Made the wrong choice studying pharmacy, should have done med!

[junesun]

I am a 4th year pharmacy student with a 3.0 pharmacy GPA. I had some personal issues going on throughout pharm school, eventually leading to clinical depression. Anyways, I'm over that now and really annoyed with myself for letting my grades slip.

 

Prior to pharm school, I studied biology for 3 years with a 3.74 GPA. My GPA used to be over a 3.9 here but again, I had suffered a bout of depression and I had one bad semester which knocked by GPA down quite a bit. I grew up in a really abusive home and I just couldn't cope at the time. I'm over all that now and I've really learned coping mechanisms over the past few years.

 

My cumulative GPA is now around a 3.35. I'm hoping to pull that up by the time I graduate in May to around a 3.4.

 

I have some hospital and pharmacy volunteering experience from before pharmacy school. I also have around 160 hours of hospital clinical experience through rotations with school which included: doing rounds with physicians, counselling patients on their medications in hospital, watching some procedures, answering drug information questions asked by physicians, monitoring patient serum drug levels etc, etc.

 

Other than that I don't really have any research experience or a lot of other volunteer experience in the recent past. I can always work on that though.

 

I've done a lot of travelling within Canada and overseas if that counts as an EC.

 

My questions is, should I even bother writing the MCAT with this GPA or just accept that it's not meant to be?

 

Also do you think admission committees would factor in that pharmacy is a very intensive program and it's very difficult to achieve a 3.9 or 4.0?

 

Any feedback is appreciated, thanks!

[dmleo]

Although your cumulative gpa is on the low side, definitely write the mcat and try to rock it. As long as your mcat,EC and references are above average and you're IP, I imagine you have a pretty good chance for an interview despite the low gpa.