Help in Course Selections

[nonzerosum]

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I am planning to apply to pharmacy this year and I am having some trouble deciding my courses mainly because I can't decide whether to apply to out of province schools.

Currently the only schools I can apply to will be U of Alberta and U of Toronto. My currently cgpa is quite poor 3.2 and I haven't got a lot of ECs.

So Course Selections dilemma: I don't know if I should apply to U of A because if I do I will have to take a full year of english and another year of chem and volunteer which may bring down my already low gpa.

Should I
1) Take the risk and do all the additional stuff to apply to UA but risk a low gpa

2) Apply to only U of T and focus only on gpa but it's rather difficult to get into - Please correct me if I am wrong but at U of T only GPA and PCAT matters, nothing else.

Thanks

 

[tydt]

Remember GPA is not everything, how did you do on your PCAT? As for volunteering, only about 2-3 hours are require a week, i don't think that's going to affect your study at all. Also, the courses that you made C's on, are you planning on re-taking a few of them? Well, these are just a few steps for you to considered about. Of course there are alot more options you can take, like considering on getting a B.A in some science field if you haven't already. just look around the forum, I'm sure you will find your answer. BTW, we have the same # of posts 😀

Good Luck!

 

[mug3n]

I think if you're applying to UofT you should get a damn good PCAT score to compensate for the cGPA, I almost forgot that U of T takes only a small percentage of out of province applicants, so you're gonna be in tough. Work on getting that cGPA up too, even that extra .1 helps.

Mind telling why you are only able to apply to UofA and UofT? There are a bunch of other good pharmacy schools in Canada like UBC and Dalhousie.

 

[nonzerosum]

thanks for the replies,

I would be considered as out-of-province for UA.

I forgot to mention that I go to utsg and the reason I am applying to only UA and UT is because my credits are not equivalent to any of the other universities and because of UTSG's policy of no more than 6 first year courses & exclusions, I cannot take the other required pre-reqs now so I am only eligible to apply for these 2 schools.

I also notices that UA wants a 3.5 gpa, and to get that I would need a 3.8 agpa for 2nd year. Should I not bother applying to UA? and just focus on getting higher at UT? or would that be a bad choice?

thanks again

 

[nonzerosum]

any advice?

 

[Passion4Sci]

Alright so your choices are:

1. University of Alberta, which "suggests" a 3.5 GPA

and

2. University of Toronto, which requires a lower GPA than UofA but is still very competitive.

Your problem is that you don't think you can get a 3.8 GPA in order to be able to raise your current cGPA to 3.5. Well, certainly that is within your control, so if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish that. Doing so would enable you to expand your applications to both schools, instead of just sending one out and hoping.

I am pretty shocked at how non-transparent those two websites are. I mean, look at Mercer or UCSF or something - Their information is easy to find, and very detailed. It's like pulling teeth out of the UA or UT's website to find even their minimim required GPA. That'd drive me nuts...

Anyway, it looks pretty cut and dried to me. Study your brains off and get a 3.8, and apply to UA and UT. Barring that as completely impossible, apply to UT and dress it up with a really good PCAT score.

Not much anyone else can really suggest, since the options you have are somewhat limited in scope.