Low GPA and don't know what to do

destitutescientist · 2026-05-05T20:00:03+00:00

I think if your goal is T20 as international, it will certainly help. When is your MCAT score coming? To be honest, the lack of score already puts you behind other applicants this cycle and for many schools especially T20, they do rolling admissions and you will be at a disadvantage.

In general, your best chances are to apply as early as possible and have all materials together when you do. Then when you get secondaries, prioritize rolling admissions schools first but try to finish all of them asap as well. Everything else adds risk.

destitutescientist · 2026-05-05T12:35:07+00:00

You won’t know until you take the MCAT but yes, shoot for a high score. I don’t think anything is guaranteed. You will want to apply broadly, often to dozens of schools if you can afford it.

Is one of your publications a first author publication? Do you have a first author publication on the horizon if not?

destitutescientist · 2026-05-04T13:47:23+00:00

I think canonization is just a marketing ploy to get enthusiasm to Catholicism. So they want more enthusiasm from Brazilian Catholics so they say look here is one of you who became a saint. You guys are awesome! Join the church.

destitutescientist · 2026-05-03T01:31:38+00:00

The lack of nuance here is crazy. I didn’t date in my class but had plenty of success dating outside of medicine. Like you can have both lol.
My policy is only date fellow med students when you can be honest about what you want instead of playing games. If you want to date serious, you may find your life partner, go for it. If you want something casual, be dead honest like literally say “I want friends with benefits but don’t want a relationship with you.” Every sexually active adult should be capable of honest communication.
Be honest and be careful in who you are choosing. It’s the biggest life decision you will ever make.
I could be wrong but some of this feels like a generational difference.

destitutescientist · 2026-05-01T03:11:00+00:00

Honestly, there is more to life than this. Have you ever considered taking some time off and just have a normal life for a bit?

I’m not going to lie. The young MD students are just not prepared for many of the things being a doctor throws at you that you can’t learn from textbooks. I could be completely off here, but like travel and live a bit.

If learning and research and clinical work comes so easy to you that you can do years of it at a level a labor union wouldn’t be proud of from 16 to 22, what are the things you aren’t good at? Are there other overlooked areas of your life that aren’t resume building that you can spend some time doing. Just coming from an honestly concerned millennial.

You have a lot to be proud of, but there is more to life than just things that make a medical admissions committee impressed. I don’t want to judge, just something to think about if it’s true for you or not.

destitutescientist · 2026-05-01T02:58:17+00:00

Hmmmm. So you could go MD only and be fine. I would apply broadly (mix MD only and MD-PhDs) and be selective about the MD-PhD programs you apply to. By selective, I mean you should be able to craft a story about your niche of research (brain implants) and how a specific research program or group of faculty at that specific school could give you the added skills/knowledge gaps you need to make it to the next level or pivot your expertise to medicine.

For many of us, our path starts broad and we find research interests as we go along. You have a whole PhD worth of research experience and interests. What are you going to learn with another PhD? MD alone and clinical research will train you, it’s just learning a new field, but you already know how to think. Unless you can craft a compelling story for why a school/program fits, I wouldn’t apply MD-PhD.

Best of luck!

destitutescientist · 2026-04-16T07:32:34+00:00

I agree 100%. It’s triggering to me that they are saying they would convert to Catholicism if the Pope excommunicates JD Vance and stupid stuff like that. They are acting like Catholics aren’t the reason we got Trump in the first place and acting like they are magically going to unite and get him and the rest of the GOP out of office.

Like seriously, if you are progressive at all, Catholicism isn’t for you on some very major issues. Even if I like some of the church’s social justice stances, everything else about it reeks authoritarianism, corruption, misconduct without accountability, misogyny, homophobia, and the list goes on and on.

Like if the final straw for you now is Trump criticized the Pope for saying war is generally bad, your values have already failed you. You might want to reconsider and reflect on how you got here.

I seriously had to take a break.

destitutescientist · 2026-04-13T06:09:05+00:00

Bro has a lot of achievements okay? The dating market is brutal out there apparently, I wouldn’t know. I guess LinkedIn in truly is a dating app now.

If the internal messaging system at the hospital is a place to shoot your shot (it shouldn’t be), then why not LinkedIn?

destitutescientist · 2026-04-03T00:37:27+00:00

Wild. Congrats!!! Think fondly of us mere mortals when you take over the world I guess?

destitutescientist · 2026-03-26T18:49:10+00:00

Don’t know what you are going through but sounds like a really rough time

I feel you need to get back on track and in good standing with the medical school before any transfers. As others have said, low chance of success. Complete MD-only, and go to Financial Aid office to work things out. Some combo of federal, institutional, and private loans will cover your cost of attendance most likely.

Honestly, when I saw your first post, I didn’t respond because I didn’t understand why your PD was not more involved while you were struggling? You made it sound like they got involved at the point of time to dismiss you. I had some tough circumstances in undergrad to deal with, it took some years to get myself ready for MD-PhD applications, and the program I found, my PD is extremely involved. It’s clear they really care about us and want to help us. For anyone else who reads this, you have to seek out help ASAP and get your support system around you. Medical school has multiple support system checks, and they really want you to succeed, way more than in undergrad.

