30 electives sounds like a lot, are you sure it's not 30 credit hours worth of electives? But I think you're correct any course not fulfilling another requirement would count. I would say upper level courses that you also did well in would be ideal, but beyond that I'd probably choose ones you got A's in even if they're lower level. (Disclaimer, I didn't apply to CSU)
For CSU, their pre-requisite requirements are minimal compared to other schools - they only require genetics, stat, biochem, physics, and english. Basically the rest are "electives", but 12 credits have to be humanities/arts/social sciences. Most schools specifically require biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, etc. but CSU will basically count all those courses as electives. If you have added CSU on VMCAS, you'll see when you're assigning classes to the pre-requisites that you'll have a ton of classes left over that you can add toward the 30 credits of "electives". It sounds scary but it's definitely not. You'll be fine!
Well on VMCAS for CSU's prereqs there is a spot where you have to designate at least 12 credits of arts/humanities/social sciences, so you should probably pick classes for that requirement first. I would assume you cannot "double dip" by using an anthropology course toward the humanities requirement, and then also selecting it as an elective. When choosing classes for the "elective" requirement on VMCAS, choose at least 30 credits in classes like orgo, nutrition, anatomy, physiology, calc, upper level courses and anything else that doesn't fit under the other requirements. I haven't read anywhere that CSU calculates a prereq gpa, so I wouldn't worry about choosing pre-calc over orgo when assigning your prereqs, because as far as I know they look at the cumulative gpa, and both of those classes will be counted.
Contact the school personally. They’re the one evaluating your classes. If it was a combined lab, it could be fine since it’s the lab for both classes in one but maybe it won’t be. Contact the school for the official answer. They’re the only ones who can tell you if they’ll accept your classes or not.
I was in between patients haha
I would also recommend making use of the readers while they are still available to get some opinions to help you out before everyone is too busy to help. Just PM anyone on the list from the most recent posting to see if they have some time to lend an eye. 🙂
@Spoot I'm available to read your essay Thursday...
Hard to say without taking a look at the essays themselves. It's good to have structure, but you also want to make sure you have space to fully answer the questions. I'd say a sentence of introduction is probably good, and no conclusion necessary imo.
They're pretty rough still but I will gladly! Thank you. Do I just personal message them to you?
Yup
If the school has a vmcas GRE code (where it shows up on that one “check status(?)” page on vmcas) versus the general school code, you shouldn’t have to. The schools I applied to that had one my first cycle I didn’t have to resend my second cycle.
List the vet stuff all together as one. Showing dogs and stuff is animal experience
Nope there should be a place for those courses. If you enter them as winter 2018 then you would have had to take them this past year. They may call them Spring on vmcas instead of winter (my college called them winter but everywhere else uses spring for that same time period). I can’t remember what I put on my vmcas but don’t put them as winter 2018 because that would be in the past and you’d need grades.
Do you have that school listed as only attending through fall 2018? That might be your problem now that I think about it.
Some schools just require it this way either in addition to VMCAS, or because they do not look at VMCAS for those things. University of Sydney does the same thing for some of their forms. Just the way it is.
Looooooolllllllllll try keeping it under 1000 characters. That’s what they had it at last cycle.
I would put them in achievements because it's more of an "above and beyond" thing imo
Have you given that veterinarian a reminder? It's super important to you, but for someone who just opened a practice, it's not going to be first on his mind so it might have just been forgotten. You can be very polite about it, and ask if he still has the time.
I emailed VMCAS about this and they said you do not need to send scores and transcripts again
UNLESS the school does not (or did not in the previous cycle) use a VMCAS GRE code! (It wouldn’t even show up on the check status page on vmcas if that was true, I just don’t want someone overlooking that)
They can still submit them up until the VMCAS deadline
What kind of necropsy lab are we talking about? If it was supervised by a veterinarian, I'd consider it veterinary experience, if not I'd probably go with animal experience. Don't stress too much about how to categorize things, do your best to follow the chart in the VMCAS instructions (Experiences), but if a school disagrees with how you categorized something, they probably won't penalize you unless it's blatantly incorrect in an attempt to pad your hours somewhere.
