1) General Chem
If you did well in terms of actually learning the material the first time (for the most part) in AP Chemistry class, General Chemistry at UMKC will bore you to tears and 7:40 am class every MWF won’t make it any more palatable. One of my friends who was in the situation you are, was so utterly bored the first few class meetings (they literally spent an entire week over things like what matter is, what the scientific method is, converting units, significant digits, blah blah) he never came to class after that and only showed up for exams (and on days of attendance checks for extra credit) and completely aced the class, but keep in mind it’s because he was rehashing through the exact same material he had already covered in his AP Chem class. General Chemistry II does tend to be slightly harder, in terms of concepts and topics, just because you’re now building off from Chem I. You get 1 exam per month, which is more than enough time during the normal school semester.
2) Organic Chem 320
It’s not offered in the fall semester, only the spring and summer. It’s different from General Chem in that you have to be able to visualize things in 3D as there are reaction mechanisms you have to learn. For those of us who utterly suck at doing this (i.e. me), our professor allowed us to use a molecular model set on exams. Exam questions are usually more application in nature of what you’ve learned, rather than just memorizing facts or just plug and chug type of problems (where u go thru the same exact steps but just change the numbers up) in General Chemistry. If you’re really that bored with General Chem, I guess you could study Orgo material along with your classmates who are taking it in the spring so it’s not that huge of a shock to you in the summer. Orgo builds a little on SOME discrete concepts in Chem II, but since you’ve taken AP Chem, you probably already know them.
3) Anatomy
Year 1 Anatomy is colloquially called “baby” Anatomy, not because it’s a cakewalk, but because in comparison to the Anatomy taught in HSF, the information to master is actually pretty doable in terms of relative detail and the time you have to study for each midterm exam. If you’ve had a high school Anatomy & Physiology course offering which many public schools do offer (http://www.waconiahighschool.new.rschooltoday.com/page/3071), I do think Year 1 Anatomy will be easier for you just because you’ve probably already been exposed to the info, although if you haven’t, it doesn’t mean you’ll be at some huge disadvantage. Like General Chem, it’s about 1 exam a month, so 4 weeks is really enough time. So many of us, since we were just starting out in college, studied in groups, went to SI sessions, blah blah, etc. that it wasn’t a problem.
All this being said, I know 18 year olds, esp. Type A ones, don’t listen to people who’ve gone thru it before, no matter how right they may be, so this is what I would do. So if you are going to do something (and YOU DO NOT HAVE TO, just to be clear) - make your own flashcards or charts of the muscles and of the bones (with all of their anatomical landmarks and markings - tubercles, tuberosities, fissures, foramen, etc.) just because the info. volume tends to be very high here since there are obviously so many of them. For the muscles, do it as a group: Muscles of the forearm, Muscles of the posterior thigh, Muscles of the anterior thigh, blah blah. For the bones, you can do an index card for each specific bone. Unless things have vastly changed – knowing the origin and insertion of every muscle is not something that is required in baby Anatomy. Every other topic in Anatomy can be studied quite well within the time frame you’re given of 4 weeks.
Example flash card: a picture or drawing of the Humerus on the front – then the same drawing on the back with labels of all the anatomical markings – greater tubercle, lesser tubercle, intertubercular groove, anatomical neck, surgical neck, radial groove, capitulum, trochlea, etc.
Example flash card: picture or drawing of the muscles of the upper limb – then on the back, labels of all the muscles - biceps brachii, brachialis, brachioradialis, etc. all the way down to the end of the forearm (excluding the hand)
Then once you make them, you will already have them ready by the time you need them. You’ll see that a lot of terms and words in Anatomy you can easily learn and reason out in your head as to why they are named that way, knowing what certain medical greek & latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes mean, which you’ll learn in your Med Term class (hopefully), i.e. a muscle called serratus anterior, looks like a serrated knife, which is how you can remember it.
4) Anatomy Lab
So this is at the School of Biological Sciences where they have a lab room filled with anatomical models as well as microscopes for histology. There are no cadavers used here, nor dissection. You meet for 1 day a week for about 3 hours. That seems like a very long time, but depending on how many structures you have to go through, both on the plastic anatomical models and on microscope slides, it’s really not a whole lot of time, nor not enough times in terms of practicing repetition to get it down. It’s a lot of work for just a measly 1 credit hour class, in the grand scheme of things. The lab course doesn’t always correlate exactly in-step with the lecture course, so just keep that in mind.
Unless things have vastly changed, exams in this course tend to be lab practicals, so something like this: http://www.colorado.edu/intphys/iphy3415/samples/. Although obviously it would be in real-time at stations which are timed which you rotate at (See example pics here of how it kind of looks like: http://iws.collin.edu/mweis/Current%20Testing%20Folder%20for%20A&P%20Basics/Basics%20Lab/Basics%20Lab%20Practicals/basics_lab_practical_testing_instructions_MAP_version.html)
Tips:
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Take any lab structure sheets that you get before your lab session, and write the textbook page number where you can find it, next to each structure, before the day of your specific lab. This is so that on the actual day of your lab, instead of wasting time going thru the index and flipping all over the book trying to find the specific structure in the limited time that you have, you’ll be able to flip directly to that page, see the specific structure, correlate it with the anatomy models they have, then move on to the next structure, etc.
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Now with the invention of smartphones, you can probably take photos of the anatomic models or histology themselves and then study them later on your own time.
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You can find many of the same models in the SBS as well as study some of the histology, at the Media Center at the medical school on the 2nd floor: http://med.umkc.edu/memc/ to practice with before your lab exam.