Saturday, May 29, 2010

A Job, Take Two?

Well, I'm looking into a new option now - getting to work with a local rescue squad on ambulances with paramedics and such. It sounds really exciting, and would be a great opportunity to do something useful, fun, and interesting.

As always, there's a catch - they want you to be able to devote 2+ years to it (which is reasonable, since it takes most of one year to earn the various certifications you need).

Given that I'm hopefully heading off to medical school in 15 months, that's a problem (that seems to be a problem with everything I find....)

I sent an e-mail saying that my preference would be to go to medical school here in DC (which is sort of true, if you ignore my pipe-dream of Vanderbilt). If I did that I'd be in the area for well beyond 2+ years but, of course, I can't guarantee being admitted into a DC area medical school (the numbers, in fact, suggest I have very little chance at it: I didn't go into that).

There's nothing to do but wait for their reply, I suppose. I'm not optimistic, but it would be neat if it did work out.

In other affairs, I'm still just studying for my Bio test. It was a bit cool today, but the pool opens and it should be 90 and sunny tommorow - I'm looking forward to getting through at least one chapter there.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Advising

I had a phone-meeting today with my old pre-med advisor from my Vanderbilt, to try and sort out a few questions that have been in my head. It was nice talking to someone from my old school, and it was nice to not have to talk to my current pre-med advisor at AU. She seems nice, but she's been having to deal with a lot lately: I think there have been some deaths in the family, and her pet dog got cancer and needed to have its leg amputated (This is the same dog I complained about her having in her office the first time I met her a year ago or so... which makes me feel pretty bad now). I'm sure the last thing she really wants to deal with is premed students coming to her and complaining about their - relatively trivial - dilemmas.

Anyways. Here are some of the things I found out.
  • DC is the worst or second worst place to be in the US for applying to medical school, numbers wise (competing with California). Each state - and DC's - schools reserve a small number of seats for residents. DC has 3 Medical Schools, with 8 seats reserved total. There are usually ~65 applicants for those 8 seats, which leaves a 12% chance or so of getting in. It's a /little/ bit better, actually, since they'll have to accept around 12-15 people to ensure the seats get filled, so it's more like a 20% chance of getting into one of the three schools. Percentage wise, this number is as good as it will get. Out of state schools will be down towards 5-10%.
  • I'll need around /five/ letters of recommendation. I'm a bit shocked by that, really - it's a lot. It's more than I was expecting. It's a good thing I went to some teacher's office hours last semester, or I'd be having a lot of trouble now. I can probably get at least one letter from an organization I've worked for (like my supervising charge-nurse at Georgetown Hospital, from when I volunteered there). Vanderbilt can provide me a cover letter, if I want, which is neat.
  • My Grades are "ok", even from AU, but the MCAT is where I'll have to back it up, as I thought.
  • Applying early is nice, but the benefits aren't going to outweigh doing better on the MCAT, even if just slightly. The problem - I'll have no idea how much extra time I'll need to study for the organic chemistry section of that test until it's a bit late. I might have to pick my MCAT date blindly, and hope for luck.
  • Not having a ton of extracurriculars is sort of "ok", since I'm doing this out of law school instead of it having been my first path. I'll need a good explanation for leaving law school though (which is fine, I have one with the epilepsy... what's harder is explaining away my B- or so average in law school, which I'll need to show along with everything else. Uh oh.)
  • MCAT scores: out of a possible 45 the national average is 26.1, the Vanderbilt student average is 29.9, and the average of students entering Vanderbilt's Medical school is 34.5, which is also the average for most of the other tops US medical schools (Harvard is 35.7, John Hopkins is 35.4, and Georgetown is 31.8. ... And just for the sake of including it since I went there for law, Emory Medical School's average entering MCAT score is 34.5 also). It's hard to list the minimum averages for other schools, since the number gets artificially lowered at state schools who reserve more slots for their applicants. 27-30 is probably a reasonable average for the lower end.
Right now, I'm leaning towards taking the April MCAT if at all possible. It will be nice to get to apply early, even if it doesn't help much, and it would be nice for schools with rolling admissions. It would also provide some buffer room for people sending in their letters of recommendation late, or what not, so the whole process would be a bit less stressful.

