Will Med Schools not accept Summer Courses?

kal123
Sat, 23 Nov 2013 16:10:36 +0000

I&lt;em&gt;wanna&lt;/em&gt;be_brown:

For example, to use mayo. All that means is that they wouldn’t reject someone who cured cancer but took biochem online. It does not necessarily mean that biochem online is viewed the same as biochem at the host school

Common sense, but elegantly stated I still hold firm in my belief (and the advise my son got from his pre-health advisor) that summer courses, if done in moderation at your own school or a comparable one, will not be deal breakers. If anybody has first hand experiences or an insight into the decision making process (beyond common sense and conjecture), I am all ears.

From my son’s experiences through this cycle, I doubt if a biochemistry class ever becomes a deal-breaker for any application. A tremendous number applicants that got interview invites at one top school in the first couple of weeks don’t even get secondary apps at some schools. And I bet its more than whether a biochem class was taken in summer or not, at play with those applications.

The most amazing thing I found out about the application process is how seemingly random some of the decisions are. A lot depends on how a reviewer reads a given application. Reviewers are human beings with all their biases/lapses. An interviewer at Yale explained the process they use: each application gets 3 reads. If all of them say yes it gets an II. If one of them says no, it goes to the hold pile. All it takes is one guy/gal who has a different sense of what is “good” for you to get screwed.



lol. You, just don’t get it , do you? One more try.

Yes, I get it. You, on the other hand, can’t seem to help yourself from dancing around the nuances. You can climb down now from your high horse of nuances, because we are all just as good if not better at understanding these nuances. Your original post asked me to show you a school that said it was ok to take biochem online and I showed, did I not? I did not say that there are schools that consider an online course as an exact equivalent to a class room course, did I? I see another lecture on how I don’t understand the nuances of language coming. ;)

Also, I am glad the hundreds are SDNs who take UC Berkeley online biochem class and successfully get into medical schools didn’t listen to your “it is not O.K. to take biochem online. Period” stuff.