So here's the story. My gpa blows (~2.6) and I know I am not getting into any med school in the US. The question is what can I do? I've heard of SMPs and post bac programs but most that I've seen say that your gpa has to be atleast a 3.0...even though they are supposed to help you increase your gpa right? So any suggestions? What am I supposed to do next? Should I just do a regular master's degree...anyone know any schools that will accept my low gpa?
OP: I've been through this (graduated with a 2.8). This response is long, but read it through.
First, to clarify terms:
A formal post-bac: This is a fromal program, offered by a handful of universities, designed to let people who graduated without having fulfilled the premedical requirements complete those requirements in the shortest possible amount of time. The best of these programs also have linkages to top medical schools (and are geared towards people who graduated with near perfect GPAs). This is not what you want.
An informal post-bac program: This is a fancy way of saying that you're staying in undergrad longer to get your GPA to a more respectable level. This is an option for you. Take more classes, or just retake the ones you screwed up the first time around.
Special Masters Programs: These are 1 year programs, offered at about half a dozen medical schools, which allow students to take classes with, and be graded against, medical students at that school. They have nothing to do wth a normal masters degree, and serve no purpose other than to help you get into medical school. These programs almost all run for 1 year, cost a lot of money, and are billed as an 'audition' for medical school. Most of these programs have very high (>75%) success rates at getting their students into medical school, which translates to just about 100% of the students that did well in the program. Most SMPs also have some sort of guarentee to admit, or at least interview, the very top students in the program. A few SMPs (generally refered to as 'high linkage' SMPs) admit more than 75% of their students into the followng year's medical school class. For obvious reasons, these are some of the most competitive programs to get admitted to.
Generally SMPs are geared towards people who have 'unbalanced' applications, meaning a high MCAT and low GPA or, more rarely, a low MCAT with multiple retakes and a high GPA. Obviously the lower your GPA the higher your MCAT needs to be to make up for it and vice versa. Most Special Masters programs won't admit you with less than a 3.0 unless you have a truely stellar MCAT, and won't admit you with less than a 2.75 under any cirumstances. So if you're interested in doing this chances are you need to improve your cumulative GPA first. An SMP program doesn't actually increase your undergraduate GPA, but your grades in the program will be weighted, by ADCOMs, as or more highly than your entire ugrad GPA combined.
BTW people who have screwed up in SMPs have reported back that after that their applications were basically unsalvagable, so if you go the SMP route view this as the very last thing you're going to do to improve your application, one way or the other.
General Advice:
1) Don't listen to your premedical advisor. Advisors are varying degrees of unhelpful if you're a good candidate for medical school, but they're all pretty much all equally and completely useless if your application sucks. They'll either advise you to give up or tell you to do something that won't help at all in terms of improving your app (like a traditional masters program). Politely ignore them.
2) Don't do a tradiational masters or an MPH. The experience of the (many, many) people on SDN who have been in your situation is that medical school ADCOMs barely even consider grades from a Masters degree. It might help for an aplicant that was otherwise borderline, but if your GPA is awful it won't help at all. For practical purposes the only grades ADCOMs care about are from undergrad and from other medical schools (via SMPs).
3) Don't do ANYTHING until you've figured out why you got a 2.6 in the first place and have corrected the problem. Otherwise anything you do will only be digging the hole deeper.
Plans of attack:
the way I see it, you have 4 options
1) Get your GPA up to a 3.0 (or maybe a 2.8 if you can really kill the MCAT) over the next year or three calculating your GPA without grade replacement. Then do an SMP. Go to a US MD or DO school.
2) Redo all the classes you did really badly in. Get your GPA up to a 3.4 (or maybe a 3.2 if you can really kill the MCAT) calculated using only your most recent grade in a given course. Apply to, and go to, a DO school.
3) Finish your prereqs if you haven't yet, get a decent MCAT, apply to the 'big 4' Caribbean schools, and start maybe as early as this coming spring. The problem here is that the Caribben has both high fail out rates (fail a single class and you're done) and a very low match rate for residency (not getting a residency means your degree is pretty much worthless). If you're not at the top of your game you're going to burried under a mound of debt you'll never escape from and you'll never get another shot to be a doctor. The upside is, if you finish and get residency, your degree will be just as good as anyone else's and you'll be a doctor only 4 years from now. This is probably the best option if you come from money, otherwise I'd recommend against it.
4) Consider another career. Seriously, this job is good but it ain't great. Have you looked at nursing? PA school? Business? Engineering? The military? Just getting in to medical school is going to take several years for you unless you go Caribbean, and then it's at least 7 years until you can practice for a decent salary. Also if you try this every year of application improvement is going to cost quite a bit of $$, and you might not get in at all. Do you really care that much about a white coat?
Anyway, G'luck, whatever you choose.
