You need to make the decision that works best for you. I would put the idea of med school aside for right now and just consider your immediate future.
If saving money on college costs is a major factor in your life, then by all means choose early college and shaving a year or two off your college costs.
Worry about med school later because I will tell you right now, unless you are some superstar research stud going for a MD/PhD, you won’t be starting med school as a 20 year old even if you’ve graduated from college.
Why? Because med school value maturity, life experience and proof that you wish to dedicate your life to the service of others. Rushing thru undergrad isn’t going to demonstrate that for them. You need to have the ECs to prove that.
And with only 2 years undergrad, you’re going to have a tough time showing you’re ready for med school. Your application will be compared with people who have the full 4 years in undergrad AND people who have had the full 4 years plus 2 or 5 years of “real life” experience after they’ve graduated. Maturity and life experience is very highly valued because as a physician you will dealing with very sensitive topics with a wide variety of people. You need to be able to convince your patients within a few minutes that you’re taking them seriously AND that you understand their background and where they are coming from. It’s tough to do. Think of it like this: you go into a room where a middle aged white gay male is sitting and need to get a detailed sexual history from him. Or in the room is an elderly Latino female. Or a 15 year old black girl. Would you be able to do that? Would you be comfortable doing this?
So if you’re doing Early College only in hopes of starting med school sooner, don’t bother.
Thank you! I think I really needed that reality check. the 2 years of undergrad will not only not prepare me for med school but will give me less time to do internships and other stuff for CS. I was just overthinking again
Okay -I’m giving an entirely different perspective on this. My daughter is doing something similar but different.
She’s taking a few classes at the community college and a few classes through the High School school district.
She LOVES this and is very happy with this choice. The CC classes are allowing her to take classes not offered at her High School. It is also letting her accelerate her math, and take a few additional science classes (versus if she was at the high school). The other half of her schedule is through the district, and that is allowing her to participate in a unique program.
Outcomes for her:
More independence and an introduction to college classes
More ability to do unique and interesting things with her high school experience
She still hangs out with friends from HS and attends events
TWO caveats:
Her volunteer and leadership work is external to school -but it always has been
She has no plans to graduate college early. These classes - IF they transfer -will help fill some entry level science and math courses. If they don’t transfer -she’ll have a leg up on the some of the material for her intro science classes
One thing that occurred to me that might be worth stating. At first glance a CS major plus completing the premed requirements seems like a strange combination. The overlap is small (I am pretty sure that calculus is a premed requirement which also makes sense for a CS major – I am not sure that the overlap is any more than this).
However, there is a very wide range of computer science jobs. There must be some computer science jobs that are related to medicine. Certainly all those machines that we see at major medical facilities did not program themselves. Even if @Coconutoil does not end up in medical school, having taken the premed required classes and done okay in them might be of some help for a CS job that is related to medicine.
One analogy that I can think of is that my first full time job was at a nuclear physics research facility. I was a math major and software engineer. They had a lot of tough math problems that needed to be solved and a lot of software to write. However, having taken two years of university level physics, specifically including special relativity, was of considerable value even if I did not get any degree nor a minor in physics. Similarly having taken some medical related classes might be of help for a software engineer who is working on a different type of software.
However, perhaps more important is that most of us try a bit of this and a bit of that, and eventually figure out what we want to do. Both CS and medicine are areas which can lead to a good career, and there is a lot of time to figure out what the desired eventual career path is going to be.
So the combination of CS and premed might seem odd, but it also seems like it should work out one way or another.
However it will increase (likely) your GPA. And it will give you a leg up on other students who did not get early pre-college exposure to advanced coursework in terms of your ability to either start College taking more advanced classes or get better grades in classes you already took bur at a “lesser” college. Biochemical sciences advancement unlike math tends to become more siloed and more focused as you advance but not necessarily more abstract, difficult or conceptual. So, if you want a “top med school” generally adjudged by research funding or careers in academic medicine, taking a grad seminar lets say on gene editing while working in a CRISPR-cas lab may be a nice synergy that you are well prepared for and others aren’t.
And there’s no reason med schools will second guess why you took Bio again in your actual college years. “You wanted to learn the material well” and you’ll be joining legions pf premeds who took the AP class already with the same explanation for repeating. Or the many premed native spanish, russian or chinese speakers who take the intro language in college.
