If you need an online asynchronous pharmacology course, go here: https://www.dmacc.edu/programs/pdp/pre-pharmacy/Pages/online-pharmacology-class.aspx
If you want pre-med and college advising through the new 1-credit online course I teach, SDV 108, you can go here: https://www.dmacc.edu/schedule/Pages/result.aspx?Term=202401&Subject=SDV course 11395 I'm Anthony Guerra.
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Everyone knows you can save a ton of money going to community college instead of a four year school, but do schools look down on it? While some do, Harvard accepts community college classes, so it's reasonable under our current economic conditions that it's a good choice.
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Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, pharmacist and author of the Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet, or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/p/mobile. Let’s get started with the show.
Hey, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. Our pharmacology course is half full here at Des Moines Area Community College for fall, so as you’re going through summer, if you feel like you may not make it, see if you can’t enroll again. It only takes a day. You just become a guest student, but you’re welcome to sign up for pharmacology there if you are maybe pre-med or pre-pharmacy or pre-something.
This fall is the first time I’m going to be teaching SDV 108, which is Student Development 108: The College Experience. It’s normally like an orientation course to the college, but because I’ve always helped pre-professional students, whether it’s PT school or pharmacy school or med school and all that stuff, a lot of those students like to join me. So it’s SDV 108 and it’s section WWT. If you want to get that kind of advice about what courses to take and those types of things, I can help you there. It’s just a one-credit online class and anybody can take it.
Something I’ll talk about a little bit more as well is cross enrollment, which is if you are a full-time student at DMACC, you’re welcome to take one course up to three credits at Drake, Iowa State, or Grandview in the fall and spring semester. And what that does is it makes not only their advisors available to you, you get I think even an email to the college, but what it allows you to do is kind of one, see if that’s maybe a college that you’d like to go to to finish up your four years, but what it also does is it reduces the limit. So when you’re applying or going to another four-year school, there’s only so many classes you can take at a community college and I think it’s around 64 credits. And what this does is it gives you four-year degree credits and so that means that if you were to do that for three semesters, let’s say, that would be nine fewer credits that nine more credits you could take at community college because you took them at a four-year school. And again, those courses are free if you take them at the other college.
So what I wanted to get into now is the actual pre-med curriculum. I think there’s a lot of confusion about it and so what I’m going to do is I’m going to actually show you the courses that you would take here at DMACC. And again, you have to be very careful because each med school is a little bit different and you’re going to apply to probably I think the average is about 15 med schools that people apply to. So you kind of start with your first choice and make sure that you’ve kind of taken enough courses for most of them. And I’ll go through it but I’ll show you what two years of pre-med would look like at a community college.
So let’s just open up this Excel file and what I’ve done is I’ve put them all in four semesters. I wouldn’t recommend this. This is a very very challenging experience and what I’m going to do after I talk to you about the DMACC pre-med classes is I’m going to show you the exact courses I actually took and the way it actually worked out for me which was not this clean. This makes it look like you just go for four semesters then you go and get a four-year degree and all as well. This will get you an associate of science two-year degree here at DMACC but again 17 credit classes with these types of classes are very challenging. I would spread it out and I’ll talk about that a little bit.
So let’s start with the first and second semester: The College Experience or SDV 108, the class that I’m teaching this fall. I definitely think that you should take this class really early on because it ensures you’re taking the right classes. You’re not taking too many or too few, and you’ve got somebody that you can talk to every single week about your courses. As your thinking changes, you can also talk to your instructor about that.
The first thing we usually talk about is General Chemistry one and two. This is why you would want to take it in your first year of college and this is why you wouldn’t. If you took AP Chemistry and you just never took the test, or you had a really good experience with chemistry in high school and you’re very strong at math, then yeah, take Gen Chem. But if you don’t feel so strong about math or college, then I might hold off on taking Gen Chem until later.
