Rocky undergrad, then a hiccup in post-bacc

Hello everyone,

I have been a long listener to all of the podcasts and a frequent reader of the forum. I am so thankful for Dr. Gray and for this community, it has helped me so much! For the first time, I have come to a point where I am not sure what to do.

My situation… I joined the Army National Guard in 2005 where I had the opportunity to use education benefits to pursue school. School was never important; it was just something I was doing since I could do it for free. I went from being part time to full time in the Guard and spent a lot of time away, which did not help my GPA. By the time 2015 rolled around and I realized I wanted to become a physician, I was almost done with a psychology degree and had a cumulative GPA of 2.7 and a BCPM GPA of 2.0. This calling to become a physician is extremely powerful and so I decided to put away a thirteen-year career to focus on school with a full time civilian healthcare job. Since 2015 I have increased my cumulative GPA to 3.1 and my BCPM to 3.3. I have done this by working hard and getting straight As. I also have been doing all this with a wife and two kids.

It became too much for my wife and she left me and filed for divorce. We were married for 13 years so this event was devastating for me and she did this while I was in the middle of an Anatomy & Physiology class. I was not able to focus on my studying and couldn’t even bring myself to open my textbook. I talked to the school about withdrawing but it was too late. They told me that my best option would be to take a D in the class and retake the class using their grade replacement option. Little did I know that this D would stay on my transcript and the replacement would only be for my GPA with that institution. So now I have this rocky educational past with an obvious shift and upward trend, and then I get a D.

The real problem here is that I have been taking all of these classes online, therefore I am limited to only certain schools. Secondly, I can’t leave my home state of Arizona because I have two kids and I cannot leave them for four or more years, it would not be good for them. That means I am down to two schools in the state that I can apply to. My top school choice administers MMIs, so not sure how I could explain this situation and I feel like I would need to. Not an optimal situation to say the least. Did I just put the nail in my own coffin?

I appreciate any responses or any opinions, thank you so much!