Please keep in mind the very strong anti-AP and anti-DE bias on this website. Academic ambition is generally painted as a fool’s errand or presumed personality negative here. Weird that since if you go to the “chance me” links the self-accelerated students seem to have some pf the strongest EC’s too.
Also please ignore absolute statements like “zero difference”. The difference will be what you make of it over the next 4 years. Sometimes it seems like commenters are here to safeguard some abstract notion of “fairness” and protect valuable academic resources from those who “game” the system. And doing extra learning counts as “gaming”. Every student and applicant is different, and students enter college with wildly different preparation and study skills; if you come into college strong, there’s a much higher likelihood you’ll exit strong.
The flip side of the argument is a possible gpa hit taking extra math (like discrete math or differential equations) or possibly weeder courses in data structures and algorithms. This is not an issue if medical schools do not include these courses in their gpa calculation.
Another possible issue is going through a tougher admission process as a CS major which is LEP at UMD.
OP - I have a family member who started university with premed intentions. Her school required placement tests even with AP or DC scores/grades. They forced her to start in o chem and advanced bio classes. Getting As in those advanced classes as a freshman were no easy task. And yes, all the DC grades need to be reported to med school.
@WayOutWestMom is our resident CC expert on med school. I’d highly recommend listening to her advice as she’s been through this with her own children.
So if you want to put a hierarchy of experience at issue with credibility or legitimacy of opinion in this open forum, 10 members of my immediate family and two first degree relatives have gone from AP / DE / T20 college, and med schools spanning overseas to 6 year combined programs to top 3 rated medical schools over two generations including a recently graduated med student taking a year off before residency with careers spanning academic medicine in a university setting, hospital based practice, textbook editing, research and private practice in a group setting and our youngest family member likely to eschew clinical practice and serve in public health.
I will assume that further responses will focus on aiding the original poster and not denigrating the responses given by other users. Nor do we need any additional posts proclaiming “my experiences are better than yours.” Aside from being off-topic, they violate forum rules, which can be found linked at the bottom of this page for those needing a refresher.
All math classes are included in both the cumulative GPA and sGPA calculations for med school admission. So any GPA hit resulting from those classes will be doubly damaging to an applicants.
Data structures and algorithms may or may not impact the sGPA. It depends on how AMCAS decides to classify those classes.
The culture at most CC’s will probably also be quite different from your high school community. Some people have high school friends lasting to adulthood, many “find their people” in college. My nieces and nephew took some DE classes and really didn’t connect with anyone other than their teacher, but just last semester found another DE student from another local high school with whom they bonded and still keep in touch after he left for college. I’d imagine that’s rare though.
Thanks for the all the advice! I was just having last minutes doubts. Rethinking again, I’m still not the best at math and my schools retake policy is carrying me right now. I’ll try to work on that, study methods and others with my high school classes instead of having rushing into CC without any retakes to fall back on. I will think about taking DE English instead of AP + 1 semester CS in senior year to at least a little exposure to college level work.
@Coconutoil i would suggest that you put medical school on the back burner for now. Your goal now is to have a positive high school experience, and the best grades you can possibly get. You will never get these high school years back.
Do the very best you can…and make a choice that will enable you to do so. Getting the best grades you can will open up more opportunities when it comes time to start vetting colleges for applications.
So be the best you possible. Think about that first and foremost.
Applying to medical school is years away, and maybe you will do that and maybe you won’t. You seem to have some varied interests and that is fine. This is the time to explore your options.
if you take 1-2 DE classes you have the benefits of learning how college classes “work” without the constraints of Early College - you can still take the hs classes with the rigor you want, you can still do your EC’s at school, you don’t have to deal with AP v. AA…It sounds like your initial reaction (not a good fit for you) was rational and well thought-out.
Repeating a college course or AP credit must be marked as “repeat” on the medical school application. Presumably, at least some medical school application readers will see that as grade-grubbing.
Colleges do not like it when native or heritage speakers take the introductory language courses, although some native or heritage speakers have little or no reading or writing ability and need to take those courses to learn reading and writing if the school does not have “[language] for heritage speakers” courses that focus on reading and writing.
I really need to stop over thinking about the future.