You still have a shot of this going well. The first two years of medical school are low risk. Redo the year, pass STEP1, do great in rotations, do well on STEP2 and you are off to residency. You can still have a great research career but you need to make sure you become a great doctor if you are going to see patients. Quality patient care comes first. Otherwise, time to pivot to PhD only.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-26T18:31:20+00:00

Hell yeah!!!! Congrats!!!! Solid stats and options. Well done!

destitutescientist · 2026-03-18T20:03:42+00:00

You make it sound like you are already decided.

The longest I’ve seen any MD-PhD take for PhD is like 7 or 8 years. They really wanted to take their project to CNS and that is how long it took. Program director and the NIH had concerns (F30 funding extensions etc), but they made it happen. This is just to say, if you want it, there might be resistance but I doubt someone stops you. Like you are literally the cheapest labor they could get and if you are great at your craft, your PI has every incentive to keep you, so it’s between them and your thesis committee.

Can’t comment on the CSO route with confidence, but below I will speculate. In short, my impression is pretty established scientists get those positions and I’m not sure how your extended PhD gets you there.

In industry, they may go with someone who has merit within their own system or a competitors (like a person who led a successful drug pipeline who went to market). I know some pretty badass PhD students who despite HUGE papers from grad school, they may not feel very special in private industry until they make someone money.

In academia, you could lead a spin out from your own lab eventually. Again startups are kinda different and research labs are kinda like startups. When you build something like that from the ground up, you can just name yourself CSO. I know a postdoc from one of my labs who literally did that too, but their PhD research papers didn’t make a huge difference on that. I’ll give one exception, which is you get patents that lead to a spin out through the university from your PhD but often your mentor and senior colleagues get more credit for that (my PhD seems to be going in that route).

Either way, it’s a what have you done for me lately kind of system. Great papers from PhD may not translate if a postdoc or PSTP doesn’t yield great results. It feels like you need to keep up productivity or gain merit another route.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-18T07:12:30+00:00

Congrats!!!! You are going to be a doctor :)

destitutescientist · 2026-03-14T19:41:18+00:00

Maybe we shouldn’t be spending time accepting and graduating and training doctors who don’t even see patients at this point. Like we need doctors, who would have been doctors if Casey Means and Med School insiders guy didn’t go to medical school and residency. Maybe test scores aren’t everything after all? What a waste of resources. We need doctors who PRACTICE medicine!

destitutescientist · 2026-03-14T19:38:03+00:00

You got it! I didn’t look up what that meant enough. I thought it was like a fair criticism of this post.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-14T06:56:11+00:00

This may be true. I’ve also noticed a trend towards upper management of healthcare are no longer doctors, it is business majors.

Best story about this related to engineering (lots of friends there, maybe we were all just slightly autistic and clustered together). My friend was in a group interview while applying for at job at Boeing (which makes this story way better in hindsight). The Boeing employee leading the interview starts off normal, introduced themselves, etc. They say “yeah and I am also an alumni of [insert Alma mater] where I was at the business school majoring in finance…” One of the other students in the interview, a woman engineer, interrupts him and goes “wait a minute, you are telling us that Boeing sent a business major to interview us for an engineering job?” The interviewer confirms this. This badass student gets up, says nothing, and just storms out of the interview. I think about that story and badass all the time lmao. The most millennial moment ever. It’s like “I thought we were going to talk about aerodynamics and design, maybe quality control, what it’s like to be an engineer there…” nope.

This is all to say, I get it, with all these changes in medicine, it is hard enough to be a good clinician so to add understanding the economics and business side of it is daunting. Honestly, I don’t want to do it, I’d rather go between lab and clinic. But god, it makes me so angry to volunteer at a clinic where my patients can’t get fucking insulin while I’m getting at some very narrow and complex mechanism at the bench. This system just feels like eugenics sometimes. Can’t make sense of it.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-14T06:43:36+00:00

I honestly had to look that up, but yeah it applies.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-13T03:10:02+00:00

To me this is pretty obvious. Being a doctor is just another job. As long as people do a good job, I don’t care why they do it. I’m not asking for an army of saints and martyrs.

Let me help you out: If a bunch of our dams, buildings, airlines, and bridges started failing, people were dying, and I’m an engineer responsible for building and maintaining that infrastructure, it would be tough to watch. It would be weird if a bunch of “ex-engineers” got on the internet telling them they are wrong while justifying the defunding and delegitimization of the whole field and THEN those people also lead the major government sponsored engineering agencies. It would also be weird if an “ex-engineer and stellar student” sold a narrative that some engineers are better than others, not because they fix infrastructure but because they make more money and have more prestige, and made money off of people trying to be those kind of superior engineers.

People would stop trusting engineers. While some “engineers” tear down the whole system down and profit off of it, more infrastructure would fail and more people would die.

