<p>I’m a junior in HS and I hope that by the end of my senior year I will have enough AP exams with good enough scores.</p>
<p>Should I skip a year of college (i.e. BS in 3 years)? I want to go to med school. My sister did college in 3 years as pre-med and is having trouble getting into any med school. I don’t know if it was because she skipped a year or her grades or what?</p>
<p>Do any of you people have success stories of people doing undergrad in 3 years?</p>
<p>Oh, and please spare me the “best years of your life” argument. I want to get out of college with as little debt and as fast as possible </p>
<p>BS (3 years) + Med school (4 years) + Residency (2-4 years). That’s a LONG time. I’m trying to balance cost and time against chances for success.</p>
<p>Also, anybody know someone who did their BS in 3 years and went to a top 10 med school? (i.e. UPenn, JHU, HMS, etc.) What were their grades, MCAT, undergrad school, extracurricular activities, clinical experience, and research experience?</p>
<h1>1 this should be posted in the pre-med forum</h1>
<h1>2 do what ever you feel is necessary</h1>
<h1>3 why don’t you shave off 2 yrs by starting school your Senior year. In certain places the school board will pay if you enter college while still h.s. This should save you some money.</h1>
<p>my father did college in 3 years, with a major in one of the sciences, then went to get his Ph.D. and had a lot of problems. not that he struggled in school, because he was accepted to a med school for his graduate work and his grades were good once he got there, but the difference between undergrad work and terminal degree work is that with undergrad work, all the professors want you to succeed, but with terminal degrees, you suddenly become the younger, newer competition of the same professors, and the way my dad experienced it, it was much harder to find any support for any of his work. he finished all his requirements to graduate with honors, then went to defend his thesis and they basically told him that he would not be granted his Ph.D. because he was too young. He went to work for awhile (started his own company) and eventually resubmitted the exact same thesis and it was accepted. but the whole situation was very stressful.</p>
<p>just thought you’d like to see someone’s experiences.</p>
<p>If it’s really what you want, go for it. A year ago, I planned to take enough credits so that I could graduate a semester early. I don’t want to do that anymore. I’m thinking about doing a semester abroad instead. Maybe that’s something you’d like to do.</p>
<p>1) You get paid during residency, just not very well. Plus it’s 3-7 years, not 2-4.
2) If youre going to med school, you’re going to have debt up to your eyeballs, and by the second semester you’ll be in too deep to be anything but a doctor…by the third semester you’ll repeatedly think things like “what’s another 10k in loans?” because it really won’t matter.
3) Med school really, really, really sucks…it’s not worth whatever savings to get there faster.
4) Getting done in three means you you’ll apply at the end of your 2nd year - which means you have 50% less available coursework for medical schools to evaluate than a normal applicant. It also means you have 50% less time to accumulate research experiences, clinic experiences, volunteer hours, campus involvement and leadership positions before you apply - all things that matter in med school admissions. This reduction in time is NOT to your benefit.
5) Med schools don’t accept AP credit, so you’re going to have to take all the pre-med requirements, or if your school requires you to use all earned AP credits, then you may have to take an upper level science to fulfill the med school requirement (ie, if you have AP Chem credit that counts for a year of general chem, to fulfill the year of chem that med schools require, after taking organic, you’ll have to take analytical chem and physical chem). If you don’t mind doubling or tripling up science courses and labs, this may not be a problem, but your GPA may suffer as a consequence of so many time intensive courses.</p>
<p>If you can do it without stressing yourself out/ ending up with bad grades,
then I think it would be great.</p>
<p>I don’t agree with this “best years of your life” argument either. College is about work and studying and if you can SUCCEED through it in less time, more power to you.</p>
<p>About your sister: My mom is actually an admissions officer for a mid-ranked medical school. The most important things are GPA, MCAT, and clinical experience. Did your sister have time for clinical experience?
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<p>Don’t worry about debt. My roommate is one of those debt free fanatics and she seems to think she is better than me when i got 70k of undergrad debt. In your life, you will not avoid debt. At some point, you will want a house, unless you make so much money you don’t care that you will waste it renting for the rest of your life. You will probably want a car too. Having debt is not a bad thing, what you do with that debt…well, that is what can be bad or good.</p>
<p>You don’t have to listen to anything i’m going to tell you. But i will tell you that you are infact probably making a huge mistake in your life by shaving off a year of college because you think “the best years of your life” is a crap argument, then rushing into med school. College is fun. You must work hard to succeed and grades aren’t going to be handed to you. But, if you generally like what you study, you can work hard, and have more fun than you realize. And no one realizes how much fun they had in college until they go to:</p>
<p>1)Real life, with debt and car payments, insurance and utilities, cable, internet, food, rent and peace of mind.
2)Medical school where they start to think “holy crap, i could be in a job right now making at least 50K with my undergrad degree instead of memorizing everything under the sun about cancer and working a 17 hour day.”
3)Grad school where we realize just how easy we got it as an undergrad. It goes from memorizing in my case, “the carbonyl stretching frequency is located between 1700 and 2100 wavenumbers in the IR spectrum” to explaining why and how a magnetic or electronic dipole can couple, discussing the nuiances of non-langmuiran adsorption on an irregular crystal surface.</p>
<p>You won’t believe me now, but 9 years isn’t that long. At the end of your life. You will look back and go, “Uhm, maybe i would have had some more fun in college if i went for an extra year.”</p>