It's been just over a year now since the day I quit law school to take up this project, and this morning the final information about last semester came up, leaving everything settled and done.
I ended up with an A- in Physics, more or less miraculously. I suppose it's really just the result of my having done ~10% better than the average on nearly everything, combined with some really hard work to get a respectable score on the midterm. My Final in Physics was less respectable. I got a 66% on it, and the median score was 69%, so I finally came at/under the average. That's not particularly surprising though, given that I chose to put all of my time into studying for the Chemistry final.
The way things have turned out, it looks like that was a solid decision in hind-sight. It was a bit risky, but things fell into the right places. Ideally you don't want to put yourself in a position where you need to make "stop-the-bleeding" choices along these lines, I know, but it's both comforting and exciting to know you made the right ones.
As a future applicant, my resume isn't going to have as much padding on it as any of the more qualified prospective medical students who have been putting together their package for years. I have managed to give myself some relevant experience while working in the ER though, and hopefully I can get something else of interest before I start to apply.
As far as grades go, my "new" GPA is a 3.9 after my first three classes, which is solid enough on its own to give me a shot at most schools if I can find a way to score extremely well on the MCAT. So I'm going to have to start seriously considering how to approach the MCAT. It seems unlikely my grades will plummet if I can manage to do well in Physics just one more time. I can't start to focus on them less, because then they will, but its becoming apparent that the MCAT is going to be the single biggest make or break piece of my application.
Anyways. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with how things stand after a year of working on it. Hopefully everything can continue moving in the right direction.
