<p>I graduated BME last year, and am currently in medical school. Overall, I would say that it doesn't really help you during the admissions process. It's harder to keep your GPA high, and the whole "I can just look it up in a book" mentality for engineering kind of ruins your will to study later on...</p>
<p>That being said, two of my undergrad classmates who majored in bioengineering are now in my med school class. Half of our whole bioe class actually ended up going into medicine rather than continuing with engineering. As for what that says about the major, I'm not quite sure, but it doesn't look like medical schools are against engineers.</p>
<p>Personally, I'd do bioe over again simply for the experience and the skills in analytical thinking. It seems to be a widely spread notion that engineering is more difficult than some other majors, so you might get cut some slack. Just remember that for every BME who ends up getting a 3.2, there's another with a 3.9 who wants to go to medical school as well. Whatever your major, you just have to do really well in it.</p>
<p>squarehead-
I'm going to be a bioengineering: pre-med major at UCSD next year too. How is the life? And is it tough to keep a high GPA? And where do you recommend doing volunteer work?</p>
<p>Also, do med schools take into account the rigor of your undergrad major (for example, if you have a lower GPA as a bioengineering major, would they be a bit more lenient?) when considering you for admissions?</p>
<p>bdm, actually although I am having an impossible time finding it there as a publication by the AAMC that showed BME's had the highest acceptance rate of all majors. It was something like 70%. But I can't find the darn thing anywhere. I have the date somewhere though when it was published.</p>
<p>1.) I do happen to know that back in 1972, BMEs were in fact the very lowest-accepted major. This obviously is not relevant data. (Citation: book that chronicled the experiences of four medical students from UPenn, which I can no longer find.)</p>
<p>2.) The MSAR indicates that as broad classes, majors are admitted in almost exactly the same percentages that they apply. Engineering, I assume, would be a physical science. The only way, then, that BME could be higher than normal is if some of the other physical sciences (chem, physics, ME, CE, EE, etc.) had compensatorily lower rates.</p>
<p>This BME data was from the early 2000's. Other engineering disciplines have lower acceptance rates since they suffer by not taking many bio/chem etc classes. The only other major were its not true is ChemE. For BME we do a lot of medical related things, and we know how most medical devices function and how to design them. As well as systems, disease spread. In general the vast majority of people who do the major are Pre-med and most of them do get into medical school, at least at my school. Pretty much with this major as long as you are 3.4+ and 30+ from my school you get in somewhere. That can't be said for other majors. Last year 100% of BME's who applied from my school got in somewhere, about 10 or so people (it was a small year).</p>