how difficult is it to increase gpa?

[MindCastle15]

this question is mainly to relieve my anxiety, but after freshman year of college, my gpa is a 3.278. I'm a biomedical engineering major, possibly switching into chemical engineering, and possibly going the premed route (not 100% sure yet) But I do know that I am either aiming for med school or grad school, and that requires at least a >3.5 gpa. Is it possible for me to pull this up during the duration of the next 3 years? Is it possible to get a 3.9, assuming I work as hard as possible?
I'm also feeling a little lost, like engineering is not for me, mostly because altho I like math, I'm nt good at it, and I hate physics.

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[Optimist Prime]

You can definitely bring your grade up but you need to do a whole lot better from here on out. Can you pull it up to a 3.9?? Probably not maybe a 3.75 though, do the math if you really want to know.

 

[altblue]

You're in for a rough time in engineering if you don't like math or physics... Ever think about switching out?

 

[efle]

3.9 is a little too optimistic, but something like 3.7 is a good target and would be competitive for MD schools. If you become 100% certain you want to apply to med school and are still struggling with the GPA, switch out of engineering.

 

[bannie22]

its quite teh diminishing returns. once you lose it it is very hard to get back. and exponentially hard to get more back

 

[astrostellar]

The more credits you already have to your name, the harder it is. 50 credits? Easy to bring it up. 150? Not so much.

Also, it doesn't have a hard requirement of a 3.5... but yeah, it would be to your definite advantage.

 

[Goro]

this question is mainly to relieve my anxiety, but after freshman year of college, my gpa is a 3.278. I'm a biomedical engineering major, possibly switching into chemical engineering, and possibly going the premed route (not 100% sure yet) But I do know that I am either aiming for med school or grad school, and that requires at least a >3.5 gpa. Is it possible for me to pull this up during the duration of the next 3 years? Is it possible to get a 3.9, assuming I work as hard as possible?
I'm also feeling a little lost, like engineering is not for me, mostly because altho I like math, I'm nt good at it, and I hate physics.

It's less about raising your GPA as opposed to you showing that you can handle med school. You can do this by aceing everything from now on. But always have a Plan B

 

[eteshoe]

In my biased opinion, switching into being a ChemE will not be any easier (I'd venture to say tougher). Just focus on learning the best way to learn the material, utilize the tutoring resources at your institution, and find stronger students to work with on assignments.

 

[FlowRate]

As someone who managed to get a high GPA in chemical engineering, I have to say it's really not worth the effort to be a premed engineer (except maybe CS or BME), unless you're seriously on the fence about med school. I worked harder as an engineering student than I did as a med student or in residency.

Also, you're pretty well screwed on getting a 3.9. You'd have to keep a mid-3.9 for the rest of college to pull off a 3.8.

 

[Blanky]

Sounds like you need to find a new major in a hurry, and pick something you enjoy!

 

[UBLI-EINSTEIN]

To be honest it's very hard. This is how GPA works, once you messed it up, you can barely improve that.
Unless you did really great in the future, then you are able to compensate some loss here, but I doubt.
If you are not an URM and you couldn't ensure you are great in the rest of your college years, you are done to MD.

DO might still open a door for you. I'm not very sure.

 

[bbbcccppp]

It is a math problem involving grades and credit hours and you can calculate. Roughly speaking a 4.0 the next 3 years is 4x3 + 1x3.3 =15.3/4 = x assuming equal credits per year


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[surgonc2017]

I'd say the first thing is deciding what you want to do with your life. If you want to be an engineer, great keep going. If you want to be a chemical engineer, great switch your major. If you want to go to medical school, switch your major to something you'll enjoy (biology, microbio, history, anything!) and work on acing everything to bring your GPA up.


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[aldol16]

You can calculate all this for yourself. GPA is just a fancy weighted average. 3.9 = (x*AVG + y*3.278)/(x + y). x is the number of credit hours you have left ahead of you. y is the number of credit hours you have completed thus far. AVG is the average you would have to sustain over the x credit hours to get a 3.9.

Let's say you have taken 30 credit hours (y = 30). You have 3 years, or 90 credit hours (x = 90), left.

3.9 = (90*AVG + 30*3.278)/(90 + 30)
AVG = 4.1

Using this scheme, unless your college awards points > 4.0, this student could not achieve a 3.9. However, this calculus changes if you take less credit hours your first year than your subsequent years. According to this scheme, if you get a 4.0 for the rest of your career, you would end up with a 3.8 - still impressive and arguably indistinguishable from a 3.9.

