Doing a Second Degree?

[BP87]

Hello everyone

I've already graduated in June with a H.B.Sc in Neuroscience (from U of T) and because I had crappy grades in my first 2 years, I've decided to give myself another chance and do another degree (in science, not sure what specific field yet). My question is, do you think the admission com. will look at this favorably? What GPA will they look at? my original GPA or my second degree's GPA? If everything is looked at from both degrees, my GPA will not have increased significantly as I've already done 120 credit hours + the 60 credit hours that I'm planning to start this September...so any increase will not be significant enough to improve my GPA in a meaningful way...so do they just get a computer to do the initial screening or does someone actually look at trends etc in your GPA-progress?

 

Any comments/suggestions are welcome!

[switcheroo]

Sorry, but they don't have the time or manpower to look through each application individually to look for trends, etc in GPAs. They're going to take your GPA after dropping 30 credit hours and use that as the number without further consideration.

[melatonin]

Hello everyone

I've already graduated in June with a H.B.Sc in Neuroscience (from U of T) and because I had crappy grades in my first 2 years, I've decided to give myself another chance and do another degree (in science, not sure what specific field yet). My question is, do you think the admission com. will look at this favorably? What GPA will they look at? my original GPA or my second degree's GPA? If everything is looked at from both degrees, my GPA will not have increased significantly as I've already done 120 credit hours + the 60 credit hours that I'm planning to start this September...so any increase will not be significant enough to improve my GPA in a meaningful way...so do they just get a computer to do the initial screening or does someone actually look at trends etc in your GPA-progress?

 

Any comments/suggestions are welcome!

 

Do you qualify as a Manitoba applicant (i.e. did you do high school in Manitoba?) or are you OOP? If you're a Manitoba applicant, your GPA is not as important as you might think. You obviously need to get the minimum GPA to apply - I can't remember offhand whether that cutoff is 3.3 or 3.6 (on the 4.5 scale); but past that, focus on doing well on your MCAT. Manitoba is one of the only Canadian schools (if not THE only one) that factors the MCAT directly into the admissions score, and I believe it accounts for about 40% of the total, which is much more than the 15% allotted for the AGPA. The other major part of the score comes from the MMIs, and my understanding is that MMI scores from applicant to applicant don't vary all that much (except for instances where responses raise red flags), so really the MCAT is your main ticket in. Again, its important to meet the minimum GPA requirement, but you may not need to go all the way with your second degree if your AGPA is relatively healthy after one or two years (unless you're enjoying what you're studying of course, in which case keep at it!)

 

To actually try to answer your question, I am pretty sure that they will factor all of your undergraduate work (from both degrees) into your AGPA calculation, which would mean that you're still left with only one year of school dropped from the record. But again, you're chances might still be great if you can do well on the MCAT.

 

Other schools that have GPA-consideration policies that you might benefit from are Queen's, Western, and Ottawa.

 

Good luck!

[BP87]

Hi

Thanks for ur response, I appreciate it. My AGPA is at 3.53 right now which is not good at all (the cutoff is 3.3). i was told by an academic advisor at U of M that I need to do 30 credit hours to bring it up to 3.6 because the advisor had never seen anyone get accepted with 3.5 (IP or OOP)

Western and queens both require 2 years of full-time with 3.7 in each year. I don't have that unfortunately.