I'm not sure how I'll get my 5 letters of rec, how I'll "fix" physics, and how I'll explain away my bad average in law school. Luckily, I still have some time to work on that all. And I still have time to (hopefully) grab one more extracurricular between now and the time I apply.

As far as regular academic work goes, I'm staying busy. I have to get a lab report done up tonight (it's awful only having one day to work on them, because our labs are so close together w/ the summer schedule...), but I think the instructor will grade it gently. Next week, I have to take a "midterm" in Lab (not entirely sure what it is, but it's worth a bunch of my lab grade....) and a real exam on Wednesday. I'll be pretty busy this weekend studying for that, but I'm confidant I can get it done well.

It's hard to believe this course is half over already.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

(First) Thoughts on the MCAT

So I said I would start thinking more about this test, now that it's becoming clear how important it will be to me (and now that the deadline is slowly but surely approaching).

In 2010 it was offered 26 times, from January to September. That sounds like a lot, but the optimal dates (especially for me) are a lot less. I want to be able to have finished my prereq. courses, but I also need to get it done early since I /really/ don't want to take it late, and have /another/ year of dead time between college version 2.0 and medical school.

Basically I'll need a date between April and August. There were 19 of those in 2010. I don't /think/ the new schedule for 2011 is up yet, but I need to check on that.

Taking the test in April means I'm /almost/ done with the second half of Organic Chemistry, and I've finished everything else. If I was a normal student it would leave me with very little actual MCAT study time - but since that semester I'll have nothing but the second half of Organic Chem going on, I could actually get a decent amount of studying done. April is early enough it lets me apply for early decision somewhere (although it's pushing that, a tiny bit), and is early enough I can be secure that I won't have any problems with regular application deadlines running late.

Taking it in August means I can't apply early. It's pushing it a little for regular deadlines, but should still work - although I'd be at a small disadvantage at schools with rolling admissions. On the other hand, taking it in August gives a lot of extra study time, and getting a high score is imperative.

Anything in between these two dates is a mix of the April/August option's benefits.

The web has a host of conflicting opinions about which choice is best. If anyone following this is looking for my opinion on which is best, I think the best choice is to ignore all the conflicting web-advice and make up your own mind. If you can't effectively make a simple decision like that, maybe you need to rethink your career choice.

As for which is best for me: April would probably be the number one option, although pushing it back into early May might be better if I decide to skip early decision applications at various reach schools. I'll talk to my pre-med advisor to get their input on how useful an early decision application would be. Other than that, I still have some months left to make my choice (although it's less than one year between now and the April test... a fact that's somewhat frightening).

Also: If I register as soon as possible, I might be able to make a 1pm test instead of an 8am test. That would be /awesome/.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Fuming. Over An A.

So yeah. We had our first Biology exam today and, actually, we got it back today. (It was a standard 90 minute exam, and our class is much longer than that. We watched a movie on DNA for the second 2/3 or so of class, while the teacher went through and graded everything - which was pretty impressive).

I got a 95, which - you'd think - I can't complain about. Well, technically it was a 93, but everyone got one question wrong. Apparently the decision was that it hadn't really been taught, and it was retroactively pulled from the test. Being me though, I can always complain.

I'm really mad because the few things I did get wrong were the /easy/ things. My studying was somewhat misguided for the test - I can go into much greater detail about some things than was required, but in spending my limited time like that I glossed over some of the really straightforward things. We had a few questions on those straightforward things. Getting those half-wrong is really embarrassing.

One of the questions I even knew the answer to (simple: list three differences between DNA and RNA). One of the differences I listed wasn't the "one" being looked for though. I knew the one being looked for - I even specifically wrote it down on the next page when I diagrammed how two nucleotides form a phosphodiester bond to create a polymer (the 2' carbon has an attached H in DNA, but an attached OH in RNA) - but I listed a different thing on that first question.

