Engineering -> Medicine Switch

[RNthenDoc]

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Do they count retakes with that? What if I retook some of my classes?



Gee thanks for the support. You seem friendly. I don't understand why I'm getting attacked for asking simple advice. I talked to some people on reddit and they said I had a good shot, but to post here.

I was unfriendly and unsupportive because you are being rude, arrogant, and crazy here.

You don’t get to be arrogant when you’re getting C’s in gen bio. That’s when you eat humble pie, my friend.

 

[LizzyM]

DO NOT GO TO THE CARIBBEAN!! You can read tons of posts here and on reddit why you shouldn't go to Caribbean schools except maybe as an absolute last resort.

I think that it is a good fit with OP's record and mindset. The academic work will be so easy and he's sure to rise to the top of the class, match well into a residency of his choice, and prosper as a physician. Now let me go outside and feed my unicorn. I need to clear my head after all of this magical thinking.

 

[Maxamillion12]

All grades count equally. If you post a C in a 4 credit course and get an A on a retake that would contribute 8 points for the first attempt and 16 for the second for a grade point average of 3.0 over 8 credits.



Because those people on reddit didn't want to be the bearers of bad news and they knew that you'd be eaten alive here we'd be realistic about your chances and that you'd associate us with your disappointment rather than take it out on reddit folk.

Wow didn't know about the retakes, that's good information.

 

[Maxamillion12]

DO NOT GO TO THE CARIBBEAN!! You can read tons of posts here and on reddit why you shouldn't go to Caribbean schools except maybe as an absolute last resort.

Been looking at them this morning. I don't think it's a good idea based on them. My question is that the IM program at my school has nearly 50% of 1st year residents from the Caribbean schools? Does that mean it's a lousy program?

 

[kkl2018]

do yourself a favor and see yourself as the same as non engineering pre-meds.

 

[Maxamillion12]

do yourself a favor and see yourself as the same as non engineering pre-meds.

My classes involve critical thinking?

 

[Maxamillion12]

Having 50% of residents from the Caribbean does seem strange to me, but I wouldn't really know. Maybe one of the physicians can comment on this.



And that somehow makes you smarter than everyone else? Engineering isn't the only subject that involves critical thinking.

Let's pretend I didn't say that remark. But if anyone could comment on why my hometown IM residency has nearly all IMGs and DOs, that would be helpful. Note I'm not equating DO = IMG

 

[ndafife]

Let's pretend I didn't say that remark. But if anyone could comment on why my hometown IM residency has nearly all IMGs and DOs, that would be helpful. Note I'm not equating DO = IMG

It means your hometown IM residency isn't a very desired residency for US MD graduates

 

[Hawkeye397]

Gotcha. I was looking at AUC, and they appear to have lower stats than most other schools. Their average GPA is 3.2 and a 498 MCAT, which I'm in striking distance for. Thoughts?

I know a few IMGs that were able to graduate from SGU and Ross but they got residencies in primary care and they realistically could have gotten into a DO school if they had taken another year to reapply but they got impatient. Going to the Caribbean for Med School should be your last resort and only after not getting any acceptances for a couple of cycles.

 

[Maxamillion12]

It means your hometown IM residency isn't a very desired residency for US MD graduates

But I guess why would this be the case?

 

[ndafife]

But I guess why would this be the case?

IDK probably some combination between low prestige and an undesirable location. It really isn't that hard to google reasons why residency locations would be undesirable

 

[Maxamillion12]

IDK probably some combination between low prestige and an undesirable location. It really isn't that hard to google reasons why residency locations would be undesirable

I've done more digging. My friend goes to school in NY, and at Upstate, Downstate and Buffalo, nearly half of all their residents are from the Caribbean. Thoughts?

R-3 Residents | Internal Medicine Residency Program |SUNY Upstate Medical University
Our Current Residents - Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences - University at Buffalo
SUNY Downstate Department of Medicine – Internal Medicine Residency: Current Residents

 

[ndafife]

I've done more digging. My friend goes to school in NY, and at Upstate, Downstate and Buffalo, nearly half of all their residents are from the Caribbean. Thoughts?

