Pre-med questions

StPlayrXtreme
Sun, 15 Jul 2007 15:40:56 +0000

orgo definitely involves more work than gen chem. It’s not necessarily harder, but just a different type of learning. In general chem you can memorize certain principles and do well, there are also some grades besides exams to bring your grade up if one of your exam scores is a little soft. The key to orgo is understanding how things interact, and it’s a lot of material, so you have to keep on top of things. Orgo lab is not that bad, most of the grade is determined in the last 3 weeks of the course. The practicals are intimidating, most of your grade is based on your yeild and purity from two different experiments. Just be careful and come in prepared and you should be ok.
It totally varies, some people can think mathematically, others have trouble. If you know that you’re someone that has a hard time thinking that way, then plan to spend a little more time on it. I found physics challenging, but very managable. I know others that breezed through it, and yet others that had a really hard time with it. So, if you recognize this as an area of weakness, just get help early on and things should be good…if you’re already strong in that area, you should be fine.
Only some medschools require calc…so if there’s a certain school you’re looking at, then look up their policy, but if you’re not set on a particular school, you don’t need to worry about it. That said, I’m in biological engineering, so I needed two semesters of calc, diferential eqns, and linear algebra. If you find calc interesting, go for it and take the class…med schools probably won’t care if you don’t take calc, but they will care if they think you’re taking loads of easy classes to pad your GPA, so choose your classes based on your interest and ability and that should be fine.


hope this helps.