Please discuss!!! Help!

[sammmmmm]

Okay so this is my scenario completely honest and very grim looking: I earned a mediocre 2.55 my freshman year of college at an average private college in MA. I transfered to another school for all of the wrong reasons and recieved poor grades, including an F and a couple of D's while studying economics. I was not very motivated at all and didn't care too much about my grades. I decided to leave college and after figuring things out in my life I enrolled at a community college in CT. Ive earned very all A's and have been accepted to UConn and would be allowed to return to my first school if i choose. I am planning on studying Biology or Chemistry. I know how grim my situation looks but med school is the path that I am going to persue. Going to UConn would reset my GPA, however I still have those first two years that have scarred my academics. My question is how poor are my chances of getting in to any med school assuming i continue to do well from here on out? How badly will my previous school transcripts effect me? Any advice on how to recover or go from here is welcome. I encourage brutal honesty and respect the opinions of all. I am 20yrs old and do not want to give up on this dream.

 

[dragonfly99]

Your previous academic problems will hurt you, especially because this wasn't your typical freshman first semester slump. It sounds as if you had bad grades for a couple of years, including some D's and F's, at a couple of different colleges. You will be competing against a lot of people who are going to have pretty spotless academic records if you choose to pursue medical school. So yes, in that sense I think that the odds are stacked against your getting in any time soon. However, particularly if you are wiling to pursue a DO degree rather than MD, if you continue to perform well from here on out I don't think that becoming a physician is out of the question. I think there are a lot of question marks right now, however. A couple of semesters of good performance at a community college does not prove that you can do the work that medical school will require, and the 1st question the admissions committees have to ask themselves is whether the applicant can do the work. Letting someone into medical school who is just going to fail out serves nobody - not the student, not the school and not the public that relies on medical schools to provide well trained students for residency.

I think it is good that you have turned things around, but I think that you are asking a question that is not answerable at this point. My advice would be to really buckle down and work hard for the next couple of years of college. By that I mean pretty much all A's and A- (if your school gives A- grades) with as few B's as possible. If you are med school material then you should be able to hack that if you are motivated. At that point you can go to the premed committee at your school and start asking them to set you up to do research, etc. that will strengthen your application. Getting your feet wet in a medical setting by doing some type of volunteer work would not hurt either. If you are motivated to take care of patients, then you are going to find a way to do that, whether it is med school, some type of nursing, physical therapy, optometry, etc. You are still young so I don't see a reason to bail out on all your ambitions at this point, but just realize that nobody is guaranteed medical school admission and that in your case you will have a tougher time.

By the way, you have misspelled a couple of words, such as "pursue" in your post above...