Sort of a dilemma

dusares
Mon, 18 May 2009 16:04:17 +0000

I guess I’ll just start this off by saying hi and giving a bit of a background. I just finished my first year at McGill this year as part of the Faculty of Science. I got transfer credits in addition to being accepted last year and subsequently skipped both freshman chemistry and biology only to take organic chemistry 1 & 2 and 2 different 2nd year biology courses (over the course of two semesters of course along with the other typical freshman science courses ie. physics and math). Around the end of first semester I started suffering some deep personal problems (I don’t think the subject matter is too important to be discussed here) and so my marks somewhat suffered near the end where I ended up with a term GPA of 2.8.

I set out second semester to try to fix-up my year and was aiming really high in order to raise my GPA to a level I found acceptable. January was ok but as soon as February hit my life completely fell apart as my personal problems became worse and I eventually started seeing a psychiatrist on a weekly basis as well as taking anti-depressants. As much as I tried to turn myself around throughout the entire semester it only started happening near the end where I pulled up all my marks from failing to just passing; I got 2 C’s and 2 C+'s with a term GPA of 2.14 and a cumulative GPA of 2.46.

Everything is a lot better now and I can safely say that horrible chapter of my life is closed. What happened over the semester is documented but I feel like people don’t have time anymore to listen to one’s life story. I graduated from my high-school having received my IB diploma and with a 90% average. I’m capable of doing well academically I have no doubt about it and before this year I always had the prospective of going to medical school not because someone else wanted me to go but because I’ve always wanted to become a physician.

My dilemma now is that even if I get a perfect 4.0 GPA for the rest of my college career my GPA can only go up so much that I’m afraid that this year ruined some of my options. I do have the choice of transferring to another university (albeit it would be a smaller, less known one) and having my GPA reset and the possibility of some of my course credits (the really low ones) not being counted. Should I transfer or am I just simply over-reacting over my marks? I really don’t think there is anything that can be done to fix/mend what happened this year. Any comments/suggestions would be really appreciated, perhaps there is something I overlooked even. If this is not the best forum to post in I really apologize and I’m really looking forward to your input because I really don’t know anymore. Thank you very much in advanced.