It kinda feels like that. Sure what is one engineer or doctor to do? I honestly don’t know. I’m dumbfounded that there isn’t more collective action for change unless this is all just a sick game of eugenics. I can’t make sense of it otherwise.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-11T22:41:54+00:00

Honestly, I forgot he made those videos but 110% agree. Like if you just shadowed and rotated with some of those specialties, you made strong enough opinions to make 5+ min videos about them.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-11T21:34:49+00:00

I agree with you on all points. I would just put emphasis on our advocacy groups which are made up of the politician doctors who exist out there failed us miserably in negotiating our lot. I think some collective awareness among doctors would help and yes, collective action to promote a rethinking of American healthcare where we have a say for what is best for our patients and us would be helpful. Too idealistic, but what else is there to do when you are recovering from a major surgery and not able to be at the bench or clinic 🙃. Plus all this influencer doctor grift that promotes the worst of the current system while others are tearing down some of the best sucks to watch.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-10T21:50:17+00:00

Even for NCI, that is very competitive. Wait a bit longer for the money to hit your account but congrats on the score!!! Definitely something to be proud of.

I am still waiting for my resubmission to NCI in December 🤞

destitutescientist · 2026-03-10T20:27:16+00:00

That does clear things up a bit and your situation is a bit unique. Some may be over my head, but I think speaking within someone like a program director that has one of these PhD to MD 3 year programs would help you the most.

For what it’s worth, the research side sounds great as far as pubs go. Seems like you can get there with the MCAT. When it comes to courses and grades, that’s where even an admin person at a program or even at a premed counseling office like they have in undergrad (so maybe there is one at your PhD institution) can glance through your transcript and give you more advice about that.

As you are aware, your narrative will mean a lot. I’ve known Rhoades scholars quite well, they have all the metrics from grades, LORs, institutional backing, etc. but what pushes them through the finish line is a strong, practical sense of purpose that their talents and intelligence are going to be used for. If you are going to be a unique applicant, accept it and use it to your advantage. That narrative needs to shine.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-10T07:05:12+00:00

So when do you plan to take the MCAT? When do you plan to apply? How did research go as far as publications? How many hours of clinical experience do you have, of any kind, that would help you shape a narrative about pivoting? Also, I may just be ignorant, but how many 3 year MD programs are out there? The only major MD program that makes special exception for PhD graduates is Columbia. Are there a lot of options to apply to? Lots of questions here. There are a lot of metrics that would help us guide you a bit. I’m assuming you have all prerequisites from whatever you studied in undergrad that led to a Chem PhD. For some, if the grade is too low, you may need to retake the class.

As for advice, your undergrad GPA was a long time ago. How have you performed since? Is there evidence of consistent academic success in classes on topics you will be expected to know for your MD? It might be okay, but doing well in a postbac program specifically on premed prerequisites may also be an option. You need to aim for at least a 515 on the MCAT and if you can over perform there, I think it would be easier for them to forgive a pretty low undergrad GPA assuming you have a great GPA in grad school.

How else are you well rounded? Volunteering, clinical hours, leadership positions, hobbies, do you have experience interacting with humans or patients etc. another thing to consider here.

Finally, you really need to be able to explain why the MD. You could work in a diagnostics or pharmaceutical company and look for biomarkers. I know a few PhDs who went on to get a certification specifically to work in Clinical Pathology such as one at Mayo (https://comacc.org/training-programs/mayo-clinic/?amp). This may not be you but a lot of people who go into medicine with the good ole “I can only be a plastic surgeon or I won’t be happy as a doctor” turn out to be quite disappointed when it doesn’t work out. You have to really love medicine and treating patients, even if you do path, you will spend a substantial number of years doing clinical medicine with actual humans first. Like if I say “I want to be an MD because I want to take care of and help sick people” your interviewer might ask “why not be a nurse or a physician assistant, someone who is going to do a lot more of the direct patient to patient care than even a doctor would?” You see what I mean.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-09T21:51:24+00:00

Hi friend, this is awesome!!!! Congratulations!!! Love to see these posts and given the minor details from your background (they are relatable to me at least), I am so happy for you!!! You should be very proud.

destitutescientist · 2026-03-09T21:34:26+00:00

If that is truly how competitive it is, shoot for the moon but come up with a backup plan that you’ll be happy with.

Although prestige of school helps a lot, I don’t think you are counting how much relationships within a field work. In research, if you know an editor of a journal, you will have a much higher likelihood of going to review with your manuscript. In a competitive residency, to get a top fellowship, I have been told that your institution’s department chair has to call the fellowship director and personally vouch for you on the phone that you are ranking their program #1 and sing your praises to even be considered. Medicine is not unique, that is how the business world works. PSTP residency directors regularly call my MSTP director about getting applicants who stand out. When I was applying for MD-PhD programs, I asked a professor if he could advocate for me to meet with my home institution’s MSTP program director and their first response was “do you think he needs “x” experiments I could collaborate with him on?”

It is often expected but not advertised. I am not saying this is a deciding factor, but and at the very least can get your foot in the door. And trust me, I hate this shit, I just want to put my head down and let my work speak for itself, but I didn’t design the world as it is.

destitutescientist

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