I know it must be discussed earlier in the past but I have a question .
I am thinking to enroll during my high school senior year as Early college admission at my local state university. i will still be considered a senior at my high school but all my classes will be at local university. I have read all the pros and cons on other forum addressing this topic.
At my current GPA, I am a salutatorian. If i enroll as Early college admission , I will lose this.
For college admission for premed honors or BSMD , how much will this affect? Loosing salutatorian status vs early admission.
If I stay as senior at high school, there are many courses which I will take will just be fillers.
If i enroll at local univ, I can potentially enroll in college level premed courses, possibly meeting my requirements early.
There aren’t HS courses in each of the five core areas left for you to take?
Can you take dual enrollment classes instead of early college? (if that maintains your GPA/salutatorian status?) DE also might be less costly than enrolling in early college. Some districts have free DE courses.
You can do that and the grades in those classes will be required to be reported to med schools (same if you take DE courses.) There is no rush to get to med school. The more relevant classes you have, the more clinical experiences you have before applying, the better.
The thing that immediately comes to my mind is that many of these premed classes are tough.
Just to give one example, my younger daughter ended up as a biology major in university. The required classes overlapped a lot with premed classes. Freshman year she took an introductory biology course which was intended specifically for biology majors. The course was full of premed students. Many, probably most, of these premed students were academically very strong. The class average on the first midterm was 45% (she did somewhat better).
I took this as the professor doing a favor for the premed students. Specifically, the professor was making the point that premed classes were going to be tough, most of the premed students were never going to make it to medical school, and most of the premed students in the class would need to either work harder in the class, or find a different career path, or both. The sooner the students learned this lesson the more time they would have to adjust.
The issue that I see is that you are likely to be a stronger student in a year or two or three. It is not obvious to me that taking premed classes when you are still a high school student is the way to maximize your chances of getting the grades necessary to help your acceptance to medical school.
And when you apply to medical schools, you will need to report the grades on all college / university classes that you have taken, even the ones that you took while you are still a high school student.
I do not know how you can judge how tough you will find the university premed classes until you have taken a few. Also, which classes any particular student finds tough might vary from student to student. As an example, I know someone who was a pre-vet student (the required classes are the same) who looked upon any required or recommended math and physics classes as what you take to pull up your GPA to offset lower grades in the tougher classes such as organic chemistry. Not all premed students think of math and physics as the classes that they want to take to pull up their GPA.
Mostly however, I think that caution is in order. This might be a wordy and/or detailed was of agreeing with @thumper1’s question:
I am planning to take AP physics through state virtual school, There are other core classes but bulk will be through Dual enrollment.
Agreed there is no rush, I was just trying to assess here in the forum what people thought if this pathway would be looked favorable to college admissions or the Salutatory status.?
Younger than typical med school applicants are at a disadvantage when it comes to med school admissions for a variety of reasons.
Medical schools don’t care about early college or HS salutatorian status. It’s not asked for nor reported anywhere on your application.
However, any early college classes you do take, you must report to AMCAS/ACOMAS/TDMSAS. All grades earned in those classes which will be included in your GPA/sGPA calculations for med school admission.
BSMD has its own unique requirements that include things beyond academics: physician shadowing, community service w/ disadvantaged groups, clinical experiences. If you haven’t started participating in these activities and you’re a junior, it’s way too late to start now and still be considered a viable candidate for BSMD programs.
Premed honors is a kind of oxymoron. All pre meds are expected to take hard classes and do very well in them. Whether or not they take those hard classes thru the honors program at their home university is irrelevant. Participating in the honor program at a university has zero influence on a pre-med’s ability to get accepted to med school.
Typically honors programs do not offer special opportunities for pre meds to get clinical experiences nor do they find research labs for them to volunteer in. Pre meds are on their own for that.
Med schools don’t consider master’s degrees when making admission decisions. (Except for SMPs.) Adcomms only look at undergraduate grades.
(Also grad programs have highly inflated grading–which make them even less meaningful for adcomms.)
A grad degree will not make you more attractive to med schools. It will not help you “stand out” from other applicants.
Med schools also don’t care what your major is. Really! And they don’t care if you have a double major, a major and minor, major and double minor, etc, etc.
The only things adcomms check is to see if you have fulfilled all the admission pre-reqs AND that you have demonstrated success in challenging UL coursework in whatever your major happens to be–be that biochemistry, chemical engineering, mathematics, sociology, classics, musical performance or underwater basket weaving.
There are plenty of ways to do labs virtually, both in HS and college. College Board addresses it a bit here:
For the purpose of the AP Course Audit, College Board considers a virtual lab to be an interactive experience during which students observe and manipulate computer-generated objects, data, or phenomena in order to fulfill the learning objectives of a laboratory experience.
There are actually some benefits to virtual labs as well, as addressed by Ohio State here:
I am sure some students prefer in person classes and labs, but not all do. Virtual instruction has come a long way (note the dates of the research in the OSU article.) Med schools might not like virtual labs though.
Med schools generally do not accept virtual labs for science pre-reqs. The OP will need to contact any schools he intends to apply to ask about their online lab policies.
Med schools strongly prefer that all science courses (and labs) be taken in-person. While this expectation was elaxed during covid, with the resumption of in-person classes, med school now expect all science coursework to be done in-person UNLESS there is a significant reason why the individual cannot access in-person classes. (For example, active duty military personnel stationed overseas.) Working full time or as matter of scheduling convenience are not acceptable reasons.
And, yes, as part of their due diligence, med school will check the course catalog of the student’s college to see if the class section number is in-person or online.
They would only know the class was virtual though if denoted on the transcript correct? I wonder if schools that offer classes with virtual labs, like OSU, clearly show that?
It may or may not be reflected directly on the transcript, however, med school do investigate transcripts of students before they are allowed to matriculate as part of their due diligence. Adcom staff use course catalogs to match up section numbers from the transcript to the course catalog. Course catalogs do typically list the mode of class instruction for each section–in-person vs. fully digital vs tele-presented.
SIL’s PT program opened a branch campus where the student attend televised/streamed lectures in a classroom that are simultaneous with the real-time lecture on the main campus. Students at the secondary campus are able to participate in class discussion, ask the instructor questions, see the same graphics/demonstrations as the main campus students. These classes are not considered online/virtual. The students in the tele-present sections have their own in-person labs at the secondary campus.
For undergrad admission at the school where I work, we weight AP physics the same, whether in person or virtual.
For OP, if they take virtual AP physics, you would recommend they not take college credit for that (assuming they get a score that the college where they matriculate would award credit)…is that correct?