“I love the first day of school, man. Everyone all friendly and shit.” – The Wire

Vacation ends today. First thing tomorrow morning, we brave postbacs start organic chemistry. Surprisingly (or it will be to most of you), I’m looking forward to “orgo,” because it’s taught by our program’s academic director and hopefully won’t be the insanely tough class it sometimes can be.

My theory is this: organic chemistry is a “weeder” class for undergraduate premedical students not because the material is intrinsically impossible, but because it has simply evolved that way. If you consider what medical schools look at besides the MCAT, they check out your science GPA and then specifically your organic grade. Why? They could just as easily have mandated microbiology as a required class and used that as a benchmark. For some reason, organic chemistry specifically has evolved into the definitive scale for medical admission. I’m guessing that organic doesn’t need to be graded as strictly as it is, except to separate serious medical school candidates from the pretenders.

But with a postbac program, the people in charge of the program have already weeded out people who they don’t think can get in to medical school. If you get in to one of these programs, they believe you’re a serious medical school candidate. So by putting us all together in one organic section – no undergrads – we can get grades that are not measured against the poor souls undergoing the weeding treatment, and thus look more appealing to medical school.

At least, that’s my theory.

Besides that, we also start physics, physics lab, biology, biology lab, and a seminar led by our program director designed to shepherd us through the medical school application process. It’s going to be a crazy, crazy semester.

The journey continues….