I'm CLEARLY asking for other people to comment on what type of schooling they went through. Please do not come on here being rude when I'm just asking a question. YES I did post previous posts, SO WHAT? If you're tired of me posting just skip over my threads and go on with your life because I CLEARLY don't care!
Although there are certainly some of us (in psychiatry) who had the field as a goal before or during college / pre-med, the majority of us discovered psychiatry during medical school. (I am one of the few who decided to attend med school after college, and I had to go back and take the pre reqs).
The point, as others have made but you don't seem to understand: you go through the hell of pre-med classes, MCAT, etc., because your goal is to become a
physician, first. There are no short cuts to med school, and as a result, no short cuts to psychiatry. There is no path to psychiatry that doesn't first go through the undergrad meat grinder of the pre reqs, MCAT, extracurriculars, etc.
I wish you good luck, but you need a lot more than luck to make it. My guess is that for every undergrad student who fancies himself "pre med," only about 1 in 10 actually make it...the hurdles are very high. How do I get to that 1 in 10 number? For every 10 freshman pre-meds, at least half to 2/3 drop the idea in the first couple of semesters after they bomb out (meaning they make less than Bs) in the science courses, or they decide they hate it too much to continue.
Organic Chem is the ultimate back breaker for many pre-meds, and the problem is that because of the sequencing of the other pre-reqs you have to take, it is unlikely you will even take the first O-chem until junior year...that is pretty deep into college to discover you really don't have what it takes. If you have been majoring in "pre med" up to this point, you have kind of screwed yourself for jobs after college, and maybe even other professional or grad school options if you have a poor GPA.
Of the remainder who stay the course and apply (say 4 of the original 10), at least half of them are tilting at windmills and will never make it - these are the people who apply multiple cycles with substandard grades and weak MCAT scores and never get in. And finally, of the ones who have the "right stuff" on paper (minimum 3.7 GPA, 32 MCAT), only about half of them get accepted to med school. So even if you get to the application stage and have the grades, and a decent MCAT, it is STILL difficult to get accepted to medical school.
Finally, there are some factors beyond your control, like the state you are a resident of when applying to med school. Some states are much more competitive admissions-wise than others...and some have a much lower hurdle. Read up on it...you should be spending the bulk of your time on SDN on the pre-allo forums to learn about the med school admissions game - that is where I learned the ropes. Beyond what you have already been told here, you are wasting your time asking the same question over and over on this forum.
