First Questions Answered! Question Fridays

So… I said I would do question Fridays if people would leave in the comments section about what they’d like to ask me and about Holy Cross or contact me via e-mail and I would do my best to answer their questions. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, leave them in the comments (you can be anonymous) or you can email them to me at DDLUU15@g.holycross.edu with the title “Question Fridays” or just give me a creative title. With that all said, let us begin!

(1.) Do you feel that your grades and your research work puts you on the correct arc toward perhaps taking the MCAT, applying and being accepted to Med School 1-3 years after graduating from HC?

short answer: I’m not really qualified or knowledgeable on this topic yet, but sure. With regards to the research I’m doing now, I’m not too sure.

I don’t think as of right now my grades are not good enough for med school and I’m not that ashamed of it right now but I know if my GPA stays this low, it’ll be unpractical for me to get in a good school (unless I somehow get a very good MCAT score). I don’t know what the MCAT is like, so perhaps I should be looking into that and what the test is like really…

However, I do think that I am learning a lot from Holy Cross, and their STEM departments and Biology depart is great so far teaching me a lot of things that weren’t tested in the AP Bio test and that I didn’t learn from AP Bio (there’s only so much we can learn). I also wouldn’t say my ‘grades’ put me toward the correct arc to taking the MCAT. Even though I know I got Bs for grades, it doesn’t show how much I learned, what I learned, or what I gained in insight from those classes.

Which brings me to say that when you learn through a professor, they basically teach you what they believe is important in the field. Often they will cover what they are researching or what they find important, but if you have faith in your professors and you’re interested in what you’re learning you’ll have no problem. All in, all, we shall see when I start looking deeper into the application process and tests so I have an idea to compare the material I learned to the material I’m going to be tested on.

On the research end, I don’t think my research I’m doing as of now will particularly help me for the MCAT as much as it would help me outside of med schools and with graduate schools. What ‘research” and med schools (again all me speculating from what I heard about others) involve is doing bench mark research. Bench Mark research is like working with diseases and other more clinically based research the med schools would like to see you have.

The research I’m doing now is involved with genetics and testing the behavior of flies, and it’s still a long way before we’d be doing research relating to more clinically based stuff. But just because it’s not considered bench mark doesn’t mean I’m learning nothing. I’ve been gaining different experiences in the scientific field that have been opening my mind to a lot of things and I’m pretty happy with the research I’m at now. I’ll expand more on my research in a later blog.

That’s all I’ll answer for now, I have some other questions to answer within the next weeks and I’ll do my best to answer them quickly, and if I can I’ll try to get them out as soon as I can and not release another one on Friday.

Best,
Dan

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