<p>Berkeley was difficult in that one could be a responsible, intelligent student who attends every class, does all the homework and still not get an A. DDs first B+ in her life was Berkeley chem and I still recall the phone calls, from shock and self doubt, the transition to being proud of that hard earned B+ was memorable.</p>
<p>One caveat, an occasional A-/B+ can leave you feeling pretty good about yourself as you go through premed, yet can easily drag your GPA down below 3.5. A truly successful premed needs to be diligent every day of every term in order to have that strong transcript.</p>
<p>Yes, it’s hard, but no it’s not impossible. I would say that there is no benefit from trying to impress an Adcom by overloading your units or taking the hardest phsyics/calc/etc. Take the classes that work well for you. (Jacobson, I think, was the physics teacher she liked)</p>
<p>Do break up the schedule so you have a mix of some science and some humanities. The premed prereqs are challenging because all the students are smart and most are organised and serious. The Ds come from people who are having personal crisis, not ‘into’ school, etc. The As/Bs/Cs are all still good students, you cannot ace every test, you cannot always master every concept in every class every term. Be diligent.</p>
<p>Your challenge will be to connect with science profs to get LORs. As I said above , DDs ochem prof (something like Frechet) was teaching 3 sections with a total of 1200 students in the curve. His rules are extremely strict, she had to have knee surgery and would not have been allowed to make up a mid term or miss and make up anything, even due to surgery. And there would have been no way to connect with that prof to get an LOR. My DD chose to apply to med school AFTER she graduated so that those profs in her senior year, in her upper division science classes were available for LORs. That gave her smaller class sizes and she took 2 profs in both fall & spring so they could connect better. If you only take prereqs that will be tougher. If you decide to take any upper div science PM me later and I can tell you who she liked as profs.</p>