numerous new time commitments, I hadn't been able to focus that much time to my math courses, and made a decision to drop them and retake them in the coming semesters, once my premed courses are finished. My decision to drop both stemmed from me having severe food poisoning the days prior to the first midterms in those classes, forcing me to miss the LA exam and to nearly fail the DiffEq one. My advisor recommended that I drop them and retake at a later time to ensure my scholarship as well as ensure better scores and increased focus on my current classes. (It is a condition of my scholarship that all of my pre-med courses must be finished prior to the end of my sophomore year). However, I have just learned that those courses will be marked permanently as W on my transcript, and have been reading some pretty scary info about how that hurts chances for admission. I was not failing, but I decided to focus my effort on my research and work (tutoring chemistry) instead. I will be retaking these courses, and this semester I should be getting all A's (maybe one A-/B+), and generally my grades have been A's (4B's thus far). I have good leadership and extracurriculars, but my grades have always been an area of worry for me. How much do these withdrawals hurt my chances for admission to MD/PhD programs?
