Most colleges have good pre-med options (advising, prereqs, etc), and students can major in anything so long as they take the necessary classes for med school. Thus, this isn’t much of a limitation, though the possibility of being near a med school or major hospitals is a definite boon for someone who’s interested in pre-med.
The engineering part of your son’s interests, however, are much more restrictive in terms of which colleges are possibilities. I’d recommend using the ABET search function to see if institutions you’re interested in offer accredited programs. There are great universities like Emory and Wake Forest, but they don’t have ABET accreditation. And as has been discussed recently in another thread, most engineering employers only consider candidates from ABET-accredited schools. Has your son done any engineering camps? Doing one this summer might be beneficial to see how likely his interest really is in engineering, which can definitely end up affecting how his list of college applications turns out.
Some other smaller programs that might be worth considering are these:
- University of Miami (11k students) is slightly larger than my arbitrary 10k student cutoff with the previous list, but is still considerably smaller than most of the big state universities, and has many different areas of engineering that are accredited.
- Tulane (8k students) only has ABET-accreditation for Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Engineering Physics, but if your son thinks those would be his areas of interest, then it’s another smaller institution that I’d throw on the list.
- If you’re willing to extend slightly further west, Rice University (4k students) in Houston is a possibility. It has strong engineering programs and also is right next to the main hospital district in Houston, so there are a lot of medical opportunities there, too.
- Also worth some additional research is Mercer University (3-4k students) in GA. ABET’s website indicates that its general engineering B.S. is accredited, and when I went to its website to see if it was a 3/2 program, there was no general engineering degree listed, but Bachelor’s in biomedical, civil, computer, electrical, industrial, and mechanical engineering instead. It could be that those are concentrations, or perhaps they’re undergoing accreditation now, or the ABET site isn’t fully updated, but I’d definitely inquire.
Both Rice & Tulane are reaches for everyone, but again, I think your son would have a decent shot. I suspect University of Miami would be a target and Mercer a likely.