I kind of want to go and see if I can get credit.... but I don't want to seem like an awful person, complaining to the teacher over my 95. Especially since, ideally, this is someone I'm hoping to get to know well enough (and perform well enough for) that I can get a future letter of recommendation. ... A second option is to go - state that I knew the answer, and that my exam proves that fact - and also state that I don't want my grade altered at all, and just want to clear things up so I don't look like an idiot. ... that option might be even worse though, I'm not sure. It certainly makes me look a bit arrogant (which is probably kind of an accurate picture of me, if not the one I'd like to convey).

And the third thing that I'm fuming over is that it sounded like someone managed to get a perfect score, and it wasn't me; I'm supposed to. :: fume ::

As far as the test itself goes, it was a decent mix between my Super Easy Chemistry exams, where they were practically handed out before hand, and my Painful Crying Game Physics exams. The exam wasn't handed out in any form before hand, and it had a fair mix of questions on. It was also missing silly ammounts of extra credit (See Also: my 110%+ performances in Chemistry). I think these tests will give me a (fairly) good measure of where I'm at.

Well, all this said - what do I think of the outcome?

I guess I can't /really/ complain. A 95 will get me a 4.0 just as effectively as a 100 (although a 95 exam average would leave me just about no room for error in performing subpar in the lab). Also, given that I had less time to study for this than I'd have liked because of my family stuff, the outlook for the next test (should) be even better. That's an encouraging sign. And I now have a pretty good idea of how the tests are set up - I can try to not get so bogged down in the details, and focus a bit more on the big picture. It's not a bad start for the course, and I'm set up to do even better from here on out.

Certainly beats Physics, at any rate.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Information Overload

Well, the first week of Biology has gone by, and we've covered some eight chapters. Even more fun, we get our first exam tomorrow. Yay! I've taken copious notes in class, and have kept up with the reading, but there's just so much in there that I'm not ready. It hasn't helped that I've had a pretty busy week, and have been taking care of stuff for my family while they're out on vacation.

It's certainly not like Physics though. While there might be a ton of details, and I'm getting fed those details at an accelerated pace to get through it all in six weeks, its stuff that - given the time - I have no doubt I can understand just fine.

How this test comes out is up in the air. I have no clue what the test will be like, and this is the kind of thing you could make as easy or complicated as you desired (ie: if it's just over the basic points best covered in my notes, it should be pretty straight forward. If it goes into as much detail as the most detailed parts of our textbook, it should be very difficult). I'll find out soon, I guess. I'm certainly spending the rest of today working hard to memorize things and, fortunately, the test isn't until tomorrow evening. Which sort of means I can study for most of tomorrow as well.

The good news is that my family comes back tonight, so I'll have a good bit of extra time preparing for the next tests. Also, my pool is opening soon, which will give me a warm, pleasant, and quiet (during off-hours) place to do my studying at.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Already?

I said I'd take some time to reflect on how things were going, but classes are starting up again tomorrow before I've even had a chance to do much of that. It feels like thinks just ended the other day, really, and like this whole week hardly happened. Refreshed, I am not.

But we can still take a moment to try and look at things objectively. The worst (hopefully), is now over, and my GPA for this post-college adventure is still above a 3.60. I'll have to take some time to really calculate it, but I think it's closer to a 3.70. It's not awful, despite the fact that my B- was awful, since I've managed to keep pretty much everything else to a 4.00. Assuming Physics is the hardest course I have, that means my overall GPA will likely end up somewhere above 3.70, which is pretty respectable. How far above depends, but it should end up nicely.

I can't drop the ball. I need a 4.00 in every course where I can realistically get one, and I need to do the best I can everywhere else to keep my GPA going back up. But as long as I stay on top of my game, up is the most likely direction for it to go. It's also extra important that I do well now because 1) I'll need to find teachers to give me letters of recommendation in short order and 2) I need to be ready for the MCAT in ~18 months. With a decent GPA, my admissions chances are going to come down almost entirely to that entrance exam. If I do badly, and my 4.00's are revealed to be shams, I'm sunk. If I do well, I'm in (at least, in "somewhere").

I'd like to spend more MCAT study time working on Physics (which will be more like learning than reviewing), so it's imperative that I turn my next few courses into MCAT review courses.

