<p>Is it good to major in engineering for pre-med or pre-law?</p>
<p>do a search in the premed forums for "sakky engineering"</p>
<p>who is sakky?</p>
<p>Looking for me?</p>
<p>Engineering is an excellent major for pre-med. I've seen quite a few people do it sucessfully. One advantage is that when you become a doctor you'll have the technical skills to design your own devices. Then you can make sure that the hospital or clinic that you work at sells them. Medical devices = BIG MONEY. My mom is an X-ray tech in Cardiology and sees doctors that she works with do this all the time.</p>
<p>doing this is somewhat dangerous however, because it is much harder to obtain the high gpa that med schools require. i'm currently an engineering student who plans on going into law. however i dont think that doing premed with engineering is necessarily as good as engineering/pre-law simply because your engineering education doesn'nt really do anything for you, whereas in law, at lesat it comes in handy for ip law.</p>
<p>Engineering can do alot.</p>
<p>what Post #5 said,.</p>
<p>The problem is as hdotchar said - you are probably going to hurt your GPA. Fair or unfair (mostly unfair), med-school admissions are highly GPA-dependent. If you get mediocre grades, the med-school adcoms aren't going to care why, all they're going to see is that you got mediocre grades. </p>
<p>I agree that having an engineering background could be useful once you're a doctor. The problem is that the most difficult step to becoming a doctor is getting admitted to med-school. Who cares if you would have been a great doctorif you can't get into med-school in the first place? As I think everybody here would agree, for the purposes of getting into med-school, getting an A in a do-nothing, joke course is better than getting a B in an engineering course, even though that engineering B probably requires more work than the A in the joke class.</p>
<p>i definitely agree about engineering being useful for a doctor, but that it's not an easy track to med school... but... that's all assuming you actually want to use your engineering once you're a doctor. if you'd really rather just have a practice and not design anything, it really wouldnt be worth the extra work for the eng degree.</p>
<p>It's not just medical school that still expect high GPA's from engineers. I recently called Columbia SEAS' Financial engineering program and the adcom officer told me that they expect 3.7+ for realistic candidates - even for engineers. Imo, getting a 3.3 in engineering is good; getting a 3.5 is excellent - getting a 3.7+ is near impossible.</p>
<p>yeah i heard that med school is gpa dependent and engineering, cause its so tough will probably lower that gpa im not saying that it will for you but im just talking in general.</p>
<p>my ra is actually applying for their financial engineering program. you have to realize that financial engineering is usually for people who majored in industrial engineering or managment sci in their undergrad years. while still hard, they are easier than say EE or ME. my ra graduated out of IE in 3 years with liike a 3.9</p>
<p>So umm... most of you seem pretty negative about this... but i mean... give me some numbers here.. about what percent succeeds in getting 3.7+ gpa in engineering? say.. at ivy schools?</p>
<p>engineering kind of sucks at most ivies. at a typical school there are probably a handful of people who are getting above 3.6 in engineering. average gpas tend to be around 2.5-2.8 at good engineering schools. coincidentally this is the same average gpa for engineering across the nation</p>
<p>At my school the 75th percential is a 3.57 for engineering. Average is somewhere around a 3.15, so at my school a 3.7 would probably be around the 90th percentile.</p>
<p>Engineering GPAs are very low, and the medians are usually around 2.8 to 3.0. A 3.5 would put you in about the top 25%, while a 3.7 is around top 10%. Consider also that a lot of students will end up dropping out of Engineering, and you can see how hard it is to get a 3.7+ GPA.</p>
<p>At my alma mater, graduating with a 3.7 in engineering would have easily been good enough to grant you High Distinction status (which is equivalent to magna cum laude status) which is conferred only to the top 10% of students in the engineering school.</p>
<p>At my alma mater, in chemical engineering, a 3.8 would put you as the top student; a 3.5 would put you in the top 10%. A 3.2 would put you in the top 25%.</p>
<p>A psych professor used organic chemistry as an example of the "double bell curve." The pre-meds take orgo alongside yoga, drama, and foreign language; the engineers take it alongside thermodynamics, differential equations, and other engineering courses. The pre-meds do better - not because they are any smarter, but because they can devote all of their time to it. </p>
<p>We all got respectable jobs, but it's hell trying to apply to law or med school with grades like that.</p>
<p>I would also point out that there is even "intra-school grade inflation" within the various engineering disciplines. I don't want to name names, but basically, it is generally recognized that certain engineering disciplines are harder than other engineering disciplines. For example, when I said that a 3.7 in engineering would have merited you High Distinction in my alma mater, that is within the engineering school as a whole - and of course, it's harder for those who are in the harder engineering discipline to earn that 3.7 for High Distinction.</p>
<p>Personally, I think a simple way to reform things is for schools to print, right next to your grade for a particular class, the average grade given out in that class. For example, if you got a B in a class, but the average grade of that class was a C-, then that fact should be displayed. Furthermore, your GPA should be printed next to the consolidated GPA of a fictional person who took all the same classes you took and got the average grades in all those classes (whatever those grades happened to be). That's a far more fair way to ascertain who's really in the top X%, and so who really merits graduating with honors. That's a whole lot better than the current situation where people are deliberately cherry-picking easy, do-nothing classes just to get A's.</p>
<p>in addition i think that it might be worse for pre-laws than pre-meds, since getting into a top law school is much more important than getting into a top med school. it really isn't going to matter what med school your going to, as long as you graduate and pass your step 1,2,3, however there is such a disparity quality and reputation between top tier law schools and mediocre law schools, that i dont think i would even bother going to a mediocre one.</p>