What if a political science major decides later in sophomore year to join pre-Med track? No previous medicine or even science related activity. Some science AP Credits but no science classes in college yet. Would it be too late?
It’s never too late. Many med school students are in their late 20s. It can, however, take more time to get everything going. Talk with your Pre-Med advisers on what you can do. Many students take at least one extra year from college graduation to starting med school. That falls in the normal range TBH.
The pre-med courses may have a four or five semester long sequence (general chemistry 1 and 2, organic chemistry 1 and 2, biochemistry) to complete, and may consume all available elective space outside of an unrelated major, which can be issues starting in second or third year. I.e. may require an extra semester or post-bacc enrollment at a four year school to complete. Plus the usual pre-med extracurriculars to ensure interest and showing interest to medical schools. Of course, very high college GPA, both overall and in science courses, is necessary (but not sufficient) to gain admission to medical school.
Medical schools commonly do not accept AP credit for pre-med courses, but there is considerable variation in policies. What may be acceptable at one medical school (e.g. repeating one’s AP credit with college courses) may be discouraged at another (which prefers students with AP credit to substitute a more advanced course instead, viewing repeating AP credit as grade-grubbing).
Applying to medical school is expensive. But then medical school itself is very expensive. Most medical school applicants get shut out, and most who get admitted get one admission, so they have no choice about whether to choose a less expensive one.
You may want to post your questions in the pre-med forum section.
There are dedicated post-baccalaureate programs for non pre-meds interested in attending medical school. These career-changer post baccs are 2 year long highly structure programs that offer all the typical pre-med class requirements as well as opportunities to get involved in clinical volunteering and lab research. Some include MCAT prep either as an extra or as part of the program.
A few of these post-bacc programs have linkages–which guarantees a post-bacc student who hits certain GPA and MCAT thresholds an early decision interview with an associated medical school.
These formal programs tend to expensive and there is little or no FA available.
It’s also quite possible to do an informal post-bacc independently by taking the necessary pre-reqs piecemeal at any 4 year college as non degree-seeking student & developing appropriate ECs before applying to medical school.
It is never too late. However, there will be the many chemistry and other science classes to fit into a schedule. There was a reason this student chose to avoid science courses in college. A change in perspective now. Classes for the major (easier to keep it than to change to a STEM one) plus the many hours for chemistry labs et al will mean some heavy academics. But- easier while still in college and good prep for the rigors of medical school. If a semester filled with science is not liked the answer to becoming a physician will become more clear.
Go for it. Discuss course tactics with a faculty member involved in the premedical intention. There is no fixed “track”. Many ways to get required classes and still major in a nonscience. The “worst case” scenario is to alter one’s schedule to fit in many otherwise unneeded science courses and discover the goal is not worth the path to get there. However, even this scenario will teach the student something- there is a (good) reason to not have taken college sciences before. Better than not trying and always wondering if one should have. A lot easier to use a semester or two as an undergrad than to sign up for post BS/BA classes at a huge expense only to discover a lack of interest in those needed basic sciences.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained”.
So all being ‘premed’ entails is
- Taking the requirements (bio, chem, orgs, biochemistry, physics, math, others)
- Taking the MCAT
- Applying to med school
Anyone can be premed regardless of age. There are literally grown adults who have decided ‘I want to be a doctor,’ took the classes and applied. It is never too late.
Your DS could have a job related to political science while taking the premed classes on the side, then apply! There are even special ‘post bacc’ programs that are designed for non-science majors to complete the premed requirements.
Uh, successfully getting into med school also requires a lot of extra curriculars, esp medical related ones like volunteering and shadowing. Plus the GPA needs to be high - any major. It’s hardly a “box checking” path.
But still - any age works. In my lad’s class it says the oldest member is 35 if I recall correctly.
Just look at old premed. com people entering med school at 40-50 years old.
Being a competitive applicant for medical school requires a lot more than numbers 1-3 noted above. That being said, I know people of many different ages in medical school.
The “never too old” trope is not entirely true w/r/t medical school.
https://www.aamc.org/download/321468/data/factstablea6.pdf
Per AMCAS date, 35 was the 99% percentile for age of new matriculants during the 2017-18 application cycle. That means fewer than 200 individuals aged 35 or older are admitted last year.
Matriculants in their 40s and 50s are the rare exception and not the norm. (That said there was a 52 year old in the class ahead of D1 in med school.)
P.S. the old premed site doesn’t exist any more. It’s been gone for a couple of years.
To go to medical school
- Taking the requirements (bio, chem, orgs, biochemistry, physics, math, others) and getting good grades. Med schools look at your science gpa and your overall gpa.
- Taking the MCAT and doing well.
- Volunteering in a medical setting so you know what you are getting into/showing commitment
- Shadowing doctors
- Maybe doing research
- Participating in community volunteering..as a doctor you will be working with all types of people
- SHowing leadership in your ECs...as a doctor you are the leader of a medical team
- Getting recommendations from professors and possibly a medical committee at your college
- Applying to med school
- Being invited to interview/fill out secondary applications
- Being accepted
Check out the student doctor network site as well.
Student doctor is brutal you have been warned 
Some colleges have some kind of committee that exercises a gatekeeper role on medical school applications – the college “supports” (or, conversely, fails to support) the student’s medical school applications. They do this because it looks a whole lot better to say “85% of the students (including alumni) who apply to U.S. medical school with the support of the college are accepted to at least one U.S. medical school” than to say “45% of our students or alumni who apply to U.S. medical school are successful.” Students (and recent alumni) who do not get that “support” at colleges that offer it can be at a terrible disadvantage. So the OP’s child may want to understand what it will take to have a supported application if he or she attends that sort of college.
