For those in the know, what happens to a kid if they go pre-med and drop out/dont make it into med

Very few LACs have engineering (they tend to be engineering only LACs). Bioinformatics is usually a major cutting across Biology, CS and some information systems type courses. I would be surprised there are many LACs with this choice either.

@texaspg yes. exactly. it’s one or the other. therein is the problem.

Check out the stats for PA school admissions (not the listed minimums, but the stats of the accepted students). If a student isn’t competitive for med school, PA school is a real stretch (as is dental school). As for the ARNP route, remember one has to hold a nursing degree for that to be an option. A bio major is not going to be acceptable for that route.

@clarabella Union College in Schenectady is a LAC with bioengineering, FYI.

My understanding is that the financial aid, at least for lower tiers of income, is pretty good. Admission seems managable too. Amtrak train runs up there and the station is a 10 minute walk from campus.

Maybe med school really isn’t his goal?

The interests you list are very similar to my D’s. She is at a LAC and covering the pre-med bases to keep that option open (has to take most of those courses for the majors she is considering anyway) but I doubt she’ll apply to med school - she is more interested in the “big picture” than one-on-one patient care - it sounds like your S is also?

Is going the MD route really the direction he wants to go? Could he go into that by studying math and/or statistics with some biology? Yes, he can go to MD school after majoring in math or statistics (plus adding the pre-med courses).

Math and statistics majors do commonly find many of their job and career options in such areas as finance and actuarial. Some go into computing.

Our friend with two sons both premed. One will be graduating from NYU med school.
The other just got accepted to vet school. (Tufts)

I think the first barrier is Bio and Chemistry. If they dont’ do well in those, then they can quickly change their major.
That is usually sometime freshman year.
Then comes Organic Chemistry…the next barrier.
So if you can get past that with good grades, then you are on a reasonable trajectory. Many many people change their mind about pre-med before they graduate.
Your GPA has to be reasonable…>3.5 for MD and a bit less for DO.

So if you graduate with a good GPA and good MCAT scores, you may have to go through more than one application cycle to get into a med school.

Lafayette is a LAC with engineering.

Interesting- never heard of Lehigh University outside of CC. Different regions are familiar with different schools. So- your son will be a HS senior next fall, not a college freshman? There are many good schools for majors such as he seems interested in. Many flagships are top tier in several STEM fields. btw- we used to say our son (both parents physicians) was too smart to become a physician. He ended up majoring in math and added a comp sci major. Math has many uses in varied fields.

It also sounds like your son may not actually want to be a physician but rather do his problem solving without having to deal with patients. I encourage you to have him search for good schools for his potential majors instead of trying to game the system for a school he can get top grades at for medical school admissions. Several years ago a chemistry major friend who went the grad school- research route and I had a conversation where we each wondered if we should have gone the other’s route. Much too old to want to go back to school!

Do not worry. He’ll find a school and a major and figure out what to do. Unlike decades ago people often change jobs and careers. I’m sure other parents are also waiting to see where their kid’s future takes them over the next decade.

Most kids I know graduate in something. Get a job in something close to what their interests are and then in a couple years get a masters degree and get the job they really want. If health care is what he’s interested in, there are tons of ways to approach it that would involve much less graduate school than medical school. I wouldn’t worry about it now.

@clarabelle18 it sounds like your son wants to be either a biostatistician or an epidemiologist. Have him investigate these fields and the path to them to see which one he is more interested in pursuing.

