Hello OldPremeds members,
I found this forum by listening to Dr. Ryan’s podcast on iTunes.
My name is Firdavs, I’m from Uzbekistan but live in US. I’m 21 years old and I want to one day become a physician.
I don’t really know what to tell you about myself, I just wanted to be a part of this forum. My close friends all want to be engineers, lawyers, detectives, etc. so I don’t have many people I can talk to about being a premed.
Currently I’m going through a rough patch. I just lost my great grandmother yesterday, and few months ago my aunt was kidnapped and murdered in India. Both of them were close to me, especially my aunt. I grew up with her in the same household and she was only few years older than me, so we were like siblings.
The unfortunate passing of my family members combined with both of my parents getting very ill, 2015 has not been very kind to me. Unfortunately my grades have also suffered and I had to withdraw from couple of classes (more on this later).
But I’m keeping my head up and hopefully I can make 2016 a better year. I’m excited to be part of this forum, and I hope we can all push each other towards success!
And before I end this post, I have a quick question.
Right now I’m a sophomore at a community college. On my 2nd semester (Spring semester of 2015) I was taking 4 classes, 2 of which were Trigonometry and Bio 1. Unfortunately that spring my mother got very sick and could not work. Subsequent medical bills meant I had to work extra so I made the decision to withdraw from those two classes and work instead to help my dad with bills.
I was planning on retaking these classes this past fall semester. I signed up, attended for first two months, then after what happened with my aunt I lost all motivation to go to school. I had to deal with lawyers, police, translate documents for them, and try to help as much as I can. I realized that I missed too many classes and decided to withdraw from all classes. My two professors (for Bio and Trig) agreed to go through with the withdrawal. My two other professors denied my request saying that albeit missing classes I still turned in all the work so I would pass with A or a B.
Now what it looks like is that I withdrew from Trigonometry and Biology 1 two semesters in a row because I could not handle the difficult curriculum. Will the medical schools overlook me because of this? What should I do?
Thank you for reading, and looking forward to read all of your replies!
Firdavs
Welcome to the forums! Sorry you’re going through a rough time, hopefully things turn out much better this year for you.
I’m not an admissions person, but having gone through the admissions process myself, you have to quickly learn that you can’t change what happened in the past so it’s not worth worrying about. If you don’t figure that out, it’ll be a super mentally-painful journey. That being said, you’ll be able to explain situations like this in your application so the admissions people can view your application in context with real life. The important part is to not make excuses (in your case, your decisions seem valid to me). Your goal from here on out should be to make your application the strongest it can be within the constraints of your life. Good grades, well-rounded performance, growth over time, etc, will all make you look “better” despite the withdrawals on your academic record.
It shouldn’t. You may have to explain and justify why you did what you did, but you have valid justification it appears. Do well in them when you take them and you should be fine.
There are very few absolute show stoppers, and I think those would be things that would drastically increase hospital liability or prevent you from being licensed as a physician (don’t murder someone, have a string of DUIs, etc).