PChem Advice?

[Lawpy]

Nonsense. This guy who took P Chem is an anecdote. I am glad he performed well but admissions committees at most medical schools aren't going to pore over this guy's transcript and say "Oh gee you aced P Chem!". His performance in that class will be ignored. The Adcoms don't have the time, resources or inclination to normalize transcripts. This is the reason that only 12% of first year medical students are physical science majors. One third of all medical students didn't major in any science. It's disgusting but that's the way it is.

The OP's gender is irrelevant.

The original post is in the premedical forum. I am willing to make the heroic assumption that the OP wants to go to medical school. If somebody wants to go to medical school, they had damn well please admissions committees. Your point of view contradicts the data and the literature concerning medical school admissions. This is a numbers game. It's driven by GPA and MCAT. If one third of the jamokes getting into medical school are not science majors, it's pretty clear that admissions committees don't care if an applicant took PChem.

Everytime I see somebody in this forum encouraging a premed to take calculus based physics or major in engineering or one of the physical sciences, I smell a troll. I suspect that poster is simply trying to cull the field for himself or a family member. You may be sincere. I don't know. However, I am completely confident that you are wrong.

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[Obnoxious Dad]

This is probably the first time someone has ascribed nefarious intentions to my posts. Since I’ve already been accepted to med school, I don’t exactly want to cull the playing field. I asked for advice on how to succeed at PChem. Some people gave me advice. I took said advice and succeeded. I also added that I don’t think that’s the right thing for everyone to do, but I wanted others to know the outcome in case they consider the taking the class in the future.


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I wasn't insinuating that you were a troll. I insinuated that Dox4lyfe might be a troll.

Congratulations on getting accepted to medical school. I wish you the very best.

 

[Robin-jay]

Both Lawper and Obnoxious Dad make some credible points.

I agree with obnoxious dad on some points, although the tone of the posts weren't ideal.

Medical schools do only accept 66.7% science majors, 33.3% other. However, the pre-reqs. for the courses still exist.

If you want my personal opinion, I think people in medical school should have a science degree. It just seems strange to me that you could be a criminal justice major and only have a few classes in your academic career that are arduous, then that's kind of an issue because just taking the pre-reqs is such a small amount of "difficult" courses, and medical schools are really taking a risk on taking students with such a low amount of tough courses, while ignoring the difficulty of engineering or physics major with lower GPAs. That's understandable.

I mean, do I trust a chemical engineer with a 2.75 GPA over a history major with a 3.8 GPA to be my physician (all else similar)? Probably.

However, if you want to play the game, you have to play it medical schools way, which means one should not take the hardest major if they plan on medical school because that just makes the most sense.

I'd argue taking a difficult course like "quantum mechanics" and earning a C+ in it shows you are not smart enough to choose better classes to take for medical school.

Either way, I'd advise anyone to play the game by medical school standards or don't play at all. If you are worried about taking a major/course where you won't get a good GPA, but shows you're smart, still don't do it.