I don't even know what to do anymore.
O-Chem I-Final is tomorrow. If I'm lucky I'll walk out with a B/B-. Most likely a C+/C though.
Physics I-Probably a B/B-
History-A or B, no idea.
This is the killer
Pre-calc-C
A ****ing C. I am in disbelief at how badly I did in this class. I was counting it as an easy A but the tests were set up ridiculously hard.
My GPA is going to be god awful.
Even if I get a 4.0 next semester by sophomore GPA is still gonna be terrible.
Does anyone else been in a worse situation than me? Is my GPA still salvageable?
A good friend of mine is an MS-2. He got a C+ in physics 1 and a C in physics 2. The semester he got the C+ his semester GPA was a 2.9. By the time he applied, is overall GPA was good (3.6ish) and his sGPA in biochem was fantastic. He had 4 acceptances. Besides one snarky remark along the lines of "good thing you're not going into engineering, eh?" (from an interviewer at one of the schools that accepted him), nobody cared.
If it was the semester before you were applying, you might want to wait to apply. My grades dropped last spring (junior year) after a death in the family and my dad's hospitalization, and that was the final impetus for me to take a gap year, which I had strongly considered anyway for financial and personal reasons. I'm getting A's again, and while I would have loved to apply with the nearly perfect GPA I had prior to last semester, I just have to roll with the punches. A bad semester can happen to anyone, and it should only make you work harder to get past it. You're only a sophomore, so by the time ADCOMs see your transcript, you'll have three more semesters of great grades to make them skim right past the bad ones.
Use this as an opportunity to evaluate what happened that made your grades drop. Maybe you need to lighten your load (ECs, credit load, etc.), or maybe you need to change your study habits. Maybe it was just a bad semester, period. As long as you improve from here, it's not going to affect your chances at admission.
Take it easy, though. I got great advice today at lunch with a friend who's an MS-1. I was stressing out about my final, and he was pretty relaxed about his anatomy final in two days. He said he sees some of his classmates in the library constantly, busting their butts for high honors, and they haven't even socialized with the rest of the class. He pointed out the obvious: medicine is a long haul, and you can spend every day from freshman year in undergrad right through the last year of residency obsessing over every detail of your transcript/CV/etc. But you'll just burn out that way, or (equally bad) not enjoy the 11-15 years of your life that is spent just to become an attending. And all you'll have to show for it is what you would have probably accomplished anyway, without killing yourself to do it.
We need to be able to do science math, not math math anyway. OP, don't worry too much about pre-calc. I say just finish up whatever math classes your uni forces you to take, never take a math class again, and don't look back!