Even Iowa State, which is where more students from DMACC go than any other public college in this state, considers Organic Chemistry a junior level class. So you could take Gen Chem here in the second year and then take Organic up there. Or you could take classes at both. There’s nothing that says that once you’re done with Community College, you have to go and only take classes at a four-year school. I’ve actually done some overlap and that sometimes is even better. We’re only 25 minutes apart so if you live in the middle, it’s 15 minutes to each.
But General Chemistry one, General Chemistry two, Chem 165, 175, here’s where it gets a little bit goofy with General Biology one and two because some of the schools want you to have Anatomy and Physiology and some of them are just like just have a Biology class or a specific class and some of them even want Genetics and things like that. But I’m just putting the General Biology one and General Biology two here just so you can see them.
Calculus is a bit of a difficult thing to put in the first semester because many students are not ready to take Calculus first semester. I had already taken it in the summer of my junior year as an audit and then I took it again in the fall and I passed it. And then I really struggled with Calculus two and I’ll talk about my story later but generally either Calculus one or Statistics, you know, you can pick which one. Statistics would probably be a better freshman year class or first semester Freshman Class than Calculus one.
And then maybe you’ve already taken Sociology or something like that again so important to have someone in your corner just kind of talking you through everything making sure that everything that you’ve done in high school aligns with what you’re doing in college and so forth.
The second year would be Organic Chemistry one, Organic Chemistry two, General Physics one, General Physics two and this is the non-Calculus based Physics that I’m talking about. And then Intro to Psych, Intro to Ethics, and then Principles of Microeconomics and fundamentals of world communication, again, these hit all of the requirements for an associate of science degree. You might ask why I’m saying AES and not AA. Well, the Associate of Arts is really more humanities-based and pre-med is super science-based. So, an associate of science tends to hit all of the things. This is the same for pre-pharmacy, pre-physical therapy, and some other things like that.
The reason I talked about cross-enrollment is because we don’t have biochemistry as a junior year class here. But in that situation where you’ve got cross-enrollment, you would be able to take biochemistry at Iowa State University, which I believe is only three credits without the lab. Often they don’t even want the lab one, they just want that you’ve taken biochemistry. That is a possibility and I believe you would actually take the class for free although you’d have to pay for your own books.
Here’s where it comes down to biology. Does the school want anatomy and phys1, anatomy and phys2? Are you thinking about a biology degree? Those are each four credits, micro was four credits. Then I teach a pharmacology class because it’s amazing that you take so many classes for pre-med but so few of them actually help you with medical school. Biochemistry would, pharmacology would to some extent, organic chemistry does to some extent, psych does but really many of the classes have very little to do with the actual course content you’ll have in med school.
Many of the students that I have also are either going to be nursing majors or they’re thinking about physician assistant. But that’s what it looks like on the page where you’re going to have four semesters get your two-year degree all as well. I’m going to show you what it really looks like.
This is what pre-med really looks like, well at least it did for me. Don’t worry about the years, it’s a long time ago but it’s actually amazingly the same. The summer that I was between my junior and senior year I thought I might want to be an engineer. I thought might want to be a physician again. I really didn’t know what these were as I have nobody in my family that was in these professions. My parents were both in computers and I just said okay well let me go see what a college class is like.
I’d never been in a college classroom before and I audited calculus one where I would go to class. I didn’t take the tests, I could have if I wanted to but the reason why I audited it was because I had an engineering camp in the middle of classes and so there’s no way I would have passed the class if I had taken it for credit.
So by auditing it, I got to know a little bit about courses and that made things a lot easier in the fall. I’d already been in the class, I kind of knew what was going on and then I ended up with a B but then I’d never gotten anything lower than a C.
I did get a D in my midterm but I brought it up to a C in one time but I’d never gotten anything below a C and all of a sudden I got an F in calculus 2. That’s a really bad thing for two reasons and it was unnecessary.
Firstly, I recognized that I was not passing the class early enough that I could have withdrawn so the most important thing I can tell you here is that it’s better to take a W than it is to take an F.