R-3 Residents | Internal Medicine Residency Program |SUNY Upstate Medical University
Our Current Residents - Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences - University at Buffalo
SUNY Downstate Department of Medicine – Internal Medicine Residency: Current Residents

What's your point? No residency is 1/2 Caribbean because they want to be, its because they aren't able to fill with US MD grads alone

 

[Maxamillion12]

What's your point? No residency is 1/2 Caribbean because they want to be, its because they aren't able to fill with US MD grads alone

If this many Caribbean grads can match into these residencies, maybe it isn't as difficult as one would imagine,

 

[LizzyM]

If this many Caribbean grads can match into these residencies, maybe it isn't as difficult as one would imagine,

It is always important to know the denominator. The number alone is unimportant unless you also know the denominator. How many started at each of those Caribbean schools, how many graduated, how many matched anywhere in the US? Until you know those first two figures, the third figure is meaningless. The real proof of the pudding is the proportion of matriculants (those who enrolled and started classes) who went on to match in the US.

 

[efle]

Nonsense. If you go into the medical school forms, students stay s1 is entirely a recall based test (ie did you memorize this symptom). My friend, who's in medical school, showed me USMLE-RX and it's exactly what I thought.

Dude I'm taking it in a couple weeks, trust me I'm familiar with what board questions are like. USMLERx is a mediocre knock-off of UWorld that is just First Aid in flashcard format masquerading as questions (it's the same company that makes First Aid and USMLERx). If your friend has told you that the people who score in the top 10% on the step1 are the ones who memorized more than 90% of other med students, they have no idea what's coming their way.

Anyways your concern for now should be the MCAT. I'd love to hear what score you expect of yourself. Since it's curved against a bunch of non-engineers you should easily hit, what, 520+?

 

[Maxamillion12]

Dude I'm taking it in a couple weeks, trust me I'm familiar with what board questions are like. USMLERx is a mediocre knock-off of UWorld that is just First Aid in flashcard format masquerading as questions (it's the same company that makes First Aid and USMLERx). If your friend has told you that the people who score in the top 10% on the step1 are the ones who memorized more than 90% of other med students, they have no idea what's coming their way.

Anyways your concern for now should be the MCAT. I'd love to hear what score you expect of yourself. Since it's curved against a bunch of non-engineers you should easily hit, what, 520+?

Not sure what you mean here? Do you mean that it isn't all memorization? Can you give an example?

 

[Phil Woods]

The perils of the anonymous forum

 

[efle]

Not sure what you mean here? Do you mean that it isn't all memorization? Can you give an example?

Sure, here's an extremely basic cardio example loosely based off a UWorld question I had recently.

Guy exercises. Which decreases at peak intensity compared to rest?

A Cardiac Output
B Left Ventricle End Diastolic Pressure
C Pulmonary arterial systolic pressures
D Systemic systolic pressures
E Systemic vascular resistance

Only 50% of medical students get this right, despite how ridiculously basic and straightforward it is. It's always easy to knock out at least one (e.g. obviously cardiac output goes up during exercise). But the rest? Nobody is going to have had exactly this set of parameters on a flashcard. You have to have spent the time studying and really understanding the system to know which parameters you'd expect to go up or down as the heart and vasculature respond to exercise demands.

As another example, they'll show you a pressure-volume loop and ask you what change you'd expect from [modifier of their choice]. It's a fool's errand to try and memorize every possible change in the plot in response to every possible modifier. You have to understand the underlying parameters that drive the plot to change in different ways and derive what you'd expect from what they're introducing.

Don't get me wrong, there are also questions that are all about testing your knowledge base. But, those usually challenge you in a different way by making you move through a differential quickly recalling reasons why each answer fails to fit. The hard part isn't knowing things, it's quickly finding bits and pieces in the paragraph-long vignette you can connect to that knowledge base to rule things in or out. I can't give you an example of that since you don't have any of that knowledge base yet, but just trust me that a lot of people KNOW everything they need to, but fail at the second step of REASONING through recognizing and applying the puzzle pieces.