Overall, I'm disappointed in how the last semester went. I did fine in Chemistry, but Physics was awful. Not only did I do badly in it (although I managed to avoid a C, at least) - I also gave up. The whole thing was very disheartening, and revealed a negative aspect of my character. Not getting the job I was after, on top of that, is just icing.

All disappointment aside, the semester wasn't an unmitigated disaster.

This summer is going to be pretty important. I need to take advantage of it to get back in things, and get a good step under my feet. I want to end up confident of a 4.00 in my course both sessions, so I can walk into the harder stuff at the end of this with some solid self-confidence (not to mention a boosted GPA). I also need to find something to do work/internship/volunteer-wise, /and/ I need to start worrying about the MCAT. I know I've said I need to worry about the MCAT before, but it's more true now than ever. And I've failed to really get involved with it so far, other than gaining an increasing appreciation for its value in the admissions process.

Friday, May 7, 2010

And The Results...

Grades are in for the semester: I got an A in Chemistry (4.0) and a B- in Physics (2.7). Both courses, as it turns out, were not curved (which honestly surprised me in Physics... I guess half the class has a C+ or lower in the end after all).

The A is great, but wasn't a surprise at all really. The B- is awful but... not a C? How awful it really ends up being depends a lot on how much I can get on track before the MCAT, and whether I can make sure all my other grades become 4.0s - especially Organic Chemistry in the Fall, which is supposed to be another "hard" course. If I can get an A in everything, that included, I can explain this semester of Physics away as "they should have said I needed to know how to do integrals...". Then I only have a mild problem. If I can't get an A in Organic, I have a serious problem.

Either way, medical schools will look really poorly on a B-, so my score on the MCAT becomes super-important.

The really annoying thing is that I genuinely don't know exactly where I stand. While neither class was curved, the Chemistry tests were practically handed out beforehand and were easy enough that the course may as well have just been curved up. I feel like I still got everything though... would I have gotten an A if that class was as hard as it was when I took it as a real undergraduate? I have no clue.

And Physics was hard, but without understanding integrals this semester I really was trying to get it done without half the tools. Should I be happy, or even impressed, that I managed to do well enough to avoid failing the course altogether given that situation? Or should I get hung up on an "awful" grade (from the med-school admissions point of view, at least).

... I don't know.

Either way, I still did well enough that there's no sense in quitting. I might as well keep pushing on, and I'll just see what happens.

In other news, it looks like my Biology course is a go. We still have no books up at the store, but the course got a room assigned to it, and is officially non-cancelled. I'm going to try and buy the book for Bio 220 (which I'm taking in the second half of summer), and I'll just hope the books are the same. It wouldn't be all that surprising if they were, and I'll need this book anyways eventually.

Monday, May 3, 2010

I'm Half-Way There

And I feel decidedly more exposed to science now than I did when this had just begun. I can explain why sunsets are red, how the chemical bonds in our eyes work to let us see, how ammonia is mass-produced, and some other pretty neat stuff too, actually. Even physics stuff.

The Chemistry final wrapped up the first half of my premed course-load this morning, and it wrapped it up on a nice note. It went well, and with any luck I managed to get a 100 on it. I'm not positive my Chemistry grade is a 4.0 at this point, because I did a good bit worse in lab than on the exams, but its looking quite possible that it turned out that way.

This is good, because with my Physics performance being what it has been, I really can't afford to be subpar in anything else if I'm going to have half a shot at getting into a medical school.

I'm not sure when I find out my official grades for both courses. Last time there was a pretty quick turn-around on that, so I'm hoping I don't end up waiting too long.

Now its time to move on. Biology starts. It should, at least. I checked the bookstore today, and apparently no one has ordered books for it. It also doesn't have a class-site up on the web, and I think its supposed to by now.

I don't know what that means, who's error it is, or if its an error at all. I'd assume that if the class was canceled, I'd have been notified by now (especially since I was billed for it....) but... who knows. I don't really want to worry about that for the next day or two anyways, so I'll drop it. It's not like there would be anything I could do to fix it, and I want to enjoy my time off. Once I've relaxed a bit, and gotten my grades back, I can try to reflect on how things have gone to this point, where they need to go, and how I can get them there.

Ps: Happy Summer Everyone. I changed the template up to something less bleak and more seasonal.