If you look at the rest of my courses you’ll see I’ve taken three W’s no F’s because I learned my lesson and maybe I had to learn my lesson that way but taking a five credit F is a really bad thing if you know and and did manage to get out of it by doing so well on the entrance exam.
Let me talk more about this in a little bit so then I go on to four-year School in the University of Florida and you know Three B’s and two two A’s.
I did well in chemistry and micro and my honors class and then brought my calculus one grade up to an A. You might ask why did you take that again didn’t you already take calculus? And yes, indeed, did and thought that well maybe what happened with Calculus 2 was i didnt “Learn it well enough,” I said. "Alright, let me take it again and see if I’ve learned it better. Maybe that’s the thing, but I found out that’s not really the case. What had happened was, I just wasn’t focused. It was my senior year of high school. I just wasn’t as focused as I needed to be to pass a course like that. So, I’ll talk about when I did actually pass it later. Okay, let me maybe make these a little bit bigger. I think it’s a little bit tough to see at the font I’m working at right now.
So there we go. Now you can kind of see them a little bit better and I can make that even bigger there. Alright, so that was my experience in first semester. I did well, it was about a 3.4 or 3.5 GPA, I think it was closer to a 3.4. Then I really struggled in the spring and I learned from that calculus mistake that okay, when you’re struggling and you’ve got a lot of responsibilities in a semester, then maybe it’s time to let something go.
What I did was, I said okay well, I’m actually enjoying this bio lab. It’s tough to take the lab without the course but I still got a C plus and chem lab, I got a C plus and Kim, I got a B. So again, I was struggling a bit with chemistry. I realized that maybe that was too many credits and you know, I took the honors class, took the writing class, did okay but again it was more like uh…I think it was maybe a 2.9 or a 3.1 somewhere around there but it was not a good GPA compared to the 3.4.
But again, I persisted and kept going and my GPA was not ruined by failing biology; that was the key. Okay so then then you know, I realized that man having all those labs was just absolutely devastating so I was like, ‘I’m going to take a semester with no labs.’ So integrated bio one wasn’t…I already taken the lab so I got a C Plus organic, got a B and organic was a bear but the way they do it at Florida is they put the two lab credits in the second semester none in the first.
Then I had my honors class uh…General psych, did okay and then stats…I really struggled with stats…the math…I just understood calculus better than stats and it just was a thing where I just wasn’t that great at it.
Okay and then this was my really bad semester and I think a lot of us have this where you know it’s just fatigue…I think whereas just like man…I really don’t know where I’m going…I don’t know that um…this pre-med journey or pre-professional journey is something I really want…I don’t even really have a major…I think my major was chemistry if you were to like look at my transcript.
And see what’s his major? I think it was chemistry but I really didn’t know what was going on and this was just a survival semester so…I got a C in BIO two, C in bio2 lab, D plus an organic two, C in the lab, C plus in philosophy class and…I was just like…I cannot do physics on top of all of this.
So that was really really a low point and two things had me move: first the University of Florida if you’re an honor student you get what was At least at the time, I had an out-of-state tuition waiver, so I was paying in-state prices. And at in-state prices, it was better and cheaper to go to Florida than it was to go to my home school of Maryland. But then once that tuition waiver was gone, Maryland actually became a little bit cheaper. But the other thing was I kind of needed a fresh start. I needed a new environment and I was like, you know what, let’s do this over and see how I can do. Okay, so I transferred to the University of Maryland College Park.
And you know, you say, okay, well, they’re going to go easy on you or whatever. No, absolutely not. This is my first semester at the University of Maryland: organic chemistry 2. I had to retake the lab because although I passed the lab, organic chemistry doesn’t come without a lab at Maryland, so I had to take that. I took calculus 2 and then I took the first semester of a three-semester calculus-based physics. You don’t have to do that for med school. I just didn’t know. I’m like, well, maybe I’ll still be an engineer. It just took me on my third year to get to calculus 2. I mean, I was taking calculus and organic and physics and I took them all in the same semester. And then I took intro to theater. And I think it’s crazy that I get a B in theater and I get a B in organic, right? And calculus and physics. Like, I’m really proud of that 3.0. Like, it was, I recovered from my bad fourth semester there at Florida. I was back on the right track and all that stuff.
