Advice please for Best Degree for CAA Route

[Hotdogman1]

I realize you are focused on a certain pathway, but I wanted to mention the importance of the recency of clinical experience. As a former Anesthesia technician, you have clinical experience, but it was long ago. Interviewers like to see some recency in the clinical setting. You may be able to leverage your previous OR experience and pursue a CSFA. https://www.meridian-institute.edu/
This gets you back in the OR, allowing you to be employed full or part-time as an SA and gain valuable experience during the intraoperative period. You can still pursue other education while scrubbing in as a first or second assistant in surgery. This program has an online didactic followed by a week of on-campus animal lab and clinical training in your hometown.  The program is CAAHEP and ABHES accredited, leading to certification as a CSFA and licensure in states that license surgical assistants. https://www.caahep.org/

It is just a thought, although I am biased toward becoming an RN, RNFA, and perhaps a CRNA or NP with first-assistant privileges. I realize "nursing" is not for everyone, but the training is excellent, especially in a hospital-affiliated university.

I never even considered CSFA to improve my application since most programs just require a couple hours of shadowing. I don't know if it would improve an application, but that kinda sounds genius and a great way to stand out. 

it was just business and chem and bio labs  first year seminar i failed pretty much everything because i didn't even show up i rather worked and it was very dumb and immature and something i regret to this day.  thank you so much for laying this out for me 

You can't just "start fresh." You need to submit all transcripts when you apply. Universities, especially competitive medical related grad schools, can use services like the National Clearinghouse for verification so it can be found. You can try not submitting the Penn State transcript and hope they don't find it, but why risk it?

Assuming you get an "A" on the 93 RA Credits (+3 since you now want to take First year seminar in person now and hopefully you can do that Business course at UMPI...), that would make that: 77 credits "A", 16 credits "C-". Overall, you would have a 3.60 GPA (Probably wrong since I just put that directly into a generic GPA calculator. Find a CASAA calculator somewhere and use that for a better answer.) It's not the 4.0 you were hoping for but it's higher than Emory's 23-24 matriculant  3.59 gpa average (https://med.emory.edu/departments/anesth...stats.html) and most other CAA schools. You could also increase your GPA by doing more RA courses, but the GPA increase would be incremental. As long as you get a good GRE/MCAT score, you should be very competitive. You should even add portions of that "i failed pretty much everything because i didn't even show up i rather worked and it was very dumb and immature and something i regret to this day." into your personal statement and it would be an "inspirational" story you could tell during the interview.

If you do more research on this, you will inevitably see "start fresh" or "Academic Renewal" policies. Penn state does seems to have an Academic Renewal policy:
"If a grade forgiveness request is approved, the original course still will appear on the student's official transcript, but will not earn credit or count towards the student's term or cumulative GPA." https://www.registrar.psu.edu/grades/gra...veness.cfm

Don't get your hopes up. It doesn't matter because CASAA factors in the failed course anyways.
"CASAA does not recognize an individual school's policies for forgiveness, academic renewal, or grade replacement for repeated courses. CASAA will verify based on how grades for repeated courses are reported on the official transcripts. All grades earned for repeated courses are factored into your CASAA GPA." (https://help.liaisonedu.com/CASAA_Applic...lculations)