Medical Withdrawal and Five W’s — Do I have a chance?

[Ferngully123]

Hi All,

This is my first post, but I have been Lurking on SDN for a while. I medically withdrew from my first semester of college at a small LAC, due to a chronic pain disorder. Unfortunately, this resulted in five W’s on my transcript. I will be returning to college next fall and wanted some input on whether I should pursue the pre med route again. I have seen similar questions asked on SDN, but I couldn’t find any about medical withdrawals specifically.

I look forward to your responses!

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[deleted996731]

Hi All,

This is my first post, but I have been Lurking on SDN for a while. I medically withdrew from my first semester of college at a small LAC, due to a chronic pain disorder. Unfortunately, this resulted in five W’s on my transcript. I will be returning to college next fall and wanted some input on whether I should pursue the pre med route again. I have seen similar questions asked on SDN, but I couldn’t find any about medical withdrawals specifically.

I look forward to your responses!

Make sure your health problems are in order before starting school again. Having all of your Ws in one semester along with proof that it was due to a medical problem will not affect you.

 

[Goro]

Hi All,

This is my first post, but I have been Lurking on SDN for a while. I medically withdrew from my first semester of college at a small LAC, due to a chronic pain disorder. Unfortunately, this resulted in five W’s on my transcript. I will be returning to college next fall and wanted some input on whether I should pursue the pre med route again. I have seen similar questions asked on SDN, but I couldn’t find any about medical withdrawals specifically.

I look forward to your responses!

You're fine. You did what the W's are for...withdraw, instead of trying to bulldoze your way through when you're not at your best. Doing the latter is a sign of poor judgement.

For some odd reason, Ws have a bigger stigma on SDN than do Fs.

The only time Ws may hurt one is if a person with a strong GPA has a scattering of them all over thier transcript. One or two here ore there are fine. But the scattering is a sign that one is engaging in GPA protection.

An entire semester says to me that someone got sick or injured, or had some other major life even happen.

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

You're fine. You did what the W's are for...withdraw, instead of trying to bulldoze your way through when you're not at your best. Doing the latter is a sign of poor judgement.

For some odd reason, Ws have a bigger stigma on SDN than do Fs.

The only time Ws may hurt one is if a person with a strong GPA has a scattering of them all over thier transcript. One or two here ore there are fine. But the scattering is a sign that one is engaging in GPA protection.

An entire semester says to me that someone got sick or injured, or had some other major life even happen.

This. I had a bunch of Ws on my transcript from times I was smart and withdrew because I had **** going on and a couple Fs from the times I was stupid and tried to bulldoze my way through. Schools only seemed to care about those couple of Fs and not the dozens of Ws (well they cared but once they heard the explanation they seemed satisfied).

 

[Destalchemy]

I'm 26 now and have 5 fs from my only semester of college 8 years ago. Ive been told I'll be fine. The only thing I'm not quite sure is how to frame it (while sticking to the truth of course).

I just stopped caring. I wanted to go into medicine but I had no motivation and stopped attending classes 4 weeks in. Funny thing is I didn't even party and drink or anything like that. I think it was a combo of depression and anxiety which I really do not want to address at all due to the stigma. I'll probably frame it as homesickness and inability to cope with a new environment? I won "worst case senioritis" in hs and I thought it would all just go away when I moved away to college. Boy was I wrong. 17 year olds are not smart.

Turns out i couldn't handle being on my own in a new city and in a dorm with 2 other people who ALWAYS had friends over. This entire friend group of 7 or 8 people all failed out after one semester.

My gpa cant be more than a 3.3 I believe after all will be said and done but I'm a new person and it's been almost a decade. After going from wanting to be a small business owner, to IT, to teaching, while working for a flooring company for 4 years, I realized I had it right all along and medicine is the only thing I want to do. It took me 8 years but here I am.

I think you'll be fine if you had an actual non psychiatric medical reason and you withdrew in time.