And right around here was when I kind of discovered that maybe I’m going to try other health professions. And that’s when I looked into physical therapy and physician assistant and pharmacy. And with pharmacy, I could actually go to a pharmacy on campus and volunteer. And that’s what ended up being my major.
So I ended up going in spring and signing up for the other physics that I had to take. But then this happens to a lot of people: you’re like, well, I’ve already kind of taken everything. So all I was doing was saying if I don’t get into pharmacy school, I’m still going to want to get a degree. And I could still get a BA in chemistry or a BA or a BS in biology. So I still was on track to get a degree of some kind or another.
And what I did was: I took my Shakespeare and took my required English class or literature class and took microbiology because even if I don’t need it, I can still take it. And I actually really enjoyed micros like one of the very few A’s I got in my college career. But for some reason microbiology is very hands-on, very great. We had a great teaching assistant, great professor. I really enjoyed it.
Physics was still a struggle and I made the shift: I was like, “I am not taking calculus-based physics again.” Like, “I really just…my engineering dreams were dashed.” Like “Okay, I’m not getting a BS in chemistry,” which is different than a BA. “I’m not getting…not going to become an engineer.” Let’s just take the non-calculus based physics 2 and move on.
And then also took biochemistry and what happened was: “I got my acceptance so early that” “I was like well” “I don’t really need biochem.” “I can still go to class but” “I don’t need the stress of trying to pass biochem and physics at the same time.” And “I was really worried about not passing physics.” So this may seem strange but it’s better to withdraw from a class that you aren’t going to pass and pass the one that you need so that you can keep moving forward because if “I hadn’t passed physics” “I either would have to take it in summer if they would conditionally accept me or” “I might have to wait another year.” So “I was like alright well let’s let’s just go to biochem class” “I’m not gonna” “I’m just gonna audit it.” And “I must not have filled out the paperwork to audit it.” “I meant to audit it but” “I ended up withdrawing from it.” And then B in Shakespeare, A in micro, C in physics and then “I made it on to pharmacy school.” At least at the time, I had an out-of-state tuition waiver, so I was paying in-state prices. And at in-state prices, it was better and cheaper to go to Florida than it was to go to my home school of Maryland. But then once that tuition waiver was gone, Maryland actually became a little bit cheaper. But the other thing was I kind of needed a fresh start. I needed a new environment and I was like, you know what, let’s do this over and see how I can do. Okay, so I transferred to the University of Maryland College Park.
And you know, you say, okay, well, they’re going to go easy on you or whatever. No, absolutely not. This is my first semester at the University of Maryland: organic chemistry 2. I had to retake the lab because although I passed the lab, organic chemistry doesn’t come without a lab at Maryland, so I had to take that. I took calculus 2 and then I took the first semester of a three-semester calculus-based physics. You don’t have to do that for med school. I just didn’t know. I’m like, well, maybe I’ll still be an engineer. It just took me on my third year to get to calculus 2. I mean, I was taking calculus and organic and physics and I took them all in the same semester. And then I took intro to theater. And I think it’s crazy that I get a B in theater and I get a B in organic, right? And calculus and physics. Like, I’m really proud of that 3.0. Like, it was, I recovered from my bad fourth semester there at Florida. I was back on the right track and all that stuff.
And right around here was when I kind of discovered that maybe I’m going to try other health professions. And that’s when I looked into physical therapy and physician assistant and pharmacy. And with pharmacy, I could actually go to a pharmacy on campus and volunteer. And that’s what ended up being my major.
So I ended up going in spring and signing up for the other physics that I had to take. But then this happens to a lot of people: you’re like, well, I’ve already kind of taken everything. So all I was doing was saying if I don’t get into pharmacy school, I’m still going to want to get a degree. And I could still get a BA in chemistry or a BA or a BS in biology. So I still was on track to get a degree of some kind or another.
