Medical Pre-med Seeking Advice on Summer Plans
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"I am a 1st year pre-medical college student planning to graduate the summer after my 2nd year. ... My summer plans are to take 3-4 courses."
Have you talked to your academic advisor about this plan? Where did you come up with this idea?
You are underestimating what you can do in summer semesters where you have only 4 weeks to complete a course that normally takes 16. Unless something has changed, you can't take more than 4 classes in a regular fall/spring semester without permission. In the summer, you are going to be very limited because not all upper-level classes are offered in the summer. Furthermore, if you plan to take prereqs with labs, you'll have to avoid lab schedule conflicts as (at my last institution) they all are scheduled for the afternoons Mon to Thursday. Try taking Chem and Phys lab in the summer... you can't because they both overlap.
It's a horrible idea... who will write you letters of recommendation? How are you getting research experience? How will you get campus leadership experience? Unless you are running on NIL money, this is hardly a good idea for anyone ready for the long slog ahead of medical education.
How about this idea: take your gap years now. Drop out of college and "live a little" for the next 3 years. Come back and take your regular 3-4 year schedule of courses and earn a bachelor's degree. If money is a problem, get to work now! If your family needs you now, don't risk bombing out of college with a horrible GPA that you have to reclaim or reinvent later. Just quit now!
Have you talked to your academic advisor about this plan? Where did you come up with this idea?
You are underestimating what you can do in summer semesters where you have only 4 weeks to complete a course that normally takes 16. Unless something has changed, you can't take more than 4 classes in a regular fall/spring semester without permission. In the summer, you are going to be very limited because not all upper-level classes are offered in the summer. Furthermore, if you plan to take prereqs with labs, you'll have to avoid lab schedule conflicts as (at my last institution) they all are scheduled for the afternoons Mon to Thursday. Try taking Chem and Phys lab in the summer... you can't because they both overlap.
It's a horrible idea... who will write you letters of recommendation? How are you getting research experience? How will you get campus leadership experience? Unless you are running on NIL money, this is hardly a good idea for anyone ready for the long slog ahead of medical education.
How about this idea: take your gap years now. Drop out of college and "live a little" for the next 3 years. Come back and take your regular 3-4 year schedule of courses and earn a bachelor's degree. If money is a problem, get to work now! If your family needs you now, don't risk bombing out of college with a horrible GPA that you have to reclaim or reinvent later. Just quit now!
Agreed with above. Better to take your time rather than rush something like this and risk tanking your GPA.
Agree with above, a fatal flaw that many students make is thinking they can do everything, biting off more than they can chew, and hurting their GPA for no reason. You wind up further behind than you would have been had you slowed down and taken your time.
I’ll give a concrete example—I found a loophole at my school that would have allowed me to take inorganic chemistry and biochemistry at the same time, even though they’re clearly meant to be sequential. My prof told me very clearly to be careful what I wish for because this was, in her words, “academic suicide,” but she would let me make my own decision because I was an adult. Ultimately I split them, and I’m glad because they may have been the two hardest courses I ever took in college and I was lucky to escape with a B and a B+.
Bottom line, talk to your advisor and the prospective profs of these courses. Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you should, and as an adult learner there are no guardrails in place to prevent you from committing academic suicide unless you ask for advice.
To answer your original question, if you’re planning to take 2-3 gap years anyways then it doesn’t really matter how you spend these two summers. There will be plenty of time to get whatever other experiences you miss in the future during gap years.
I’ll give a concrete example—I found a loophole at my school that would have allowed me to take inorganic chemistry and biochemistry at the same time, even though they’re clearly meant to be sequential. My prof told me very clearly to be careful what I wish for because this was, in her words, “academic suicide,” but she would let me make my own decision because I was an adult. Ultimately I split them, and I’m glad because they may have been the two hardest courses I ever took in college and I was lucky to escape with a B and a B+.
Bottom line, talk to your advisor and the prospective profs of these courses. Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you should, and as an adult learner there are no guardrails in place to prevent you from committing academic suicide unless you ask for advice.
To answer your original question, if you’re planning to take 2-3 gap years anyways then it doesn’t really matter how you spend these two summers. There will be plenty of time to get whatever other experiences you miss in the future during gap years.
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