 

[Maxamillion12]

Sure, here's an extremely basic cardio example loosely based off a UWorld question I had recently.

Guy exercises. Which decreases at peak intensity compared to rest?

A Cardiac Output
B Left Ventricle End Diastolic Pressure
C Pulmonary arterial systolic pressures
D Systemic systolic pressures
E Systemic vascular resistance

Only 50% of medical students get this right, despite how ridiculously basic and straightforward it is. It's always easy to knock out at least one (e.g. obviously cardiac output goes up during exercise). But the rest? Nobody is going to have had exactly this set of parameters on a flashcard. You have to have spent the time studying and really understanding the system to know which parameters you'd expect to go up or down as the heart and vasculature respond to exercise demands.

As another example, they'll show you a pressure-volume loop and ask you what change you'd expect from [modifier of their choice]. It's a fool's errand to try and memorize every possible change in the plot in response to every possible modifier. You have to understand the underlying parameters that drive the plot to change in different ways and derive what you'd expect from what they're introducing.

Don't get me wrong, there are also questions that are all about testing your knowledge base. But, those usually challenge you in a different way by making you move through a differential quickly recalling reasons why each answer fails to fit. The hard part isn't knowing things, it's quickly finding bits and pieces in the paragraph-long vignette you can connect to that knowledge base to rule things in or out. I can't give you an example of that since you don't have any of that knowledge base yet, but just trust me that a lot of people KNOW everything they need to, but fail at the second step of REASONING through recognizing and applying the puzzle pieces.

Wow, never thought of it that way, good example. Do you think it's harder than the MCAT? For some reason I was told that they ask you things like, What is the definition of X?

 

[efle]

Wow, never thought of it that way, good example. Do you think it's harder than the MCAT? For some reason I was told that they ask you things like, What is the definition of X?

It's much harder than the MCAT because they're both curved, but for the MCAT you're competing with a pool of everyone that wants to apply to med school, and for Step1 you're competing against only the premeds that got admitted. The average accepted MCAT is around 80th percentile, so just imagine taking the MCAT a second time against a group where top 1/5th is the new median. And for the most competitive specialties (surgical subspecialties, derm) you need to again hit top ~15% to be at the average for successfully matching.

It's become so insanely competitive in recent years that the national stakeholder groups (American Association of Medical Colleges, National Board of Medical Examiners, American Medical Association) recently held a convention in Philly to discuss changing it to Pass/Fail like the Bar exam or otherwise modifying it to stop reporting percentiles. Med students are a very bright group of people and it pushes us to our mental limits.

 

[Toutie]

Max12, you are doing such a good job at hitting every troll trigger point there is...why don't you just move ahead and bash @Goro for the trifecta?

 

[Maxamillion12]

Max12, you are doing such a good job at hitting every troll trigger point there is...why don't you just move ahead and bash @Goro for the trifecta?

I'm not a troll. I sent Elfe my grades

 

[Maxamillion12]

It's much harder than the MCAT because they're both curved, but for the MCAT you're competing with a pool of everyone that wants to apply to med school, and for Step1 you're competing against only the premeds that got admitted. The average accepted MCAT is around 80th percentile, so just imagine taking the MCAT a second time against a group where top 1/5th is the new median. And for the most competitive specialties (surgical subspecialties, derm) you need to again hit top ~15% to be at the average for successfully matching.

It's become so insanely competitive in recent years that the national stakeholder groups (American Association of Medical Colleges, National Board of Medical Examiners, American Medical Association) recently held a convention in Philly to discuss changing it to Pass/Fail like the Bar exam or otherwise modifying it to stop reporting percentiles. Med students are a very bright group of people and it pushes us to our mental limits.

Do you think it should be pass fail?

 

[ThrowawayShmoaway]

I'm not a troll. I sent Elfe my grades

I mean, you may be a real person with those actual grades, but that doesn't mean you aren't a troll. Actually, that makes this all the more clever. 10/10 for ingenuity.

 

[Maxamillion12]

I mean, you may be a real person with those actual grades, but that doesn't mean you aren't a troll. Actually, that makes this all the more clever. 10/10 for ingenuity.

