<p>I’m a first year student, who while not pre med, had a roommate this year who was pre-med. My roommate has really been struggling a lot with her classes, but from what I gather it’s doable if you keep a few things in mind:
- be very honest with yourself about your willingness to work hard to keep up. It’s a lot of work, especially the labs, pre-labs etc. Ask yourself how good you would be at managing your time and keeping up with the reading and the problems, so that you can avoid cramming for tests the whole night before and still get some sleep.
- Don’t take Organic Chemistry your first year! When you do take it, be sure you have a group of people you can study with. My roommate had some issues this year with finding people who were willing to help her and I think finds it a very competetive environemnt.
- Especially when you are taking Organic Chemistry, you should be very careful about being involved in too many extra-curricular activities.<br>
- Ask yourself how difficult you find science and how interested you are in it. The more you are actually personally fascinated in learning about atoms, electrons etc, the more pleasant an experience it willl be for you.
- As for advising, from what I’ve observed a lot of it is luck. From what I understood, there are lot of incoming students who indicate interest in pre-med. so they didn’t seem to have enough real pre-med adivisors. My roommate’s assigned advisor was not a professor, but a general councelor/advisor through the residence life department. He is not unhelpful, but mainly directs her to others in the pre-med department. There are I believe weekly tutoring sessions, but because my roommate got very behind very fast due to some of the issues I mentioned above, she did not find them that helpful and has often ended up studying organic chemistry by herself, often taking over 5 hours to understand 3 or 4 pages. . Either now or especially once you enroll at Brandeis, I would contact the pre-med advisor, Kate F u kawa-Connelly, see e-mail address here:
<a href=“http://www.brandeis.edu/as/prehealth/\[/url]”>http://www.brandeis.edu/as/prehealth/\</a>. I do know that other pre-med students I know had professors as advisors as advisors who helped map out their classes. My roommate herself went to speak with her Organic Chemistry professor this semester and found him friendly, accessible and mostly helpful. There is also a pre-health society at Brandeis which organizes info about different career options (eg. Vet, Dental tracks) and social activities. - In general it seems to be the case that grading is far stricter in the sciences than in social sciences/humanities. </p>
<p>I think the bottom line is that it’s not impossible, but it depends strongly on your work ethic, your priorities, your wililngness and ability to seek out help. Especially once you’re doing organic chemistry, you should be sure that you know you have people who can help you, you should try to avoid getting through the pre-med track on your own. Those students I know who took General Chemistry this year are defintely managing at the moment. I also knew another girl who came in thinking she would be a chemistry major, but decided after 2 or 3 weeks to concentrate in humanities/social sciences instead.</p>