I am a 26 year old male who has recently decided to pursue my dream of being a psychiatrist. I am the definition of a non-traditional student. I went to community college straight out of high school with no idea what I wanted to do with my life and received all Fs my first two semesters, not because I couldn’t understand the material or pass the test, but because I refused to go to class and had no desire to study. I literally attended class for two weeks both semesters and never went back. Since I never formally withdrew, my transcript shows 6 Fs.
Somewhere around 2010 I managed to get a decent job at an IT company driving a fork lift and assisting a logistics manager. At that company, I worked my way up and within a year I had received two promotions and was working as an IT specialist. I managed to pass several industry certifications and decided to go back to school and get a degree in Information Technology. The degree would be exclusively online and each class was graded on a Pass/Fail scale, which sounded great to me at the time. While pursing my IT degree, I took a couple of psychology classes that really piqued my interest. I became so interested in psychology that I was convinced I wanted to be a psychologist or psychiatrist. I wanted to completely change my career and study this newly discovered passion of mine. After months of research, I concluded that the only way to pursue my dream would be to enroll in a Post-Bac program (the only one was 4 hours away) for pre-med/pre-psy. I had no idea about “do it yourself Post-Bacs” at the time. After months of thought I determined that it wouldn’t be worth the risk to quit my job for something that may never happen and decided to finish my IT degree.
Fast forward 7 years, I completed that IT degree and received a Masters in Information Security from the same institution. I currently work in the Cyber Security field, but after all of these years I cannot shake my desire to become a doctor. Last fall I decided to enroll in as a pre-med student (thanks to OldPreMeds and The Pre-Med Years podcast) at my local university and pursue my dream of becoming a doctor. I have only taken a few classes, but have maintained an A average so far. However, I have virtually no GPA to calculate for my bachelors and masters degree and 6 Fs that are calculated into my GPA (2 of them are BCPM). I work full time so it is hard for me to take more than 8 hours a semester, and it seems nearly impossible to achieve a competitive GPA without AACOMAS grade replacement, since I was pursing the DO route. I’m sure that many pre-meds feel my pain, but I cannot convey how heartbroken I was when I found out about AACOMAS killing grade replacement. Where do I go from here?
I really don’t know where to go from here… Per AMCAS policy, P/F courses will count toward your overall hours-attempted but does not factor in to any sort of GPA calculation. I’m assuming AACOMAS is the same. I guess the best you can really do if have a strong “recent” GPA and try to explain the situation somewhere in your application. There’s probably not much you can do to try to game the system against GPA screens. Not all schools set a minimum GPA, and any human looking at your application would probably see the merits of your current coursework.
Are your degrees from a regionally accredited program? Some schools require regional accreditation (vs national). I know there are pass/fail only schools with regional accreditation, it’s just not very common (as far as I know).
I guess that getting my application screened without anyone looking at it is my biggest problem. Several schools in my area have a 3.2 minimum (both DO schools) and it will take me several years to bring my GPA up to that without grade replacement.
My degrees are from regionally accredited programs and are awarded only on a Pass/Fail grading system. Hopefully Adcoms will see that I have over 160 credits hours and pay more attention to my recent achievements.
It’s probably worth emailing those programs to see how they would view it. You seem like you have a pretty unique situation in that you are academically fine but don’t have the numbers to back it up due to the p/f system. They may be able to flag your record to be reviewed differently.
That’s a great idea! I will contact the programs and see if they can flag my application. It is a very unique situation so hopefully they will understand I am a completely different person than I was 10 years ago. Thanks again!