You guys are unbearable. Why would I waste my time here AND show someone my personal grades? If I was trolling, I'd do it about politics

 

[Goro]

Been looking at them this morning. I don't think it's a good idea based on them. My question is that the IM program at my school has nearly 50% of 1st year residents from the Caribbean schools? Does that mean it's a lousy program?

Generally, yeah. A sweatshop.

 

[efle]

Do you think it should be pass fail?

I like the idea of something tiered, like top quartile / pass / fail.

 

[Perrotfish]

Hi,



So I'm a junior who's currently majoring in civil engineering. I was inquiring about the possibility of going to medical school after I complete my degree. My GPA is overall on the lower side, 2.65 overall to be exact. I'm not really too concerned about it, as my classes are much harder than doing well in premed classes. Last year I've started taking the premed courses, and I've gotten above a C in all them. I was concerned if I'd be able to handle it, so the Step 1 material book (First Aid), and it's seems relativity straight forward memorization (I've taken nutrition and got a B+ in it), so I feel like I could breeze easily through medical school compared to the engineering curriculum. I haven't taken the MCAT yet. I was going to do that this summer. I have about 300 hours of volunteering in the hospital, 200 hours of research, 50 hours of shadowing, and I'm working as a scribe starting this fall. Thoughts on if I'm doing this right?

OK, so while there is a good chance this is a troll, this is also basically where I was when I found SDN so I am going to give it the benefit of the doubt. When I decided I was premed I had a 2.8 GPA in Mechanical Engineering with no upward trend at all. I had taken all of the prereqs for unrelated reasons, and had already managed to accumulate nearly 200 credit hours.

FWIW I worked hard to get that 2.8. At the time I was proud of making it through: I had watched my engineering class dwindle as the majority of the people who started with me failed into non-engineering majors (or failed out entirely), leaving only a handful of us to limp across the finish line. If there were engineers with above a 3.9 applying to medical school they weren't coming from my department, my year none of us had a GPA that high and my 2.8 was slightly above the graduating average. I did find the premed courses much easier and maintained a 3.5 in the prereqs . That 3.5 was still low, of course, but at least it was on the low end of acceptable. I didn't change my work habits much when I started medical school and, while I didn't exactly set the world ablaze, I didn't fail anything either and graduated in the top half of my medical school class with good step scores and a few publications. I put about an equal number of hours into both undergraduate engineering and medical school and the difficulty levels felt pretty similar, though the sources of stress were different.

Unfortunately it took several miracles to and an extra year to get me into medical school, and things have gotten significantly harder for premeds in the 11 years since I matriculated. How it happened for me:

1) I got a high MCAT score, well above the allopathic matriculant average for that year. I started with a pretty good baseline, and then took a formal review course and basically did nothing but study for the MCAT for an entire summer

2) Armed with that MCAT score and my awful GPA I failed to get admitted to medical school, but I did manage to slime my way into a special master's program (a master's program designed specifically to get you into medical school) with a high linkage to its associated medical school. The rule for the program I matriculated at was simple: you took classes with the first year medical students, and if your grades were good enough you went to medical school there the next year. It was a clean slate.

3) My grades were in the program were good enough.

Now OP you are a few steps behind where I was when I found SDN: you still have some of premed coursework to go, and you want to retake those Cs in Bio as well. This is going to get a little easier if you can graduate with at least a 3.0. Then you have to crush the MCAT, since that's going to be your evidence that you actually can handle the coursework despite your GPA. A 'good enough' score isn't going to be good enough, your score needs to be significantly higher than other matriculants to balance out your low GPA. Your practice test score now is meaningless, you haven't taken some of the coursework and you haven't studied for the test. However if you finish your coursework, get to the end of your prep course, and you still can't kill the test then this might not be the right path for you. Finally, with a 3.0 GPA and the high MCAT you probably won't be applying to medical school, you will be applying to an special masters program (there are a lot of them, look at the postbac forum for guidance). Ideally that program will have a high linkage but at a minimum it will have a great reputation, and you will prove that you can handle medical school coursework by acing that coursework at an actual medical school. Then hopefully, with a broad application to low tier schools, or alternatively a single application to your linkage school, you will get in. There is an entire forum on SDN (the postbac forum) devoted to the topic of how to turn an application like yours into an acceptance.

