Does anyone have any advice for a pre vet student who is planning on majoring in Ecology Evolution and Organismal Bio?
Did not even know a major like that existed in my school
@XAtlas : Remember that VU has broken its biological sciences major broken into “degree conferring concentrations” because this is apparently the trendy thing to do at private research universities now-a-days (no it is nowhere near the only elite to do it. My alma mater did it with physics, splitting it into like 6-8 “majors” and is on the verge of doing it in chemistry). It is really just a marketing tool IMHO. The reality is, if one was pursuing graduate school or a job, the readers of the application would scrutinize the transcript and will be able to tell that the person had a specialty or area of focus regardless of the label of the degree. Also, experience in the claimed area of interest would trump such labels any day. It annoys me because it basically suggests that undergraduates are incapable of carving their own specialty unless it is prescribed/laid out for them how to do it. I feel this really only “tricks” prospective freshmen (who will be silly/naive enough to choose one school over enough based upon whether or not a concentration exists even if the course offerings are identical in the participating departments at each school. It means schools can effectively create these concentrations from existing courses and make no new courses and then market it to incoming students as “innovative”). Exceptions are bigger places like Cornell and public schools like Berkeley where a concentration may be an almost completely different curriculum and may not even be housed in the same department as something like “biological sciences” (Berkeley has a school of chemistry for example, and chemistry majors won’t even take the same introductory chemistry course as others, such as pre-meds or molec. cell majors. The latter’s intro. course is hosted in the College of Arts and Letters).
IMHO that particularly concentration at VU is slightly problematic because based upon the UG course offerings, molecular cell biology and genetics are going to offer a lot more to students. Perhaps the geosciences/environmental sciences dept could be coupled to add to the experience of those pursuing that. Also, it is Tennessee so, there could be some interesting research projects that will more than compensate for the course offerings or lack thereof.
Wow. That makes so much sense. And explains why my daughters TA at Cornell summer school for HS students was a Vet student with an undergraduate degree in EEOB from Yale and why she now thinks pursueing same degree from VU will be ok. I wish I had undestood all this earlier. I hope she doesnt regret her choice not to do ED at Cornell or another school where she can have more formal major for Vet school. But VU had everything else she liked and wanted. I so appreciate the info and insights. She will have to work hard at finding good research opportunities and animal experience.
@Nhmama : These places have to keep their application numbers and yield up some how lol. That is what it is all about. Every gimmick and marketing tactic in the book will be used, so I advise more academically serious (I mainly just mean those students who are more likely to pick among schools they get an offer from based upon academic differences as opposed to other things. This student is somewhat rarer now-a-days though. Usually that is overlooked or taken for granted when schools are highly and closely ranked, but there often are substantial differences in offerings and areas of strength even if not in overall quality) people to actually investigate things like the FULL course atlases for their departments of interest and then the associated courses for each “major” a department claims to house. Often you will find striking overlaps between a school that offers a concentration versus the one that doesn’t (in fact often ones that don’t may actually have a better undergraduate program on a course per course basis or even based upon research and other opps).
There are other exceptions than the ones I mentioned already including the 4 year and 4+1 MA/MS programs which may involve collaborations with a completely different entity (like at my alma mater, there is basically a biostatistics or BS/MS in environmental science and public health and the collaboration is between the arts and sciences and the public health school). Duke has a pharmacology concentration through its BSci and that seems to be a collaboration between the arts and sciences and graduate division (a completely different school) pharm/tox. offerings. But often, fully undergraduate concentrations are kind of gimmicky. It is like sticking a shiny object out in front of a poor prospective student that may not know (or care) enough about curriculum design and course offerings at a school.