I am almost finished with my UC Davis secondary application. All my extra essays are written (seven of them), my three most significant experiences are listed and explained (unnecessarily redundant!), and all I have left to do is enter my required coursework. My obstacle?
Inconsistency.
First, UC Daivs counts in quarters, not in semesters. Thus, the minimum units they list for pre-requisites are much larger numbers than I could ever hope to achieve with my semester units. The provide a conversion factor for semester "hours" to quarter "units" and ask for "units", but concede that each school counts "credit" in their own way. I decided it would be safest to put whatever is on my transcript on my application, so I went with that. That and an email to them with a calendar reminder set up to call them first thing tomorrow morning.
When looking on their admissions page for more information about this, their required coursework is described in number of semesters. So while under the unit/hour/credit count I would be 1.5 units shy of the upper division biology requirement (because that course was only 3 semester hours, but they want 6 quarter units. The conversion gives me 4.5 quarter units), according to their web site, all I need is one semester of upper division biology, which I actually have. But not enough...units.
Thus far I've encountered 3 different ways for measuring how much work I did. Isn't that nice.
Also, the categories given to me to satisfy requirements are, for example, "Organic Chemistry w/lab". All you Cal students out there know that this categorization is problematic considering lecture and lab are two separate classes, for which you receive two different grades. This is the same for one semester of general biology, but not the other. Again, to resolve this I just entered them separately like it is on my transcript, but it does not exactly match the called-for format.
Finally, another thing potentially very relevant to my fellow Golden Bears regards the one year requirement of General Chemistry. The Career Center's website very calmly claims that most students take one semester of general chemistry (Chem 1A), two semesters of Organic Chemistry (Chem 3A/L and 3B/L), and then one semester of Biochemistry (MCB 102). This is where the Career Center starts to get potentially very very wrong. They go on to claim that in order to fulfill the typical one year of General Chem and one year of Organic Chem required by (most, not all of course) medical schools, students usually use the one semester of Gen Chem and the first semester of O-chem to count for the first year of Gen Chem, and the second semester of O-Chem and the one semester of Biochemistry to count for the one year of Organic Chemistry. That makes huge amounts of sense, right? Yeah, I thought so too.
Then UC Davis throws you a curveball and asks you for "Organic Chemistry w/lab". First of all, the problem above applies. Further, if you tried to use Biochem in this category, there is no lab. Woo hoo! Go Career Center! UC Davis also requires an additional upper division biology course, without lab, for which they suggest, you guessed it, biochemistry. Luckily genetics also qualifies, which I'm taking now, so if they let me do this requirement shuffling I won't have to take Chem 4A. But you know what? This seems to be the case on all the secondaries I've examined thus far. So thank you, Berkeley advisers, for living up to your infamy.
Needless to say, spending two hours figuring out just how to do the mindless data entry sort of burned me out for the night medical-school wise. And the bottom line? I'm probably going to be taking Chemistry 4A next semester. Along with an R1A class. So many freshmen to meet! And 18 units to earn.
(Avett Brothers anyone?)
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