I will be a freshman at University of Georgia in the fall working towards a degree in biological engineering with the goal of attending medical school and doing a dual PhD/MD program. As most engineering majors know, the course load is quite strenuous and, at UGA, there are 130 hours of coursework required, not including some of the extra courses I have to take in order to take interesting major specific electives and certain courses which some med schools require. I am lucky in that I have some credit from high school but, even so, most of it is fairly insignificant when applied to my degree. My scholarship only covers 127 hours in total, with up to 15 per semester over 4 years. I would love to take a minor but I was wondering how important this is as I would have to pay for each course I am taking outside of those hours and take away time in my summers where I could be participating in research pertinent to what I want to do in medicine. Do most med school applicants to the middle/top tier schools have a minor and will this set me apart negatively from other applicants? Would they rather see more shadowing/research/medical volunteering or more hours in the classroom?
Thank you!
They won’t care. Get great grades — that is enough of a challenge as an engineering major. Research/ volunteering is good, too. But without the grades and MCAT score, none of the rest matters.
Some students take a gap year after undergrad to get more research or volunteer experience, and to give them time to really focus on their apps.
The answer is NO. Another point you need to be aware of is - MD/PhD programs have higher bar for GPA/MCAT, plus substantial research (publication), e.g., if MD program has average of 3.7 GPA, then MD/PhD probably has 3,8 or 3.9. In general, any engineering major is the top GPA killer, keep that in mind.
@Andorvw
Actually the disparity isn’t quite as great as you claim.
AAMC has data on the mean GPA and MCAT scores for MD/PhD matriculants here: {url=https://www.aamc.org/download/321548/data/factstableb10.pdf]MCAT Scores and GPAs for MD-PhD Applicants and Matriculants to U.S. Medical Schools, 2016-2017 through 2017-2018
2
MD/ PhD Matriculant GPA/sGPA/ Mcat: 3.79/3.76/515
OP–no minor is required or expected for med school applicants whether MD or MD/PhD.
For an MD/PhD applicant, research experience with primary responsibility for an independent project is very important.(Think senior research thesis or something similiar.) Publication is a plus, but not necessary. (Some fields take longer to get publishable results than others.) Shadowing, clinical experience, community service are also expected from MD/PhD applicants.
The bar is definitely higher - maybe not always 0.2, but definitely higher. The averages for MD students are 3.71/3.64/510.4, those are differences of 0.8/0.8/4.6. Saying a school’s MD/PhD class has a 0.1/5 point increase in the GPA/MCAT average is totally fair. At my school, for the entire 8 years I’ve been here, the MD/PhD GPA/MCAT averages have always been higher than the MD and on the order of 0.1-0.2/5.
First of all, I agree with all the above comments regarding md/phd.
What I want to say is that you should target medical school as a premed. Do not set a high hope to mid/high tier medical school md/phd program until you attain that status in your third year in college. It’s hard enough to get into ANY medical school, to get into high tier med school is a crap shoot even with high stat students.