Be honest with me: do I have a prayer?

[Tolly]

So here's my story:

I had always thought I maybe wanted to be a doctor but looking at my math and science grades in high school I decided this wasn't feasible and instead went to England to take a degree in Modern Foreign Languages at a top university. I've enjoyed this degree and done very well in it, but my wish to go into medicine keeps pulling at me more and more strongly and insistently.

I'm a smart person and I've always been a good student - but my smarts are very largely verbal. I do very well in English, foreign languages, history, geography, philosophy, all that stuff, but not so well in math, science, linguistics etc. When I was at school I was always good enough in math to get put in the advanced classes, but once I was there my grades were variable - sometimes decent, even good, but sometimes bad, even very bad. I got worse at math as I got older. I scraped by in physics and I did pretty well in biology when I could be bothered to study, which wasn't always. I started out doing pretty well in chemistry and I was interested in it so I took the most advanced classes I could find, but once I was in those classes my performance went downhill, becoming consistently bad. I was, I think, joint third worst in my class of fourteen.

Now here's the good news:

There are some mitigating circumstances to my performance in chemistry. I now think that the teaching wasn't very good, though it was OK. Almost everyone else in the class had had a kind of foundation class in the eighth grade in which they learned the very basic stuff - the periodic table, how to write a lab report, atomic structure. I never took this class because I entered the school in the ninth grade, so some of the absolute fundamentals I just never studied, and I never bothered to catch myself up on them either. That's another thing: I didn't work very hard. How hard you work makes a huge difference; I'm very good at languages but I got mediocre grades in tenth-grade French because I didn't study much; once I pulled my socks up I started doing much better. I was pretty lazy for much of high school; I just coasted. Towards the end I worked harder and ended up with very good scores in my humanities subjects, but it was too late for the others.

I am very, very interested in medicine. I have been for as long as I can remember. The interest means I learn about the human body and its illnesses very well; for example, I can remember almost verbatim what we were taught in the fifth grade about the structure of the ear, and what we were taught in the seventh grade about different kinds of fractures. I love that stuff. I read medical guides and medical history books for fun. Since high school I've grown up a lot and I'm now much, much more capable of buckling down and working in a disciplined way. Maturity has gotten rid of my laziness.

So, I want to finish up undergraduate in England, come back home to the US, take a post-bacc pre-med program, pick up the rest of my 90 credits however I can and apply to med school. I just want to know: given what I've just told you, is that at all feasible? I've had no biology, physics or math since the end of tenth grade and I flunked my college-level chemistry class in the eleventh and twelfth grades. Would I need to take prep courses before going into a post-bacc pre-med program? Would I get in to such a program? Would I pass? Would I get in to med school? Would I pass there? Or am I just too bad at math and science to do this? I'm prepared to work hard for a long time; I just want to know if I have any kind of a chance.

Thanks for reading my novel here (!). Any advice is appreciated. Please be direct and honest.

[Scottish Chap]

Impossible for anyone to make the predictions that you seek. Only you can decide how much effort you want to invest in post-bacc. classes. Remember, some of the journey to medical school (and, for that matter, in medical school) is mundane and a hard slog. Staying focused on the goal requires self-discipline like nothing else.

Instead of wondering, I would spend quality time around doctors so you can realistically see what you might be getting into. Many people see a medical career through rose-tinted glasses. It's not an easy life....especially in the U.S. I think it's not appropriate for a stranger to tell you what they think you ought to do. You know yourself best, but you definitely won't get into medical school if you don't try. That much I can tell you. Good luck!

[Tolly]

Thanks for your kind words. I certainly am prepared - or I firmly believe I am prepared; time will tell - to put in hard work in spades, and I've done some GP shadowing, so I have an idea what I'm getting in to. I remember last summer I was shocked and disillusioned by discovering the links between doctors and drug companies, so if I can get over that...

I'm just worried that I'll invest years of my life and my effort and my money and in the end just not be good enough, and be utterly crushed; but, as you say, I definitely won't get in if I don't try.