My son is a high school senior and is interested in biology, technology/computer science, and possibly pre-med. He loves the smaller liberal arts colleges he’s visited, and loves the idea of a relatively open curriculum (ie. no long list of distribution requirements or core curriculum).
What schools offer interesting ways to combine these interests? Are there trade-offs, for example, between a school that has a very open curriculum, making it easy to, say, double major in neuroscience and computer science, while picking up pre-med required classes and still having flexibility to take wide range of other courses in random subjects he’s interested in… and, say, a school that has a strong program in computational biology as a specialization within biology? Would these two options yield different career/grad school options as next steps, or are they for all practical purposes the same? In the event med school is not the next step for any reason, is there a benefit to having a “major” in computer science, vs computational biology?
Second question: given this set of interests, what schools come to mind as especially worthy of consideration?
He is a very strong student looking at the most selective liberal arts colleges.
Thanks for any thoughts you might have on these questions!