Yes, I did do those things you mentioned about (going to office hours/participating in class especially since seats were assigned and we couldn’t choose where to sit). In my situation, would it better to ask the biochem or genetics professor?
Additionally, in regards to the PI, I was planning on asking the PI who I had worked with for 10 weeks over the summer rather than the one I had worked with for more than 1.5 years. This is because I feel like the summer PI was able to monitor my work more closely and I was able to publish an abstract and a poster. With the PI I had worked for 1.5 years, I feel like she would write me a good letter but I feel like I didn’t get much output from it in terms of pubs and posters. She also has many undergraduate research assistants and many different projects she works on. With my project specifically, I only meet her once a week. Would this be considered bad if I ask the PI I’d worked with over the summer rather than the one I’d worked with 1.5 years?
If it were me, this would not be an "and/or" situation, it would be a "both/and" situation. Ask everyone you can.
The nightmare fuel scenario is getting to application time, trying to prepare your essays, study/sit for the MCAT, SJTs, the committee letter process (if your school participates), all while running around campus (or furiously putting out emails to everyone you've ever met) trying to desperately secure any letter. I hope you realize that, without the number of letters you need, you will not have a completed application at virtually any MD school (though, I don't have experience with TMDSAS but can assume they evaluate similarly to AMCAS).
Without a complete application, you can send in the most compelling fantastic essays on the planet, a 12 PREview and 8Q CASPer, a 4.3 and 529...but nobody would know, because you never truly "submitted" and the file never goes into the queue of students to be screened/reviewed.
If you're applying this year, you need to be freaking out. Professors are busy and will not take kindly to emails in April and May that basically say "this is an emergency and I need you to drop everything and turn over this letter in 48 hours." You often have to give them at least a month, minimum 2 weeks.
To summarize: ask everyone you can think of, literally right now. Not everyone will say yes, but even fewer will actually submit.
The broader community will call me neurotic and intense, but my experience has been that nobody cares about my career (and the sensitive periods that move my outcomes) as much as I do. Assume that even those that genuinely mean well are somewhat disjointed/removed from the salience of the process unless you have a cabal of science professor family friends lying around.
You might find instead that most are pretty unaffected and cavalier about it, often because they are approached very often about letters from students past and present pretty much constantly. It is an unpaid half hour of work that can quickly mount to become a full-time volunteer job for them if they do not draw professional boundaries. Don't take it personally. Do take it into consideration.
The goal is not to make you feel more anxious... paradoxically, I'm trying to put you at ease. This process is very mentally taxing when it's all actually happening to you. You may find that with every loose end you have to tie, your patience wears thinner for every impersonal inconvenience, every snag, every question you might have as you go through.
If I could describe the application process now that I've experienced the full breadth of it, it is very much a "hurry up and wait" process. You're in the hurry up phase. Thank me later when your schools send you an A in October vs other applicants hoping and praying for interviews in January and February (g bless).
