7-27-99 Premed Requirements

>Hi Alex!
>I recently logged on to deja.com and found your pre-med website to be very useful.
>I have a few questions regarding the pre-med requirements, if you have the time to answer them.

Well, thanks for the compliments. It's good to know that someone actually benefits from your toils :)

>I am transferring from a community college to a UC school...do the pre-med requirements
>at the community college count towards my science GPA?

Yes. All post-secondary (after high-school) classes you take for credit anywhere and anytime are counted towards your GPA. The AMCAS application, which you file to apply to medical schools has a section for listing all your classes, credits and grades you received. It does not differentiate between classes taken at 2- or 4-year colleges or in graduate programs. So, in a word, all the classes you took in community college will be counted towards your GPA for the purposes of medical school admissions.

>Also...I took a quarter of chemistry at UCI (chem 1A) without lab..and it did not transfer
>to UC Berkeley (where I will be in fall 99), but to satisfy my g-chem, I took chem 1A and 1B
>at a community college. Do all 3 chem classes count? Sorry about all the questions.

To be honest, I do not completely follow the story. But as I understand you took 1A & 1B to satisfy premed requirements but UC Berkeley did not accept these classes for the purposes of its degree (BS/BA that you will get in not too distant future). USI is UC Irvine I guess--so you took two 1A's one in community college and another at USI. That maybe somewhat irrelevant, though.

Here is the story. The AMCAS application does NOT have a section where you tell what classes you have taken to satisfy particular requirements. You use AMCAS to apply to most schools and some have weird requirements. On AMCAS application you designate the schools to which you're applying. AMCAS processes your application (checks if you did not lie about your grades, classes, etc) and sends a copy of your application to each of the schools to which you want to apply. Once the schools receive your AMCAS application, each school will send you its own "Secondary Application." The secondary application is the place where you list the classes (along with the grades) that you took to satisfy particular requirements of the school.

In your particular situation, you may have a choice about what classes you want to count as fulfilling "the requirements"--and those are the classes you will list. You mentioned that you took a quarter of chemistry 1A at UCI. If the chemistry classes at your comminity classes are also "quarter"-based, you can mix-and-match then. I will not recommend doing so if the other classes are semester-based since medical schools require a year of chemistry which means four (?-I guess) quarters or two semesters.

Another question is whether the two 1A classes overlap in content--and I guess they do--which means that medical schools will not let you double count them, though both classes will count towards your GPA calculations.

Now, you mention that you're majoring in science. If your fate brings you to taking advanced inorganic chemistry classes and you do well in them, you might want to find out whether you can list them instead of 1A and 1B. The reason I am mentioning this is that you are probably well aware that community colleges are not known for their rigorous standards, and you might be asked why you took the classes at a community college. Obviously you have an explanation--and I am sure it will not cause problems but if you end up taking upper level inorganic chem anyway--you can just as well eliminate unwanted questions and skepticism about the classes you took at community college by listing the upper level classes you take at Berkeley.

>I am really confused whether to go for medical school or not. I enjoy helping others..
>and learning medicine...but I am a little shaky on my commitment, especially since
>I did not do as well as I expected to at the community college. Thanks for all your help.

Well the commitment question is a big one and I think everyone is thinking a lot about it for the simple reason that it is a BIG commitment--first the premed years which are very demanding and then the medical school.. The question is whether you can control your commitment--and by that I mean whether you can ignore many things in life and get down and dirty working on your GPA and everything else that you need to get done to get into medical school. Everyone screws up--not everyone has the willingness and determination to rebound. As long as you are determined to get into medical school--and by this I mean to get the much needed "statistics" I think you will do well despite your lackluster performance at community college you attended.

>P.S. I'm hoping to major in either Molecular and Cell Biology
>or Bio-engineering..any thoughts on these majors?

Well, I majored in Biology but I consider myself the "molecular" person so...I guess I think MCB is a good major and so is bio-engineering. There is a lot of cool stuff being done in both areas and I guess my recommendation would be to do whichever you feel more comfortable with. I know there is that statistics about Biology majors--low admissions rates but based on my understanding I think its a statistical fluke--it is not adjusted for the GPA. Biology majors as a group probably have low overall GPA and do not do as well on MCAT as those who do Biochem, Genetics, Molecular, biochem, and hards sciences--physics, chem, orgo because MCAT emphasizes analysis and does not have questions on descriptive biology such as "ecology" and other classes that are very popular with "vanilla" biology majors.

Obviously bio-engineering is a rigorous major and if you do it and do it well you will get bonus points for it.

As long as you do well and love what you do--so that you excite others by telling them what you study--I think you will position yourself well for medical school.

Exactly. If everyone in the world emphasized the second part, Dr. James Watson will have less work to do trying to come up with a cure for the a very serious disease:

Tell your friends about this site

Back to
Home Page

Questions? Comments? Communicate!

Back to Home Page

Back to
Home Page