I take issue with several things here, and please do not take my words personally. But I'll start with an anecdotal story about a friend of mine who is quite candid with his experiences. He went to a very, very reputable university for undergrad and was in engineering. After 4 years of destroying his GPA (it sank to below 2.0), and being just a semester or two away from graduation, he changed majors to biology (at the same school) and proceeded to graduate in 1 year. I was shocked that someone who did so poorly in engineering could accomplish the task of completing an entire major in one year (summer + fall + spring). His answer? He may have been a bad engineer, but he wasn't a bad student and its not that he didn't learn anything. He said he grew from the experience and after really sitting down and thinking things over, he realized he learned how to work efficiently and that everything was easier after that. He said with the wisdom he gained from the experience, he probably could have started engineering over and gotten an easy 3.5. He was just making one mistake after another in his decisions and they led him down a vicious cycle. Moral of the story: you can accomplish anything if you approach it from the right angle and with the right attitude.
1) If you find undergraduate courses difficult at UH, and graduate school is far more challenging, how do you think you will perform then? I know the saying goes Cs are for PharmDs... but do you honestly believe that you'll be getting Cs? You went from As and Bs to Bs and Cs. Its fairly reasonable to say you'll go to Cs and Ds (aka not passing) in grad school, is it not?
2) You withdrew from a class because a professor was "difficult" and you couldn't pass a single test. Is your plan to withdraw from classes when you get to pharmacy school and find that passing them is difficult? Because, to my knowledge, you really can't do that. You'd fall behind a year.
3) Not passing because a professor was difficult is an excuse. You're just a kid, but the reality of the situation is that you need to accept responsibility for your actions. Whether it was due to the fact that you overloaded your schedule with too much work, didn't seek tutoring assistance or professor's help during office hours until it was too late, or because you were too concerned with "college life" to study the right amount, or even if there were personal issues at hand, it doesn't matter because all of them are a measure of your errors in decision making. You could have registered for fewer classes, sought help early, partied less, and withdrawn for the semester. You make (literally) hundreds of decisions a day... and there are always better decisions you could have made.
Being a mature adult, one who a pharmacy school seeks to admit, means you can handle the rigors and challenges of graduate school AND can accept responsibility for your own actions because down the road, your decision making could quite literally be life or death for patients. Every admissions committee realizes that when you're 18 or 20, you make loads of poor decisions. Its a perfectly normal aspect of youthful exuberance. Depending on the degree of error, many admissions committees are quite willing to forgive these little transgressions as a normal part of becoming an adult.... But the question they will ask themselves is how do you rise to the challenge from here? Option 1: Do you run back to the school where you can get better grades in the hopes that no one notices? Option 2: Or do you step up to the plate and do a better job in your second semester at UH? Both decisions carry risk - with option 1 its that admissions committees don't think you can make it and don't accept you or that once you get there, you cant handle it and flunk out... and with option 2 its that you continue to perform poorly and won't be accepted into pharmacy school.
Let me be clear - neither decision is a "bad decision" but both carry a big risk. Its not the decision which sets apart the good candidates from the bad - its the process by which you make it, and the actions you take once you make it that does.
Life is full of character revealing moments - this is simply one of yours.
Thanks ya'll.