Other advice:

1) The Caribbean is not a shortcut, its a trap. Their matriculants mostly don't become practicing physicians and they can't discharge their student loans when their dreams don't materialize. Some go on to low tier IM/Peds/FM programs but it a small percentage of matriculants and getting smaller each year as the number of US continues to add medical spots much faster than residency spots. Caribbean schools prey on people like you. Don't go.

2) Of all the courses in undergrad, medical school most closely resembled bio. Memorization, information synthesis, scantron tests. If you hate that kind of learning you may hate medical school. To me the biggest red flag in your post was that you couldn't pull a B in either intro level bio. If you can't prove that that was a fluke you might need to go back to focusing on engineering.

3) Be aware this might not work out, and that's fine. Getting through engineering is already a huge accomplishment and the start of a great career.

 

[Gilakend]

In b4 OP gets 118 CARS

 

[chemdoctor]

I Googled "hubris" and this thread popped up.

Really? I just googled “troll” and this showed up!

 

[chemdoctor]

Sigh. 2/10 for trolling.

 

[Gilakend]

Sigh. 2/10 for trolling.

What?! 2/10?! This is pretty good! He got a lot of people riled up

 

[chemdoctor]

What?! 2/10?! This is pretty good! He got a lot of people riled up

Hmm good point... but it’s something old tho. Like the whole “my major is there hardest” ain’t original

 

[RNthenDoc]

In two years, next thread:

“Dismissed from Caribbean, chances for Ivy USMD?”

 

[Gilakend]

In two years, next thread:

“Dismissed from Caribbean, chances for Ivy USMD?”

I don't know if Carib schools even do interviews, but there is no way if this was a real person they could EVER get past an interview. Not even mentioning the GPA situation. But I do look forward to future threads from this guy.

 

[Maxamillion12]

OK, so while there is a good chance this is a troll, this is also basically where I was when I found SDN so I am going to give it the benefit of the doubt. When I decided I was premed I had a 2.8 GPA in Mechanical Engineering with no upward trend at all. I had taken all of the prereqs for unrelated reasons, and had already managed to accumulate nearly 200 credit hours.

FWIW I worked hard to get that 2.8. At the time I was proud of making it through: I had watched my engineering class dwindle as the majority of the people who started with me failed into non-engineering majors (or failed out entirely), leaving only a handful of us to limp across the finish line. If there were engineers with above a 3.9 applying to medical school they weren't coming from my department, my year none of us had a GPA that high and my 2.8 was slightly above the graduating average. I did find the premed courses much easier and maintained a 3.5 in the prereqs . That 3.5 was still low, of course, but at least it was on the low end of acceptable. I didn't change my work habits much when I started medical school and, while I didn't exactly set the world ablaze, I didn't fail anything either and graduated in the top half of my medical school class with good step scores and a few publications. I put about an equal number of hours into both undergraduate engineering and medical school and the difficulty levels felt pretty similar, though the sources of stress were different.

Unfortunately it took several miracles to and an extra year to get me into medical school, and things have gotten significantly harder for premeds in the 11 years since I matriculated. How it happened for me:

1) I got a high MCAT score, well above the allopathic matriculant average for that year. I started with a pretty good baseline, and then took a formal review course and basically did nothing but study for the MCAT for an entire summer

2) Armed with that MCAT score and my awful GPA I failed to get admitted to medical school, but I did manage to slime my way into a special master's program (a master's program designed specifically to get you into medical school) with a high linkage to its associated medical school. The rule for the program I matriculated at was simple: you took classes with the first year medical students, and if your grades were good enough you went to medical school there the next year. It was a clean slate.

3) My grades were in the program were good enough.

