Hello, fellow SDN users. I first appreciate your valuable time to click into my post and read it and hopefully give me some useful and essential advice
heheh.
Okay, so… to briefly explain my situation, I attended UC Berkeley from the
year of 2005 as a freshman through the year of 2007 and withdrew due to
high stress from school(partly due to doing extremely poor in acadmics)
and uncertainty about my career. Since then, I have been taking a break
without really doing anything particular. ( Yea, I mean absolutely nothing at all, seriously )So far, I have zero volunteer work in a community. I have no clinical experience whatsoever.
In addition, to give you an idea of how poorly I did academically in my freshman and sophomore year of college, I got C from general chemistry, C from calculus, failed first o-chem twice and passed the third time with a B, got a B from second o-chem, got C’s in bio. (Pretty devastating, right?) And Im pretty sure that you can guess how poorly I did in non-science courses.
Although I perceive myself not that stupid(graduated high school as top of
the class), I nearly quit studying once I got into college due to so much
social activities I was really into, which I really regret. Furthermore, my
self-esteem just plummeted to the lowest… and that’s probably why I
decided to take time off. I just wanted some time to recoup everything
I’ve lost, whatever that is, or… I wanted to believe so.
But… I also realized that after I failed my first two years of college, I was
overwhelmed and surrounded by all these negative thoughts these past
years since I withdrew from school. And then recently, this determination
came in my mind that I shouldn’t give up. At least… I gotta try…
So… my question is this (sorry, my intro was quite a bit long!!! =_= )
Should I go back to Berkeley and try to raise my GPA? So far, I have
completed a little less than 70 units. or… should I just start all over at
a community college and transfer to another university? (yea, I know that I can’t really start all over and I still have to list all the grades in the past) I am leaning towards the option of transferring to another university and doing well there. The only thing that really makes me reluctant to choose the first option to go back to berkeley is that I really lost all my confidence from that school. I am not just sure if I can do well at that school.
Furthermore, I think if I choose the second option I’ll actually have more time to go volunteer in a hospital and gain some clinical experience whereas I will hardly have time to do those if I choose to go back to Berkeley cuz I think Berkeley will be still tough although I may try a lot harder and put my full effort into it. I think what is most important for me now is to regain self-confidence that was long gone, and I think going back to berkeley may not do me any good for giving me self-esteem back. Well these are just my thoughts…
So… please give me as many advice as possible!!! You can even criticize
me if I am sounding like all pessimistic and acting like a loser!! heheh
Thank you again for reading my post!!! You are the best!!!
- natenate1020 Said:
I think you meant to post this on SDN - this is OPM.
hahah oops. I just copied and pasted after uploading on SDN. but u shouldn’t have a problem answering right? hopefully? lolz =)
As long as you have figured out how to correct the problems that were responsible for you doing poorly the first time around, I see no problem with returning to school. If you don’t feel that you can do well at Berkley, than I see nothing wrong with taking a different route. I would encourage you, however, to think about ways that you can show an adcom that you learned from your experience and matured during your time off. You state that you have no volunteering or clinical experience. You need to start working on that NOW. You will be competing for medical school slots against people who have been volunteering for years and/or have tons of research and clinical experience, and you also have the poor initial track record of grades. You need to not only figure out how you can do very well in your remaining classes and improve your GPA, but what you can do to make the rest of your application stand out.
It’s not impossible - but it will take a lot of work and dedication on your part over the next few years. Good luck!
Thank you so much for your advice, Emergency!!!