For a 4-credit bio, I got a 76 overall and the average was 56. The maximum was 87. The class had 350 people and I was in the top 15%. I expected at least an A- but I got a B+. What is this!? My BCPM GPA is down to 3.5 and I'm in my third year. If I only get A's from now on, the best BCPM I could graduate with would be 3.7, which is not competitive for a Canadian trying to apply at US schools without great MCAT and EC's. I have lost hope. I'm extremely sad. What should I do?
You are going to need to be in the top 10% to get an A consistently unless it's an upper division or graduate level course (in which case you'll be working just as hard, if not harder to get that "A" but grading gets more complicated).
There are many things you could do. You could take additional (similar) 4-credit bio courses in the hopes that you'll get an A. Basically, just keep taking classes until your GPA goes up. No matter what, you should have a backup plan in case you don't make it into a U.S. medical school. Plan a rewarding career whether or not you get into medical school. This is particularly helpful even if you get into a U.S. medical school and find out that you really don't want to become a physician or that you are not competitive with other students and cannot get into the specialty you like. For example, you could go to a Caribbean medical school. You could go into podiatry. You could go into dentistry. You could become an optometrist or audiologist, physical therapist, nurse anesthetist, or psychologist. The list goes on and on. You could go the Caribbean or Mexican medical school route. The possibilities are endless. Don't beat yourself up for making a B+. That's still a good grade and shows that you learned a lot.
Continue to focus on learning and exploring various career options instead of getting so fixated on this one and only way to have an awesome career that you seem to be on. It isn't entirely beyond the imagination that you could get into medical school and hate it, hate residency, and then hate your job as a physician and finish your life as a bitter, miserable person; it happens a lot, unfortunately. Medical training and careers have a lot of stress associated with them. It would be wise for you to learn to deal with stress now and make the most of the situation you are in. If you do go into a career that involves caring for patients, you will no doubt someday have a patient who is not doing well despite everything you have done. Rather than getting frustrated in this situation, you could apply your life skills and continue to explore new or different treatment possibilities to make the best of a difficult situation for this patient. The bottom line: learn what you can from this experience and move on quickly. Life is to short to get bogged down by very small problems like the one you describe.
