Hi! I’m currently a junior in my high school and I have prospects of going to Texas A&M, College Station for college. The only problem is that I haven’t decided on a major I want to do. So far I narrowed it down to Cell/Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, and Genetics based to my interests. I do have plans to go to medical school, but just in case something happens I want a good major for backup. It would be awesome if you guys could help!
Thanks.
There is heavy overlap between all these areas. Any sort of chemistry major is probably marginally better than a biology major. However, all of these majors have extremely poor prospects on their own, if medical school doesn’t work out.
No, they don’t. The vast majority of chemistry and biology majors are gainfully employed. The unemployment rate for biology majors is around the same as it is for business and accounting majors, civil and mechanical engineering majors, and computer science majors. The unemployment rate for chemistry majors is actually lower than the unemployment rate in those other majors - it’s about on par with math, nursing, and finance. It’s actually in the top five majors with the lowest unemployment.
As for this, a couple of thoughts:
-You’re a junior, so you’re way ahead of yourself - you don’t have to choose your major now. You have at least a year and a half to think about it, and since all of your majors are biologically based and have very similar entering sequences, I would say that you’ve probably got closer to three years (aka, end of your freshman year) to make a decision. You can use the end of high school to start investigating the differences between these majors. If necessary, you can also use your first year of college to sample some coursework and see which you’d prefer. (Texas A&M does allow you to transfer into the biochemistry or genetics major after starting, provided you meet some basic requirements.)
-You can double major in biochemistry and genetics within the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, or you can major in one and minor in the other.
-The CALS majors have the best track record of getting students into medical school - 80% of their students who apply to medical school get in. They say themselves that is the best track record at the university. They have a research requirement in their curriculum, which is pretty unique amongst universities and life sciences majors. The college also seems to have a nice heavier emphasis on what you can do with their majors outside of medical school and graduate school, which is good to see - they have several sections where they talk about which employers you can work for and what kind of work their graduates tend to go do.
-It seems like it may be easier to change majors into biology than it is to change into one of the two CALS majors, biochemistry or genetics.
Personally I’m more of an advocate for a more generalized major - you can always start more general and then take specific electives to sharpen your knowledge or skills in a particular area. So I’d lean towards the biochemistry major, with a minor (or double major) in genetics.
Do these employment rates and statistics also tell us how many of those biology and chemistry grads have additional training or degrees, or does it tell us whether these graduates are employed in completely different fields that have nothing to do with their majors, or does it tell us whether or not these graduates are underemployed or doing things like retail, food service, etc., or does it tell us whether any of them have escaped the usual dead-end LabCorp-type job that pays about as much as a fast food job?
The fact is, without additional advanced or professional degrees, certifications, or training, most biology majors, and even chemistry and other science majors, will look forward to low-paying drudgery and labwork that anybody with a high school diploma could do. Of course, there are decent jobs out there as well, with the potential for advancement, but these are few and far between, especially with just a BS.
Even at the PhD level, things are pretty dismal. The number of biology and science doctorates awarded has increased over the last few decades, but the number of PhD graduates in tenure-track (and even non-tenure track) positions is lower than ever, while the number of graduates in post-docs is higher than ever, with many graduates struggling to find stable employment and drifting from post-doc to post-doc. A few articles about the crisis:
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-researchers-stirs-quiet-crisis-science/HWxyErx9RNIW17khv0MWTN/story.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/what_is_the_value_of_a_science_phd_is_graduate_school_worth_the_effort_.html
I think it’s important to remember that “gainful employment” statistics don’t necessarily capture the details of the situation.
Yes, the numbers quoted are for recent graduates with less than 5 years of experience and no graduate degree.
or does it tell us whether these graduates are employed in completely different fields that have nothing to do with their majors
No, but why does that matter? If you’re a chemistry major who is happy at your job as an associate account strategist or business analyst or marketing manager at GoodCorp with good pay and benefits…that’s a good thing. Few people end up doing precisely what they imagined doing as an 18-year-old choosing their major in college.
or does it tell us whether or not these graduates are underemployed or doing things like retail, food service, etc.,
Yes, there are statistics on that. Low-skilled underemployment in food service and retail is actually less common among the recently college-educated than people think. The predicted probability of a given biology major ending up in a low-skilled service job such as food service or retail is about 9% (about the same as business management); it’s about 7% for biochemistry (about the same as math and marketing) and 6% for chemistry (pretty close to physics). Relatively very few chemistry/biology/biochemistry majors will end up slinging burgers at BK or serving up coffee at Starbucks. And when they do, they tend to only do it for a short time before moving into a professional career.
The statistics collected on employment disagree with you. The report I referenced above [url=http://www.nber.org/chapters/c13697.pdf]here[/url] have predicted probabilities of all kinds of underemployment, including low-skilled service work. For biology it’s 45%, for biochemistry it’s 40%, and for chemistry it’s about 37%. The first takeaway from that is that most biology, biochemistry and chemistry majors will not end up underemployed in a job that anyone with a high school diploma could do.
The other takeway is that the way that underemployment is defined by the report is very broad, and about 40% of the jobs considered “underemployment” jobs were jobs that required higher cognitive skills and paid $50K per year or more. They just technically didn’t require a bachelor’s, although in practice almost everyone who gets these jobs in these days has one. (Some examples the article gave are paralegal, computer network architect, sales account representative, and detective.)
I have a PhD, so I am quite familiar with the academic job crisis. And yes, the academic job market is quite terrible. But PhDs have extraordinarily low unemployment rates. Most PhDs don’t actually go onto tenure-track academic jobs, but there are many many other productive and well-paying things that life sciences PhDs can go onto do that are non-academic. I actually just spoke on a panel at the NSF about this on Monday - there was a chemistry major there who is a scientist at a very large beverage company (household name).
The other question that I always have on these threads is - what on earth do people expect students to major in, then? These threads rule out pretty much every possibility besides computer science and engineering, and it’s not realistic to expect everyone to major in one of those.