Best Major for Medical School?

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
1

<p>I'm worried about choosing the best major for medical school -- one that will give me the best opportunities throughout my undergrad years (e.g. research), and best prepare me for the MCAT. </p>

<p>What is the best major? Would it be inclined towards engineering, like BME (biomedical engineering) or ChemBE (chemical and biomolecular engineering), or a solid science, such as Cellular and Molecular Biology or Neuroscience?</p>

2

<p>Read this first:</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/214387-what-should-premed-major.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/214387-what-should-premed-major.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Engineering majors have pluses and minuses–</p>

<p>Plus</p>

<p>–you have an automatic fall back career should you be among the 60% of applicants who are not accepted into any medical school</p>

<p>(For the record: Bio, neuro (and chem) have absolutely lousy employment prospects should you not go to medical school.) </p>

<p>Minus</p>

<p>–engineering majors are reputedly hard to maintain a high GPA in (Does this mean you won’t be able to maintain a strong GPA? No way to tell…… And before you ask, no, you don’t get any ‘special consideration’ from adcomms for having a “hard” major. “Hard” is in the eye of the beholder.)</p>

<p>–engineering has a very full (and often rigid) curriculum and it may be tough to fit in all the pre med requirements (which now include biochem, stats and social sciences as well the all the old pre-reqs.)</p>

3

<p>I don’t know, but assume the answer is yes: </p>

<p>Do most MCAT questions have to do with biological science?</p>

<p>The admission success rate of various majors might be interesting.</p>

4

<p>The 2015 MCAT has 4 sections: biological sciences (bio, biochem, ochem, genetics); physical sciences (gen chem, physics); human behavior (sociology, psych) and verbal (reading & analysis)</p>

<p>Statistics is incorporated in all 4 sections.</p>

<p>Each section is given equal weight in a student’s final score.</p>

<p>As for MCAT scores by majors—</p>

<p>AMCAS has a lovely table for that:</p>

<p><a href=“https://www.aamc.org/download/321496/data/2012factstable18.pdf[/url]”>https://www.aamc.org/download/321496/data/2012factstable18.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>You can derive admission rates for each major cluster by comparing the applicants vs matriculant numbers. Basically, except for specialized health science majors (nursing, medical lab science, kinesiology, nutrition, athletic training, dental hygiene, etc)–which have a lower admission rate-- the admissions rates for each group are nearly identical.</p>