Now OP you are a few steps behind where I was when I found SDN: you still have some of premed coursework to go, and you want to retake those Cs in Bio as well. This is going to get a little easier if you can graduate with at least a 3.0. Then you have to crush the MCAT, since that's going to be your evidence that you actually can handle the coursework despite your GPA. A 'good enough' score isn't going to be good enough, your score needs to be significantly higher than other matriculants to balance out your low GPA. Your practice test score now is meaningless, you haven't taken some of the coursework and you haven't studied for the test. However if you finish your coursework, get to the end of your prep course, and you still can't kill the test then this might not be the right path for you. Finally, with a 3.0 GPA and the high MCAT you probably won't be applying to medical school, you will be applying to an special masters program (there are a lot of them, look at the postbac forum for guidance). Ideally that program will have a high linkage but at a minimum it will have a great reputation, and you will prove that you can handle medical school coursework by acing that coursework at an actual medical school. Then hopefully, with a broad application to low tier schools, or alternatively a single application to your linkage school, you will get in. There is an entire forum on SDN (the postbac forum) devoted to the topic of how to turn an application like yours into an acceptance.

Other advice:

1) The Caribbean is not a shortcut, its a trap. Their matriculants mostly don't become practicing physicians and they can't discharge their student loans when their dreams don't materialize. Some go on to low tier IM/Peds/FM programs but it a small percentage of matriculants and getting smaller each year as the number of US continues to add medical spots much faster than residency spots. Caribbean schools prey on people like you. Don't go.

2) Of all the courses in undergrad, medical school most closely resembled bio. Memorization, information synthesis, scantron tests. If you hate that kind of learning you may hate medical school. To me the biggest red flag in your post was that you couldn't pull a B in either intro level bio. If you can't prove that that was a fluke you might need to go back to focusing on engineering.

3) Be aware this might not work out, and that's fine. Getting through engineering is already a huge accomplishment and the start of a great career.

Thank you for the well-written post. It nice that someone agrees with me about the difficulty of engineering, and I appreciate your tips. On a side note, you just wrecked @efle in one post. Do you think you would have had a 4.0 if you started out as a premed? Was the 3.5 the product of not trying? What made you want to go to medical school?

 

[Maxamillion12]

Hmm good point... but it’s something old tho. Like the whole “my major is there hardest” ain’t original

What's ur major then, pal?

 

[Girl on the Move]

Sigh. 2/10 for trolling.

Honestly I would say that this seems sadly genuine. I've met enough people like this in engineering to trust that he believes what he's saying.

 

[Perrotfish]

Thank you for the well-written post. It nice that someone agrees with me about the difficulty of engineering. Do you think you would have had a 4.0 if you started out as a premed?

Definitely not a 4.0, I couldn't even get As in all the prereqs. I tried pretty hard in medical school and half of my class still did better than me, its not by any means easy. I think my GPA would have been higher if I had done a bio major, or if I had known I was premed and that my grades would be so much more important for my future vs my work and research experience, but I guess I will never know for sure. This is also school and program specific, different schools have different median GPAs for their engineering, bio, and liberal arts departments. If you're 2.65 is at a school where that's the median for an engineer that's very different than a school where the median civil engineer has a 3.5, and if you're getting a 2.65 at MIT that's very different from a 2.65 from an online for profit.

Anyway, if you are trying to convince yourself that you can do this, the best way is to take at least some premed courses and get As in them. Retake the bios, give yourself a reasonable course load, and see if you can ace them. You know what you need to do next, or at least where to start formulating a plan, so go to SDN's postbacc forum and start reading. You're not gaining anything from arguing on the internet.

 

[Goro]

Hi,

So I'm a junior who's currently majoring in civil engineering. I was inquiring about the possibility of going to medical school after I complete my degree. My GPA is overall on the lower side, 2.65 overall to be exact. I'm not really too concerned about it, as my classes are much harder than doing well in premed classes. Last year I've started taking the premed courses, and I've gotten above a C in all them. I was concerned if I'd be able to handle it, so the Step 1 material book (First Aid), and it's seems relativity straight forward memorization (I've taken nutrition and got a B+ in it), so I feel like I could breeze easily through medical school compared to the engineering curriculum. I haven't taken the MCAT yet. I was going to do that this summer. I have about 300 hours of volunteering in the hospital, 200 hours of research, 50 hours of shadowing, and I'm working as a scribe starting this fall. Thoughts on if I'm doing this right?