And what I did was: I took my Shakespeare and took my required English class or literature class and took microbiology because even if I don’t need it, I can still take it. And I actually really enjoyed micros like one of the very few A’s I got in my college career. But for some reason microbiology is very hands-on, very great. We had a great teaching assistant, great professor. I really enjoyed it.
Physics was still a struggle and I made the shift: I was like, “I am not taking calculus-based physics again.” Like, “I really just…my engineering dreams were dashed.” Like “Okay, I’m not getting a BS in chemistry,” which is different than a BA. “I’m not getting…not going to become an engineer.” Let’s just take the non-calculus based physics 2 and move on.
And then also took biochemistry and what happened was: “I got my acceptance so early that” “I was like well” “I don’t really need biochem.” “I can still go to class but” “I don’t need the stress of trying to pass biochem and physics at the same time.” And “I was really worried about not passing physics.” So this may seem strange but it’s better to withdraw from a class that you aren’t going to pass and pass the one that you need so that you can keep moving forward because if “I hadn’t passed physics” “I either would have to take it in summer if they would conditionally accept me or” “I might have to wait another year.” So “I was like alright well let’s let’s just go to biochem class” “I’m not gonna” “I’m just gonna audit it.” And “I must not have filled out the paperwork to audit it.” “I meant to audit it but” “I ended up withdrawing from it.” And then B in Shakespeare, A in micro, C in physics and then “I made it on to pharmacy school.”
I had worked in such difficult classes though because the Pharmacy College admissions test only tested calculus one and really mostly first semester organic chemistry. And I was so far ahead of that that I scored a 99th percentile overall. It’s unusual for someone to be so strong in English as I was but I just had you know kind of a passion for it. So I did really well on my entrance exam. And this is back when it was harder to get into pharmacy school than Medical School. The numbers were much higher.
Believe it or not, back in the late 80s, there was actually a glut of Physicians. That is, there were too many Physicians and it just was not necessarily the most desirable field to get into as it is now. You have to have a 3.8 cumulative, 3.5 or 3.6 overall when you’re looking at med school as far as the GPA.
But this is what I want to show you is that since I was kind of a chemistry major and maybe I would have ended up being a chemistry teacher or biology teacher and I was gonna finish that chemistry degree but then I did four years of pharmacology or pharmacy school. I’m like well, I already kind of did a chemistry degree like do I really want to finish that? And so I decided much later that you know I would like to finish my bachelor’s degree but I really did like the Shakespeare class and the writing classes and the theater class and all that stuff.
So let’s take a look at my English major which I did finish at Iowa State which is an engineering school. It’s just so funny. But I want you to look at the grades: the only A- I received in my English classes was in grammar. So you know my inability to do those, I just could not put grammar together in a way that I could get the full A.
And so when you’re looking at the best major for pre-med, the reality is that many of us are going to struggle with those chemistry classes right? And this hard science is and there’s a reason they’re called the hard Sciences.
But what I did was in that second half of things is I got all A’s. So if you were to add up all of my grades, basically, I had about a 3.0 from undergrad first and second year and then I had almost a four point on the second. I would have been around a 3.5. And yeah, I would have been on the way low side of things but my strength has always been in test taking.
So if I had taken the MCAT, I think it would have done well. The reason I can say that is that I did take the GRE and I scored in the 98th percentile in English and the 87th percentile in math which is really really unusual usually like the engineers scored 99 in math and like you know low on English and then the English major score high on English but low in math.
So, by completing an English degree by completing a hard science degree, everything came out a lot better. And then now, looking at my life, now, I’m really more of an author and a teacher because of these classes that I took in the liberal arts.
There are a couple of things I did want to talk about with this degree is that some of the courses I took here when as a community college professor because I was like huh, “I get to take free classes.” And “I’d always been interested in taking literature.” So “I started taking some lit classes creative writing classes” um just you know when “I wasn’t working.”
