can I get into medical school if I'm bad at math? -- Virtually Advising Q+A

The Q: I am currently taking college algebra. I get A's on the homework, but when it comes to test time, I can't seem to get it together. If I can manage to pass all the way through calculus so I can take physics, will lower grades in math hurt me when I apply to med school? I get A's in all my other premed courses and my psychology major courses, and mostly A's in my general requirements. Also, why are math and physics so important for medical school? I know that, statistically, women can be mathematically challenged. Could this account for why there are so many more male doctors?

The A: Actually, if you check out the recent med-school admissions stats at www.aamc.org, you'll see that more and more women are entering medical school -- indeed, in recent years the percentages have been about 50/50 in entering classes. In my opinion, the reason we have more male doctors at the moment is because for years, med-school admissions processes and college science curricula have been biased towards men, and women have been told they'd make better nurses than doctors. A lack of innate math skills doesn't seem to have much to do with it!

While math and physics are important parts of the premed curriculum, once you get to med school their importance -- thankfully -- seems to fade. Honestly, I sweated those subjects in college too, but found that after the MCAT was over I could breathe easy. There are applications of physics to such areas as nuclear medicine, pharmacology/pharmacokinetics and the physiology of the circulatory system (blood flow through vessels, etc.), but as a practicing physician you generally don't need to know the concepts or formulas in detail. Usually a professor just glosses over a formula (say, the formula predicting rate of blood flow through a certain diameter blood vessel) during a med-school lecture and that'll be the end of it.

The same could be said of organic chemistry. You sweat it as a premed student, and med-school admissions committees like to use it as a predictor (not a good one, either) of how someone will do in med school, but beyond that you really don't have to use it much.

Are women doctors at a handicap because of their decreased math/physics abilities? I don't believe so. Women are supposed to be different from men in terms of their spatial reasoning, and I think that may come into play more for women surgeons than women in other fields of medicine, but I have never felt myself to be at a handicap. And I wasn't an outstanding math or physics student in college either!

My advice would be to try to get through these classes with the best possible grades. B's probably won't be questioned, but C's will have to be explained to admissions committees (although you can still get in with one or two of them). I recommend you take the time to figure out why you just aren't "getting" math as a subject, and what you need to do to fix it. Is it more one-on-one time with the teaching assistant or with the professor? Do you freeze or panic on exams? Try joining a study group when you do your problem solving, to see how other students are thinking about problems. Also consider meeting with an academic adviser or counselor on campus to talk about these issues in detail, and to get more specific advice on how you can overcome them.

Hope this helped,

—Anna Kaltsas, Premed Advisor

This response was written on June 5, 2006.