Hello everyone,
I am new to old pre-meds although I am not exactly old but will be graduating with my BSN in nursing next May. After graduation, I hope to begin pursuing pre-med requisites and apply to med school eventually. I am looking for help and suggestions as to how to do this. Many have suggested that I take my nursing boards and start working at least part-time while taking my classes towards med school. If anyone was ever in the same boat please help! Especially if you were nursing and switched to pre-med.
Thanks!
If you search the forums you will find tons of information from both nursing and non-nursing professionals pursuing their premed classes.
Hi - One of the people in my post-bacc program had just graduated with her BSN and went straight into a 1-year post-bacc premed program to take the med prerequisites in a condensed format. I think she took calculus in the summer when the rest of us were doing Chem I and II, since she had taken that recently.
She actually did NOT work right away, but did in the “glide year”. If you did the courses informally and part-time, you could also work. I’d figure on 3 months of full-time orientation at any nursing job for a new grad (so one semester), which would let you take courses part-time. If you want to do the courses in one year, you might work part-time after orientation and do the courses full-time.
(hope that made sense - just coming off night shift).
I do think that some hospital time as a nurse would be helpful exposure, but by no means essential.
Kate
Kate (and to whoever else that can help!),
Thank you for your response! I guess it really is a matter of figuring out what works best for me but I want to get started as soon as I can with my pre-requisites. Where I am currently working and hope to stay when I graduate, the orientation is 6 months. That is a pretty good chunk of time and I worry about working and taking classes. Unfortunately, as much as I would love to take a year off, I need to somehow work to support myself. I do have family support which is great but I also agree that experience will be very helpful in med-school.
If you check back on this post (or anyone else) and see this…Would you mind my asking why you switched to pre-med and how it was perceived by the schools? I realize that I may have some high expectations in the interviews and some difficult questions to answer about why I switched from nursing to pre-med.
If anyone could help out with the schedule that would also be greatly appreciated. I plan to take all the typical requirements (bio, physics, ochem, and chem). I will be taking summer classes and regular session but I am thinking it is going to take me at least 2 years and then fitting the MCAT and things in as well will be tricky. I also worry about not taking extra classes such as calc, biochem, a genetics course, etc. but taking these would add a generous amount of time onto the already expected two years. I want to keep the classes to a manageable load especially if I have to work at least part time in order to achieve the best grades possible and get the most out of the classes.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Jen