OK, Max, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, because this is a teaching moment. You seem just uninformed int he process, and for the rest of you've seen plenty of SDNers just like max.

For starters, read these:
Goro's advice for pre-meds who need reinvention

Med School Rx: Getting In, Getting Through, and Getting On with Doctoring Original Edition by Walter Hartwig
ISBN-13: 978-1607140627
ISBN-10: 1607140624

So let's clear up come misconceptions.

The people at r/premed tend to be of the "rah rah you can do it!" phenotype. Here at SDN, we give realistic advice, not hugs and kisses. Some people do not take kindly to this. The more hard headed they are, the more SDNers tend to pile on, which is the main reason you're getting grief in this thread.

I'm not going to get into the engineering is harder than medicine argument. It's not relevant here. But as an Adcom member, we simply do NOT view a 2.9 GPA from an engineering school as being better than 3.n from any other UG school. You're expected to do well, no matter where you go. A 2.9 GPA is a 2.9 GPA, and it's lethal for MD schools, lethal at my DO school (and tons of others), and circling the drain at the newest DO schools.

As someone who also teaches med students in a rigorous subject, it's not all brute memory. You have to be able to apply. A typical Boards question might be something like 'A patient is seen with X/Y/Z symptoms. He then goes into shock (vitals and lab values given here, with normals). Where is the infection/tumor/blockage/ischemia/gene defect?

FA is just the barest of bare-bones guide you need for Boards. And on top of that, there's still high yield stuff missing from it or wrong every year!

As an aside, I have seen a number of former engineers as student at my school. They struggle with the curriculum. I had one student who had trouble throughout his second year. He kept telling me "but as an engineer, I was trained to think this way". He finally shut up when my pathologist colleague pointed out "your days as an engineer ended when you put on that white coat".

So if you wish to be a doctor, you have a few years of GPA salvage to go though. Med schools aren't going anywhere.

 

[Maxamillion12]

OK, Max, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, because this is a teaching moment. You seem just uninformed int he process, and for the rest of you've seen plenty of SDNers just like max.

For starters, read these:
Goro's advice for pre-meds who need reinvention

Med School Rx: Getting In, Getting Through, and Getting On with Doctoring Original Edition by Walter Hartwig
ISBN-13: 978-1607140627
ISBN-10: 1607140624

So let's clear up come misconceptions.

The people at r/premed tend to be of the "rah rah you can do it!" phenotype. Here at SDN, we give realistic advice, not hugs and kisses. Some people do not take kindly to this. The more hard headed they are, the more SDNers tend to pile on, which is the main reason you're getting grief in this thread.

I'm not going to get into the engineering is harder than medicine argument. It's not relevant here. But as an Adcom member, we simply do NOT view a 2.9 GPA from an engineering school as being better than 3.n from any other UG school. You're expected to do well, no matter where you go. A 2.9 GPA is a 2.9 GPA, and it's lethal for MD schools, lethal at my DO school (and tons of others), and circling the drain at the newest DO schools.

As someone who also teaches med students in a rigorous subject, it's not all brute memory. You have to be able to apply. A typical Boards question might be something like 'A patient is seen with X/Y/Z symptoms. He then goes into shock (vitals and lab values given here, with normals). Where is the infection/tumor/blockage/ischemia/gene defect?

FA is just the barest of bare-bones guide you need for Boards. And on top of that, there's still high yield stuff missing from it or wrong every year!

As an aside, I have seen a number of former engineers as student at my school. They struggle with the curriculum. I had one student who had trouble throughout his second year. He kept telling me "but as an engineer, I was trained to think this way". He finally shut up when my pathologist colleague pointed out "your days as an engineer ended when you put on that white coat".

So if you wish to be a doctor, you have a few years of GPA salvage to go though. Med schools aren't going anywhere.

Wow this is good advice, thanks for the help