It’s a seemingly age-old question: which of Brown’s general chemistry courses should first-semester pre-medical students take?
This choice, some pre-med students say, matters much more than you may think.
Most medical schools require students to take general chemistry and organic chemistry, each for at least two semesters and all with a lab component, according to Brown’s Health Careers Advising website.
Currently, Brown’s Department of Chemistry offers two introductory general chemistry courses: CHEM 0100: “Introductory Chemistry” and CHEM 0330: “Equilibrium, Rate, and Structure.” Pre-medical students will typically take one of these during their first semester at Brown.
All students are eligible to take CHEM 0100 as their first chemistry course. But in order to skip straight to CHEM 0330 — a more advanced course — students must either complete a placement test or be placed into the course based on their Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate chemistry scores.
Students who elect to take CHEM 0100 will typically then take CHEM 0330 sometime in the next two semesters. Once CHEM 0330 has been completed, students can move onto the organic chemistry sequence.
But CHEM 0350: “Organic Chemistry I” is only offered in the spring, meaning that students who elected to take CHEM 0100 their first semester must wait until their sophomore spring to take the course. Then, students will take CHEM 0360: “Organic Chemistry II,” which is only offered in the fall. That means students who started at CHEM 0100 will not complete the organic chemistry sequence until their junior fall.
They will be one year behind students who took CHEM 0330 their first semester and began organic chemistry their first-year spring. This puts CHEM 0100 enrollees behind their peers who continued with the chemistry sequence after starting with CHEM 0330.
Noa Brown ’26, who plans to apply to medical school after taking a gap year, decided to self-study for the chemistry placement test in order to take CHEM 0330 in the fall of her first year. The University offers an online tutorial program to help students prepare for the placement exam.
“I was definitely very intimidated to enter a class like (CHEM 0330),” Noa Brown said. “Looking back, I don’t regret it, per se, but CHEM 0330 was a very, very challenging class for me and definitely difficult to navigate as a freshman who’s overwhelmed by everything else.”
Over 50% of students in CHEM 0360 this semester are sophomores. First-years comprise over 80% of students in CHEM 0330, according to Courses@Brown.
Many medical schools also require or recommend that students take one semester of biochemistry. Pre-med students at Brown will typically take BIOL 0280: “Biochemistry” after completing CHEM 0360 the fall before.
Although CHEM 0350 is the only requirement for BIOL 0280, both courses are only offered in the spring, so most pre-medical students will have to wait at least a year after completing CHEM 0350 to take BIOL 0280.
Students who take CHEM 0100 their first semester will likely take BIOL 0280 the spring of their junior year — typically one year after peers who took CHEM 0330 their first-year fall.
When deciding which chemistry course to take her first-year fall, Noa Brown said that some upperclassmen warned her against CHEM 0100, as it can introduce many challenges to the pre-med timeline.
“I didn’t want to preclude myself from all of my options in my first semester as a student here,” she added.
Sean Treichler ’25 emphasized that students who choose to take CHEM 0100 will likely have to take a gap year between undergraduate and medical school due to the Medical College Admission Test.
Students hoping to attend medical school directly after graduating from Brown are recommended to take the MCAT sometime before or during their junior year to then submit their application materials that spring.
“You can start the application process without an MCAT score but we recommend that you have a score by mid-June of the year when you will apply,” the Health Careers Advising website reads.
Because biochemistry is one of the four subjects tested on the MCAT, most students wait until completing BIOL 0280 before sitting for the exam.
According to the HCA website, the majority of students attending medical school in the U.S. have taken at least one gap year.
Treichler, who plans to take a gap year, took CHEM 0330 his first-year fall. But he noticed a “culture of them feeling behind” among some students who chose to take CHEM 0100.
Lily Budnick ’26, who took CHEM 0100, said she didn’t notice any drawbacks from taking the course. Instead, Budnick thinks that her decision allowed her to take CHEM 0350 when she was more prepared and already had a year of college under her belt.
But Budnick was disappointed that her decision to take CHEM 0100 limited her ability to study abroad her junior year. While many students who took CHEM 0330 had finished their chemistry requirements by the end of her sophomore year, Budnick will not finish BIOL 0280 until her junior spring.
If she decided to study abroad her junior year, she would not have been able to finish the chemistry sequence and biochemistry until her senior year — which would likely require her to take at least two gap years to prepare for the MCAT.
Noa Brown wondered if offering additional small sections of the organic chemistry courses each semester would provide opportunities for the students who want to take the MCAT in time to avoid taking a gap year.
Students’ complaints with the chemistry sequence are nothing new. In 2016, students created a petition calling on the University to offer CHEM 0350 and CHEM 0360 during both semesters. But the chemistry department is “limited in the number of labs we can offer in any given semester,” said Amit Basu, a chemistry professor and the director of the chemistry undergraduate program.
Labs have to be conducted in spaces with the proper safety and ventilation equipment, and there needs to be “proper staffing in terms of instructors and (teaching assistants) for each of those sections,” Basu added.
Offering CHEM 0350 and CHEM 0360 at the same time would involve “two sets of experiments that would be using the same space and often the same instrumentation,” Basu explained. “Doing two different sets of labs in the same space with the same analytical instruments is simply not possible.”
While most medical schools require two semesters of general chemistry with a lab component, “the majority of medical schools accept the intensive CHEM 0330 course to fulfill their general/inorganic chemistry requirements,” Ginger Fisher, the assistant dean of the College for pre-professional advising, wrote in an email to The Herald.
But some students are still concerned that taking CHEM 0330 — and thus only fulfilling one of the two required semesters of general chemistry — will negatively affect how their application is viewed by medical schools.
CHEM 0330 is a one-semester course because CHEM 0330 students typically have a background in chemistry from high school or CHEM 0100 and will have “covered the material that is seen in a general chemistry sequence,” Basu explained.
Earlier this year, Noa Brown communicated to HCA that she was unsure about whether her coursework would fulfill certain medical schools’ chemistry requirements. She was advised to reach out to the schools to ask if their specific admissions policies would accept the University’s CHEM 0330 course or would still require an additional general chemistry course.
This “is not a personal problem for me, (as if) I did something at Brown that is different from the norm,” she said. “It’s an institutional issue, so I would have expected that there would be sort of an institutional response to help students.”
HCA, which assists pre-med students with their medical school applications, shares a cover letter with each applicant’s schools to explain the University’s curriculum, Fisher wrote.
“If a school has asked for more information (about Brown’s chemistry sequence), our office reaches out to them directly to explain the curriculum at Brown,” she added. “If none of these options would work for a student, they could take an additional chemistry course at Brown or at another institution.”
Among Treichler’s friends who are currently applying to medical school, any problems related to the University’s chemistry sequence have “not been brought up, so I don’t think it’s an issue,” he said.
“Changing a set of introductory sequences is not a small lift, right?” Basu said, noting that the current curriculum has been in place for fifteen or twenty years. Such a change would include “making sure we have the lab space and the staffing to do that, but it’s certainly something we’re constantly looking at.”
Kate Rowberry is a senior staff writer at The Herald.
