Originally Posted by t.dot

Is it possible to maintain a GPA that's higher than 3.90 in biochem? Especially if you only got a 10.4 sessional average in first year in life sciences?

No, it's absolutely impossible to get that kind of average in biochem.
















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Like people above me have said, it's possible to get any average in any program. You just need to put in the effort.

I'm thinking of med school as well but i want to keep my option for pharmacy school and my friend told me that i should be in biochem if i want to get into pharmacy school. :s Thanks for your reply!

Originally Posted by kumara

I'm thinking of med school as well but i want to keep my option for pharmacy school and my friend told me that i should be in biochem if i want to get into pharmacy school. :s Thanks for your reply!

you definitely don't need to be in biochem to go into pharmacy. although uoft is changing their requirements for the 2010/2011 admission cycle, you can get it from any program provided you have the required courses. if you want to go to waterloo for pharm, it might even be better to NOT be in biochem because they have so many required courses, it's easier to be in bio or something where you have enough electives to get all the requirements without summer school.

for uoft's new requirements: http://pharmacy.utoronto.ca/programs...quirements.htm
for equivalent courses at mac, see attached file.

UW's requirements: http://www.pharmacy.uwaterlo o.ca/p.../academic.html

Originally Posted by kenneth526

No, it's absolutely impossible to get that kind of average in biochem.


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Like people above me have said, it's possible to get any average in any program. You just need to put in the effort.

hahaha, k. I was just wondering if it would be difficult or very stressful if i wanted to maintain a high gpa while maybe volunteering and participating in some extracurricular activities. And any advice for prospective biochem students?

Yep, it's very possible to balance biochem and extracurriculars. I know of at least 3 different biochem students who were a) either (H)CAs in residence and/or presidents of an MSU club b) pretty social people and c) are now currently in graduate school (so they had pretty good marks in undergrad). It gets stressful trying to maintain both at times but you got into the biochemistry and biomedical sciences program at McMaster, so you're obviously an intelligent student and can handle it =]

how does the workload compare to other science programs?(specificall y honours bio). it seems people are saying that the program is a lot of work, but is more in comparison to life science, bio etc.?

yes lol, it is a much much higher workload than honours bio thats not even a question, honestly though you cant just go to university, expect to take a bunch of bird courses cuz you wanna chill and take a 4 year breeze to pick up a degree and expect to get someone later

It's less about workload and more about content. Biochemistry is geared towards setting you up for research in biochemistry. If you don't have interest in biochemistry research (which involves reading papers and writing them too) then spare yourself the pain. You don't need to be in this program to go to medical school or pharmacy or anything for that matter other than biochemistry related research or biochemistry industry work.

i'm not exactly sure of what i like so I selected biochem as my program... but now i'm having doubts....

i really enjoyed chemistry in first year but didn't really like biology, but I think that's because first year biology content isn't that interesting. So I figured I wouldn't be happy doing only biology, but then I don't think I can do only chemistry either.

So I thought if I went into biochem i would get a mix of both... However, I'm not sure if I like spending so much time doing research and writing research papers... Medical school is also one of my goals. So would it be better to have taken honours bio (with physiology) and then taken some biochemistry and chemistry electives instead??? And would it still be possible to switch my programsss??

thankss

i was thinking the same thing, I was so sure that i would be fine in bio chem but then i had some doubts, so now i'm doing biopsych instead and hoping that i can switch into HOnour bio ( hopefully with physiology)