<p>I'm really excited that I got accepted into MIT. But like a lot of other students, I haven't been able to decide on a specific career to pursue (and I understand that I'm not yet expected to). However, some of my wide-ranging interests seem to conflict with one another.</p>
<p>For example, I'm really interested in learning computer science, and I'm really excited about MIT's CS department. Meanwhile, however, I'm contemplating applying to med school. Because I'll need to decide relatively early whether or not to study pre-med, I figure I might as well go into my freshman year already having decided. At the moment I also want to minor in economics.</p>
<p>How uncommon is it for CS majors to apply to med school? i'm assume that majoring in CS will conflict with studying pre-med? I have a rough idea of how the med school application works, and I'm under the impression that most applicants dedicate multiple summers to gaining experience in a biology or medical-related field. </p>
<p>That means that if I do study pre-med, I will be conducting biology-related research and hospital work instead of working cs internships during my summers.</p>
<p>My ultimate questions are these:
1. How significant is sacrificing summer cs internships as a cs major?
2. Will majoring in CS hurt my chances if I end up applying to med school?
3. How common is it for CS majors to study pre-med, and are there any figures about their acceptance rates?</p>
<p>I'm trying to seek as much advice as I can to make my decision, so I would appreciate other comments as well.</p>
<p>You might be interested in being a 6-7 (computer science and molecular biology) major. You take all but three of the classes that a 6-3 (computer science and engineering) major would take (and you can take those, too, just for kicks) and you also take all of the core biology classes (not sure how many you’d be missing compared to a biology major).</p>
<ol>
<li>Someone I talked with from Yelp said you only need one summer internship to go into industry as a software engineer. I’m a 6-7 major, hoping to stay in academia in genomics. I’m planning to spend all my summers working in a lab on campus.</li>
</ol>
<p>I don’t know anything about med school, sorry.</p>
<h1>1) Doing research in bioinformatics will make you very attractive to Harvard med. It seemed like this was one way to get in there.</h1>
<h1>2) You will have to do some volunteering at a hospital regardless of your major, but that doesn’t mean it has to take your entire summer.</h1>
<h1>3) Biological research is not required for medical school.</h1>
<h1>4) Taking care of premed requirements is not that tough considering that most of the requirements are GIRs (freshman requirements) anyway. Basically, you have to take orgo. I’m not sure if anatomy or physiology are actually required, but I don’t think so.</h1>
<p>If you can AP out of some classes, that will make things easier.</p>
<h1>5) I know top medical schools request to see your “hidden grades” from freshman year; that is, the letter grades, not just P/F grades.</h1>
<p>Another piece of advice: you are not going to be a normal premed, so don’t try to force yourself to be. If you find a niche’, you may be a very attractive candidate. That could be computational biology or that could be bioinformatics. </p>
<p>Granted, there are some things you have to do (volunteering), but you don’t necessarily have to worry about them now. You can always volunteer later.</p>
<p>It is uncommon, but not for MIT. Being a CS major is by no means detrimental to your pre-med application. In fact, if you take a lot of computational bio classes, it may even be a plus. Like lidusha said, you might be interested in 6-7, which blends biology and CS. </p>
<p>I won’t go too into depth, but I just want to make the point that if you want to study CS and be pre-med, go for it! The two goals are not mutually exclusive, and you definitely will find people here with similar goals here at MIT, more so than anywhere else.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone! I now feel a bit more comfortable with what I want to study. Yeah, I am considering studying 6-7. I’ve had some fun doing compbio research in high school.</p>
<p>Will there be a significant demand for 6-7 students in industry? The major avenue for computational biology seems to be into academia, but I might be very wrong.</p>
<p>Yes. There is a significant demand for 6-7 students everywhere. And if computational biology doesn’t work out for you, you also have (almost) the full training of a software engineer to fall back on.</p>
<p>Once you declare course 6 as your major, you’ll be put on a wonderful mailing list and get a dozen emails a day from Anne Hunter about job openings. Most will be software engineering jobs; some will be computational biology jobs. You can stay in academia. You can get a job at a job fair. You can get a job by talking with alum friends. You can get a job by responding to one of Anne Hunter’s emails. You can even start a whole new company. And all of these can be in computational biology, software engineering, or biology. There are many, many options.</p>