<p>If I have to take a course such as English, literature or humanities, I can just take this at community college to satisfy my college’s gen eds right?</p>
<p>You could, but why would you want to?</p>
<p>
Two potential reasons I can think of: cheaper, and/or easier.</p>
<p>The former applies when the 4-year college charges by credit, not by a flat semester rate. One coworker once told me how much money he saved money by attending a community college for his first year or two of his college education (and got through those engineering track weeding classes like math and physics in a much easier way.) Although he was from a family which had been in this country for likely 5-6 generations, his family was poor so he needs to pay attention to the cost.)</p>
<p>For the second reason, another coworker, whose family came to this country when she had been graduated from high school in another country, told me that it is almost the only route she could take in order to pass these courses, and almost everybody with the same background as hers tried to survive the core education classes by doing this. </p>
<p>Both of them are those who excel in math and physics but are not good at most other college-level classes. i think becoming a physician should not be their career goals because of the background in their education before college. (MCAT will likely weed them out anyway if they try to break into this career path.)</p>
<p>An interesting side story: 6 or 7 coworkers went to company’s cafeteria for a coffee break in one afternoon about 10 years ago. Somehow the topic to talk about happened to be related to high school life in US. We found out only a single person there had gone through the high school education here in US (but there were 3 PhDs sitting there. This happened at a Fortune-500 company.)</p>
<p>Did they get their PhDs in the states?</p>
<p>Taking a few solid GED courses is very helpful for the MCAT verbal. Perhaps, it is not a bad idea taking a couple of unreasonable weed-out courses at a CC.</p>
<p>i<em>wanna</em>be_Brown, Two of them did (from a well-known university in the engineering/computer science field, e.g., CMU), but one did not (from some university in Europe). This is an anecdotal experience and should be read as such.</p>
<p>But my point is that many essential skills, especially those required for being a practicing doctor, come from the kind of education or growing up environment before college. The qualification for a researcher could be quite different. One of my coworkers (an PhD in engineering from Georgia Tech) in the past told me that at the top PhD engineering programs (neither MD nor MD/PhD), a very high percentage of their students are international.</p>