 

[PreMedMissteps]

In my biased opinion, switching into being a ChemE will not be any easier (I'd venture to say tougher). Just focus on learning the best way to learn the material, utilize the tutoring resources at your institution, and find stronger students to work with on assignments.

ChemE will likely be more difficult than BiomedE which has a rep of being engineering lite.

 

[amg_la]

this is a straightforward math calculation. if you dont know how to calculate your GPA just grab an online GPA calculator, enter the credits, grades, and then put in your future classes with all A's. that would be the best case scenario and the most you can improve your GPA.

 

[Blanky]

Some good apps for gpa as well.

 

[paul2752]

If you want to change your major, Chemical Engineering is the last thing you want to consider. I am 3.55 Chem E major, and while this is a nice gpa, this isn't super good for med schools.

 

[FlowRate]

You can calculate all this for yourself. GPA is just a fancy weighted average. 3.9 = (x*AVG + y*3.278)/(x + y). x is the number of credit hours you have left ahead of you. y is the number of credit hours you have completed thus far. AVG is the average you would have to sustain over the x credit hours to get a 3.9.

Let's say you have taken 30 credit hours (y = 30). You have 3 years, or 90 credit hours (x = 90), left.

3.9 = (90*AVG + 30*3.278)/(90 + 30)
AVG = 4.1

Using this scheme, unless your college awards points > 4.0, this student could not achieve a 3.9. However, this calculus changes if you take less credit hours your first year than your subsequent years. According to this scheme, if you get a 4.0 for the rest of your career, you would end up with a 3.8 - still impressive and arguably indistinguishable from a 3.9.

Damn, beat ya' to it but didn't show my work. Always was my problem.

 

[aldol16]

OP, you can create a spreadsheet in Excel quite easily into which you can input all of your credit hours and grades into in the future. The advantage of this is that you can calculate separate GPAs for BCPM courses, separate your GPAs by year, get departmental GPA, etc. all in one go. Just use one column for the course name/number, a column for the credit hours, and a column for the points earned (you can use whatever system your school uses for A/B/C/D/F or, if different from the AMCAS point system, you can also just use the AMCAS system since that's the relevant one anyway. Your GPA is simply the sum of all the products of credit hours and grade points divided by the sum of credit hours. So create another cell that gives you the product of credit hours and grade points for each class. Then if cells Dn are the products and cells B1:Bn are the credit hours, then the code is "=sum(Dn)/sum(B1:Bn)" where n is the cell number corresponding to the last class. You can sum over different subsets of cells to give you special GPAs like BCPM or departmental.

 

[MalenurseRN]

this question is mainly to relieve my anxiety, but after freshman year of college, my gpa is a 3.278. I'm a biomedical engineering major, possibly switching into chemical engineering, and possibly going the premed route (not 100% sure yet) But I do know that I am either aiming for med school or grad school, and that requires at least a >3.5 gpa. Is it possible for me to pull this up during the duration of the next 3 years? Is it possible to get a 3.9, assuming I work as hard as possible?
I'm also feeling a little lost, like engineering is not for me, mostly because altho I like math, I'm nt good at it, and I hate physics.

It's not easy to bring it up, but you're not in red either. To some extent, everybody struggles during freshman year. Focus all your efforts into doing well in future semesters. Adcoms know this. As long as you can show an upward trend and show them that you learned from your mistakes, you will be fine.

 

[MindCastle15]

Thanks for all your replies, everybody! I'm really, really on the fence about my career: I know my end goal is biomedical research/working in bio/pharma companies--> if I study medicine, I will probably specialise in something like pathology rather than the more usual areas. From my previous experiences on this forum (and internet in general), I've gathered that majoring in biology (or anything related to bio)--> grad school route is very very common and quite competitive, and I really don't want to major in just biology which is frankly,a little boring for me. It's the intersection of biology with other fields that interest me. I picked BME as an alternative, but after an year I've realised that BME at my college is geared more towards mechanical (something I don't want), a BME major kind of leaves me in the middle of nowhere. I've had limited experience with ChemE (I'm currently doing some exploring) but it seems to be interesting, and widely applicable in many of the industries I'm interested in. The other alternative major I'm thinking about is chemistry. About math and physics- I feel like I'm going to have some math and physics if I choose to stay in any science-related major (except maybe pure bio), so it's something I'm going to be dealing with either way! And I do love math, it's physics that gets under my nerve at times...