Hi, I’m a high school senior and I’m starting to look at different potential majors. I’ve spent a while looking around and I’m not quite sure what to choose. I’m mainly interested in doing research for a living. Whether that path has me develop drugs or develop the newest tech I don’t really care. I’m open to all suggestions and am willing to go as far as necessary (IE masters or phd).
Recently I have been tossing around the idea of going into pharmaceuticals. My only questions with that is if the classes I would have to take for it would require me dissect animals or work with dead bodies?
Thank you for your time
Dead bodies probably not, unless you decide to get an MD. Dissecting animals, probably, although it depends on the tools your school uses. Some undergrad colleges have switched to using computer simulations of animal models because they are cheaper. If you go to graduate school (which you almost certainly would have to do, if you are developing drugs) then you’ll need to work with animal models eventually, most likely.
“Research” is a broad area. You can do research in anything. Even knowing that you want to do STEM research doesn’t really narrow it down, because that can range from biology and chemistry to physics, computer science, math, statistics, and probably some other majors too. Even pharmaceutical research doesn’t narrow it dow - obviously biologists and chemists do much of that work, but pharmaceutical research teams also include computational scientists and biostatisticians. You don’t have to figure out a major right now - you can take some classes in your freshman year and see what you like best, and take some time to figure out what you might like to research.
Thanks for your reply, to clarify a bit I was wondering which majors would be most likely to get me a job in research. I thanks for your suggestion though, I think I’ll apply as a pharmaceutical major and then figure out better once I’m there. Thanks a bunch!