D18 is planning on majoring in chemistry at Alabama, but (at the encouragement of her Latin teacher) is also considering continuing her study of Latin while there. Does anyone have experience with double majors with basically no overlapping courses? She loves both subjects and is excited about the idea of a double major, I just want her to have a realistic idea of what kind of work would be involved. She intends to apply to med school so I know maintaining a high GPA is crucial.
She has the potential to enter Alabama with 29 credit hours depending on how well she does on her AP exams. Her AP classes are:
AP Art History (5)
APUSH (4)
AP US Gov
AP Lit
AP Environment Science
AP Chemistry
I would love any input or thoughts anyone may have. With the community service expectations of a pre-med student, would she have any down time to speak of? She just started considering this recently after a chat with her Latin teacher and I would love for her to pursue this knowing how much she enjoys Latin, I just don’t want her to sabotage her chances for med school or not have time for a life outside of classwork while she is in college.
Double majoring is not that hard and I don’t think it would detract from pre-med. However, it would significantly limit out-of-major electives. It might also require some summer classes. Might affect any study abroad ideas. Might complicate sequencing of classes. But assuming your child is on the ball with planning, those things are all manageable. In my experience, pre-med classes are much more difficult than classics classes so if GPA is a concern then it would be better to have a second major or Latin than Physics for example. Between Latin and Classical Studies, I would look a the details of the major. I think Classical Studies would be easier - fewer language classes and less tedious translation - but might require some Greek which might be a turn off.
By the way, she could continue study of Latin without majoring in it. Perhaps she could start that way, taking a couple of semesters of Latin plus a Roman Civilization class, and then decide on a major once she has a feel for the classes and requirements.
I don’t recommend double majors for premeds. Premeds trip themselves up by trying to take on too much. Premeds also often misunderstand the premed process and wrongly think that the med school adcoms will be impressed by a double major or extra minors or whatever. Med schools do not care about any of that. They care about cum GPA, BCMP GPA, MCAT score, volunteering, medically related ECs, and research experiences.
As mentioned above, she can continue Latin without majoring in it. My son loves Spanish, but when he looked over the req’ts for even a minor in it, he decided just to casually take some classes. Between placement testing and actual spanish classes, he graduated with about 21 spanish credits.
Frankly, i would suggest that your daughter take some spanish classes as a premed. Being at least loosely fluent in Spanish can be a plus for med school applicants. It also helps when looking for community service experiences. With her Latin background, spanish would not be hard to learn. If she’d worry about her grades in that, then she can self-teach herself using one of those language apps like Duolingo.
Your daughter will have to devote a lot of time to her chem and premed prereqs. There is often a grade shock when moving from high school to college because students sometimes lose points for not perfectly following lab instructions, missing classes due to illness, etc.
Countless times we see students who rarely or never had a B on a report card finding themselves struggling for a C or B in a premed prereq. This is true for virtually all colleges since all schools have to weed their students. Every school has too many freshman premeds (and freshman STEM) so they all weed those shared classes.
When my son was premed at bama, he devoted much of his time towards his studies. He had a very strong math and science background, but college is more demanding. During the semesters that he took classes like Ochem 1 and 2, and cell bio, he had a very minimal social life. His senior year was his lightest year, which allowed him to take some courses just for interest…and that was best since med school apps got submitted during the summer before senior year and interviews were attended during senior year.
Thank you for the feedback. I will share this with her, I do think concentrating on her chemistry major and casually taking some language classes sounds like a much more reasonable way to go. @mom2collegekids, she actually has already taken 4 years of Spanish and hated it, lol … but I think that was mostly because she didn’t care for the teacher. She’s in her 3rd year of Latin and genuinely enjoys it which is why the subject came up.
Thank you for your responses!! So much to think about!