Ok hi, so, I really want to be a doctor but am also pulled towards law and politics and just political science in general. Is there a way to become a doctor and like minor in public policy or like what would I have to do, can someone help me out please!
You could major in public policy while fulfilling the pre-med requirements if you would like.
Pre-Med is not usually a major, rather a collection of courses suggested to be competitive for MCAT and Medical School Admissions. You could major in Public Policy, Political Science, Justice Studies, etc… and be Pre-Med
Medical schools do not offer minors in unrelated fields, but you can do premed requirements alongside most undergraduate majors. You might look at Public Health as a possible social science major with a healthcare-related component,
I know a couple of medical doctors who got a Master’s in Public Health while they were in med school… that’s possible.
As people have mentioned above, you can earn an undergraduate degree in any field be eligible for medical school admission so long as you fulfill all other med school pre-reqs (bio, chem, ochem, biochem, phyics, math, stats, psych, soc, English). So if you want to major in public health in college, that’s fine so long as you take the science classes for science majors. (Many undergrad public health programs only require PH majors to take sciences for non-science majors.)
About 1/3 or more of medical schools offer a dual MD/MPH degree. At some med schools training in public health is hard wired into the curriculum. For example, every student at Mayo graduates with a MD/MPH. All students at my instate public med school graduate with certification in community public health.
If you are interested in getting involved in public health policy on a state or national level, you can certainly do that during med school and residency. (D2 has. She’s a policy research assistant to a member of a national healthcare policy committee that is writing new national guidelines for an specific issue.) There are even residency programs that allow a physician to earn a MPP from a associated government school program (Harvard, USC, Minnesota, UCSF, UCLA, JHU, Yale, plus about a dozen more).
There are also public policy fellowships for physicians at the CDC and NIH.
Thank you everyone! After reading and doing more research, I was able to figure out how address this ! 