And then “I also was like well” “I have to get this language requirement.” And “I don’t remember if there was a language requirement with this particular college with Iowa state but” “I was like okay well” “let me just see if” “I can pass the test.” And so “the CLEP test” “I spoke enough Spanish” “that” “I was able to get through immediate intermediate Spanish too.” And “I got those 12 credits for a hundred dollars.” Like “that was all” “I needed to do.”
But again, “I think” “the combination of taking a course” “the pre-med coursework with a major like English or history or those types of things which actually have a much higher acceptance rate than med school than biology major does.” It makes you much more balanced and it makes things a lot easier because there are other things you also need to be able to do in that med application which is you need to be good at the interview, you need to be good in writing your letter and all of those things. And obviously, an English major is going to write an amazing med school letter.
So, I’ll go back to that page of the DMACC as and kind of maybe shrink it up a little bit so you can see it all on one page. But really, this whole idea that people actually complete this in this way is unusual. It’s much more likely that a rising junior senior in high school is going to have completed many of these classes. You want to kind of look at them in a way that is going to work well with your school.
And so the last thing I wanted to point out was there’s always that kind of talk about, do colleges take Community College classes? And this is the AAMC document guidance documents for 2024 and here’s the University of Iowa and they say we have no problem with Community College classes. That’s fine, you go ahead and take them. You say okay well that’s Iowa, that’s a state school, that’s fine. What about more prestigious schools? Alright, let’s look at Harvard. Harvard said Community College classes, those will be just fine. That’ll be great. Online courses maybe not. Community College classes yeah if you go to them that’s great.
So when you’re looking at the colleges or Med schools that you’re looking at it’s actually much more rare that a college would not want Community College classes because community colleges represent if you’re a minority student we represent half of minority students going into college like we’re just much more diverse we just are. Many reasons socioeconomic for one of them but there are many reasons why we have that.
But the other thing is I just don’t know why you would want to take an organic chemistry class where you have 300 people in the class versus where you have 24 people in the class. I mean that you literally would it is impossible in a DMACC for you to be more than 30 feet from the professor like you physically cannot like you would have to leave the room.
Like I just don’t understand why you would want to be all the way back in an organic chemistry class trying to pass that class in a much larger section. So I understand why some people might say oh well it’s easier well it’s easier because it’s easier to get help there’s only one Professor. I mean maybe there’s a bunch of TAs but how long have they been teaching? All the professors here we don’t have grad students here we all are have doctorates and so forth.
So I just think that I’m really bullish on Community College as a way to get these classes and to move in especially with the way things have been going with expenses and things. I mean seriously 175 dollars a credit hour, you can go to college here for less than five thousand dollars a year so your total cost of tuition is less than ten thousand dollars here to get a degree. For some of you, that’s a quarter or a semester or a part of a semester.
So again I’m you know, I really think it’s a great opportunity that you can have taking community college credits. And one last thing that I want to point out is, as I was doing this pre-med thing, I wasn’t like, “I’m gonna be a doctor, burn the ships,” and all of that. I was saying, “I might want to be an engineer physician.” And then as I’m kind of going through this, I’m like, “Well, I’m struggling and I’m learning how to do this. Maybe I might want to be a teacher,” which I ended up being eventually. So maybe I could be a chemistry teacher or biology teacher or something like that, maybe even a math teacher. I finally get through calculus three which I heard is easier in calculus two.
So you know, I know I went to almost 30 minutes in this episode but I really just wanted to let you know that when you’re thinking about pre-med, don’t feel like everybody actually gets it right. Like that you never see what other people do. It’s actually much different and it’s actually probably a much more zigzag path than it is just this straight and narrow take these classes go to med school live a perfect life and so forth.
So need my help? Well, Tony the pharmacist at gmail.com happy to help you out. Thanks for listening to the memorizing pharmacology podcast. You can find episodes cheat sheets and more at memorizingfarm.com. Again, you can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile. Thanks again for listening.
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