Terrible Freshman GPA

BigTenProf
Sat, 10 May 2014 05:18:18 +0000

Med school is for high-performing, obsessive, perfectionist students; I would not want to be treated by an MD who was anything less than obsessive and perfectionist. Your grades show that you don’t have these characteristics. I think you would be setting yourself up for further misery if you try to compete with the med school crowd. IMHO, this is now the time to re-orient yourself. Any kind of engineering is going to have really nice career prospects, and will leave you time to enjoy real life and a nice salary along the way. Or how about chemistry and a PharmD? Pharmacists do quite well, and they, too, have time for real life even before retirement.

I would advise you to think long and hard before aiming at academia. It’s brutal and all-consuming, with jobs in strange little nowhere college towns, and the financial rewards are not great. In lab sciences, everything is about getting the grant money, and if you fail to do that, you’re sunk. (My cousin is now a stay-at-home Dad with a good Chemistry PhD, who lost his tenure-track job because he didn’t bring in sufficient grant money. End of story.) I’m in a gentler field, but I don’t like academia nearly as much as I thought I would. Now I have tenure and am thus unemployable at anything else, so I’m stuck. In hindsight, engineering might have been just the thing.