<pre><code> I doing pre-med at UCLA at the moment and after talking with a friend he suggested that I may not be able to get into an allopathic medicine program (at least not one in the U.S.) due to bad grades from almost a decade ago. Is this true?
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<p>I went to a technical school in 2001 and did poorly. I was there for about two semesters and then just worked. A few years later I joined the Navy as a corpsman and afterwards I moved to California and enrolled at a CC here. I got a 4.0 at the CC and I have thus far kept the same GPA at UCLA. What I am wondering is if I would still be able to get into an U.S. allopathic medicine program or should I switch to a different career?</p>
<p>There may be some schools which have a flat minimum GPA and if your old grades bring down your average enough, they simply may cut you before they look at the complete package you present.</p>
<p>There will be other schools which will look at the big picture. If you are carrying a 4.0 over 4 years of coursework, even if you had very low, failing marks at the first school, would it take you below a 3.5?</p>
<p>You were only there for two semesters - how low was your GPA there? Unless it was insanely low, its not going to drag you down much. And either way, schools will likely be forgiving of something so far in the past, as long as you’ve made up for it recently with good grades and life experience (which it sounds like you have covered)</p>
<p>Things went pretty bad. The first semester I showed up for the first day of class and only the first day of class. I did not formally withdraw. The second semester I did well, I think I actually got A’s, but I only took two classes. You can see why I did not go back for a third. I haven’t crunched the numbers yet (still waiting on a copy of my transcript), but just from that I know things don’t look good.</p>
<p>As people have said, the only issue here is that your “reported GPA” will include them, but it sounds like it will be pretty diluted. Any human actually looking at your app though will put very little weight on grades from 10 years ago if you have good grades now.</p>
<p>@curmudgeon It is an accredited school. It is part of the technical college system of Georgia. I do not think I can leave it out without committing fraud.</p>
<p>If you just failed one semester, it shouldn’t hurt your GPA that much even if you failed 15 credits. If you got A’s in the second semester for two classes, then that isn’t a problem. You can explain this. You can say you were young and foolish and then you went in the Navy and they straightened you around. (I have two stepsons in the Navy and it did both of them a world of good!) Navy corpsman plus 4.0 GPA is a pretty good start on your application. </p>
<p>You do have to turn in transcripts for all classes taken and med schools are quite fussy about it. My D took one English class at our local community college while in high school and that had to be turned in.</p>
