Deal is, my grades are ok, but I'm getting like incredibly lazy, I think its because I'm done with school in about four and a half weeks and I figure I can probably coast through even though I know damn well I can't. Whatever. Anyway, I really, really, really, really, ad infinitum, apply to med school, but I also know full well that my grades are not 3.5+ and most likely won't be by the time I need to apply because at that point I would have either burned myself out and decided just to keep my other major or gone crazy and shot up half the campus from studying so much.
To apply to medschool I have to take what is basically a second major in science classes and shit like that, but I really want to keep my original major (economics) as a fall back in the event I don't get accepted. I know I have the brain capacity to do all the work, since I really like science and all that shit, but I'm not sure if I have the patience or attention span to pull essentially a double-major since I can't even do a term paper until the night before. I was just wondering really if anyone else was in this type of a situation before and had any friendly / useful advice they could lend me.
I'm studying med. I'm from Australia, and the method for getting into med is slightly different here, but most of the people who transfer to med from other uni courses transfer from science-based courses.
If you have the intelligence to get into med, you can get in. But you will have to put up with the patience and attention span to do it; if you're not capable of doing it for the double-major course, you won't be able to do it for med. I can promise you that med will be harder than a double-major science course; you will need a very good attention span for it and patience too.
However, at least where I study med, there are very few assignments and tests. The main assessments are the end-of-semester exams, and the on-going assessments of your performance in tutor groups, the main one being called PBL, Problem-Based Learning. (It's actually called CBL at my uni, but most unis call it PBL). I had 4 assignments last year (first year), and this year I only have 1 (second year). That 1 assignment is easy. It's more about on-going learning and studying than cramming for tests and learning by doing assignments.
The style of learning is also very different to how it was at school and most other university courses; I learnt last year that how I studied for school, mainly cramming for tests and exams, was horrible for university. Active-learning is promoted when possible in university e.g. studying with friends, applying your knowledge to cases (e.g. why does this person have shortness of breath?), however, you will still have to read LOTS. When you studying, you need to know what you're learning, understand it, and be able to apply it; you can't just make notes for it and read off them, or just remember answers to specific questions. The information you learn is also integrated: you don't learn the body anatomy, then the body physiology, then apply it to how you interact with the patient (this last one is called clinical skills); you learn them all together. For example, the first thing I had to learn was the anatomy, physiology, clinical skills, histology, some pathophysiology etc of the heart. For example, you can't just know that the heart has coronary arteries; you need to know what part of the heart they supply, what can happen if they have significant atherosclerosis, and how you would examine patients for the symptoms and signs of significant atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries.
In saying this, most people who do med enjoy it, and there aren't that many drop-outs. Most of the people who drop-out do so because it's too much work, and there's still many less drop-outs than other hard but not-as-hard courses like engineering. This is primarily because that a great proportion of people who study med enjoy it than with engineering.
In short, if you want to do med, you will probably enjoy it, but you will have to work your ass off. Don't worry, you'll still have a life! Med has an extremely large social life, much bigger than high school.