Although I understand the worry, it is way too early to worry about this! Too much will change for him before the time to choose his career. My husband and I are both MDs, met at the same (elite, non-ivy) college known for lots of undergrads who want to go in to medicine or law. Literally half of my freshman hall were planning on being MDs; most got weeded out with all the classes mentioned above, and most (by graduation) were very glad they did–it would not have been the right field for them and they knew it by then! My husband and I both are physicians: I had the “easier” path of good grades (the science GPA matters more than the overall GPA, by the way!), graduating magna cum laude(3.8) and tip-top MCAT(I am a good test-taker), and got in the first year I applied to multiple schools including the one I attended (then #3 in country and was the same as my undergrad school–they accepted 8 of us out of 100 and 5 chose to enroll). My husband is equally smart(trust me), but slacked a bit for a “premed” student–he did not become an efficient studier until med school. He graduated cum laude(3.4–his science gap was the same) and had the national avg MCAT score. He took time off as his undergrad counselor told him to, had to apply twice but got in the second year, off the wait list at a mid-level med school in the US). Why am I saying all of this? Because we both are doctors now, and it has nothing to do with what we majored in (both Bio), but has everything to do with medicine being what we both wanted and knew we wanted, no matter what it took, way before we got to college. We both were tested (mine were just non-academic “tests”), and we both got there. I firmly believe the strength of his(our) undergrad school got him pushed over the edge and off that med school wait-list. We both picked our undergrad school (from different states–we did not meet until sophomore year) because we loved it and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else, not because we were thinking whether or not it would help us for med school. Luckily both of our non-wealthy, middle-class families of origin got some financial aid so we could go. We paid for med school ourselves with huge loans (again, because we wanted it more than anything), and are very happy with our choice. We just had our 20-yr college reunion, and guess what?? ALL of the “former” premeds are extremely happy and successful in their careers (some are far more successful than we are, if you define it by $ or recognition, which is a debate in and of itself), and all of them owe at least some of that to the strong undergrad education they received.

I work in public health research and your son sounds like he would be a good fit here. One colleague majored in math, has her MPH in and is now a doctoral candidate in epidemiology as well. Faculty have backgrounds in statistics, econ, public health, pharmacy, as well as sociology, law and political science. Biostatistics is another possibility. More recently, I’ve seen biomathematics and biophysics tossed around as specialties or subfields within a biology major. (I have no idea what these entail) There are a lot of opportunities for a strong math, analytical person in the public health fields.

Bioinformatics is in high demand and covers a lot of the premed requirements.
It sounds like he’d go the MD/PHD route though.

There is no pre-med major as noted above.
Plans are very different from one student to another. There is no “general” plan/solution. One goes with the back up plan and another decided that she better focus on getting into medical school because she simply cannot see herself doing anything else. So, in the first case, the kid should choose a major in the field that he/she is OK being in case that medical school will not happen. In the second case, the plan basically from the very beginning is to get an A in every single class to make sure that medical school is a high probability. Well, even in the first case, the kids better try hard if they want to have options. And again, they go further and ask themselves how to achieve an A in every class. And it may again be different from student to another. Kids who were in tons of activities in HS, used to manage their time very closely and went to the very rigorous HS where they could not “glide” thru, but had to really work hard for their As definitely have advantage over others on the college pre-med track.
What I am trying to say is that it is very detailed day to day activities that will make the goal come true. Medical School acceptance is NOT a lottery, but rather a result of the very hard work that will get increasingly harder (as my D. expressed it “quantum leap” harder) in Medical School and much harder than even in Medical school later in residency.
Best wishes!

DS#2 was premed- took all the premed required courses but took an anatomy class and cadaver lab and decided it wasn’t for him. Then decided to change his major sophomore year and never looked back.

OP wrote in post 19

Steering him to med school seems like a bad idea. Physicians are driven to push through all the training and long hours and debt and memorization for a variety of reasons. If healing individuals isn’t in the top three — I think it’ll be a very big mismatch. There are plenty of other career paths suggested in this thread.

I wouldn’t want to have your son treat me or my family member one day unless he has a dramatic shift in preferences. I’m not judging him – I think he’d not be happy nor his patients either.

Sounds like he should consider a biotech or public health type degree if the goal is CDC research.

^I have a friend that is an MD and a very accomplished oncologists in one of the top hospitals in the country. He is very hands off. He tells me stories about surviving residency were he had to “touch” patients. He is however very successful and loves what he is doing now. I don’t see why I would not want him to be in my doctors’s team because he does not want to be “hands on”. Apparently in his position he does not have to be.