I agree with everyone else who has said start now. But the student really doesn’t have to get into a position to apply to medical school for the year following college graduation, or even the year after that. It will take some time to build an appropriate science/med resume, and to prepare carefully for the MCATs, so the possibility of going straight from college to medical school has probably already passed as a practical matter. It may make sense to plan on completing the last one or two required pre-med courses as a non-degree student the year after graduation, while working part-time in some appropriate job, then taking the MCATs a year after graduation and applying the following fall. Doing that also hedges the bets a little bit for the rest of college. The student doesn’t have to fill a schedule completely with basic science courses and labs only to find that, yes, the student still doesn’t actually like science!
(One of my sisters decided at 33, in the middle of a life crisis, that she had always wanted to go to medical school, she had just forgotten to take any science courses after 10th grade. She had been a B+ history major at a middle-of-the-road public flagship, she had a certificate in art history from an Italian university, and she had a decade of successful jobs at a regional stock exchange. It took her three years to get into medical school: two years to take the pre-med courses at a brutally competitive public flagship while working part-time in a medical research lab and shadowing doctors, then MCATs, then an academic year’s worth of application process while continuing her lab job. A lifelong academic underachiever to that point, she understood that she had no margin for error. She worked her tail off and got As or A+s in all of the premed requirements, and did very well on the MCATs. It helped a lot that she did this in a community where she had lots of ties to doctors and medical researchers who really joined the team to get her into medical school at age 36. She was 44 when she finished her residency.
She’s a great doctor.)
Although being weeded out by the college’s pre-med committee may feel terrible at the time, it does mean that the pre-med can abandon medical school dreams early and switch to an alternative educational and career plan before spending another year and several thousand dollars on what would be futile medical school applications (since those pre-meds weeded out by the pre-med committee were the ones the pre-med committee sees as having no realistic chance of admission to medical school).
I have two friends who are doctors who decided late in college to become doctors and attended the post-college baccalaureate programs. One is a professor at Harvard Medical School. He was told by his advisor in the post-bac program that he would never get into medical school. The other was a psych major and went on to get a MPH as well and led a state’s public health program, I think, before heading to the private sector. Both really enjoyed their careers.
Gee, fortunately I was never at one of those colleges that the school had any influence on what we chose. I shudder at that type of influence- not a college I would ever consider. So many better things that make a school good. Most colleges/universities do NOT track what happens to their grads. Tracking involves having the grad bother filling out a survey. Schools I know of do not have/spend the resources figuring out where their grads (finally) end up. Past one year especially, and many medical school students do not go straight from graduation to school. A year off, second degree…
Again, go for it. You can always hop off the track and will then know more about yourself and not need to go through as much as the scenario in an above post.
This presumes they would only weed out those who absolutely wouldn’t make it, but that’s not true. Some colleges weed out those who could have a 30 - 50% chance because they don’t want too many of those not making it and messing up their “great” numbers. If you were a student with a 1/3 to 1/2 chance, you’re screwed if you pick a school like that yet could have a reasonable chance if you picked somewhere else. Look at the following table and across the GPA 3.0 - 3.19 row:
https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/factstablea23.pdf
If the school requires a 3.4 to support someone, it could very easily be stopping some who could get in.
You can’t have it both ways. Either a college let’s everyone apply to med school (and some do) and then they have a low success rate with med school admissions, or a college does some gatekeeping to encourage the strong students to apply and the weaker ones to find something else to do with their lives. But then you can’t criticize the low probability colleges- “What the heck is wrong with them that their med school admission rates are so poor” or complain that the gatekeeping colleges are keeping solid potential doctors out of the applicant pool. Pick one.
There are always going to be kids who get screened out who would have made it through, and kids who make it through who either drop out of med school, or who leave the profession entirely either before or after residency. Nothing is perfectly predictive.
But in general, I see a LOT of kids claiming that they are pre-med to either get their parents off their back for a few years (figuring that if they get into zero medical schools, that problem solves itself) or claiming pre-med because they are 18 years old and they don’t know anything about the 500 or so other interesting jobs that grown ups do that don’t require becoming an MD first.
What it does mean is that if a potential pre-med is choosing an undergraduate college, the existence of a pre-med committee that does gatekeeping for medical school applications may be a relevant factor.
A. If the pre-med will want to try to apply to medical schools (at considerable cost in time and money) even with a lower chance of success (i.e. would be weeded out by the pre-med committee’s non-support), then s/he may want to avoid colleges with a pre-med committee that does such gatekeeping.
B. If the pre-med wants to know earlier whether the probability of success is high (pre-med committee will support) or low (pre-med committee will not support) in order to know earlier whether to switch to another path without spending time and money on a probably futile application cycle to medical schools, then s/he may want to prefer colleges with a pre-med committee that does such gatekeeping.
Honestly, I think that’s silly. At a college that does no gatekeeping, it’s perfectly possible for a student to get a pretty accurate, experienced read on medical school admissions prospects. And I don’t think people college wanting to go to medical school but assuming that they will be marginal performers academically.
I raised the gatekeeping question because it may matter to the OP in this thread, not to debate the merits of the concept. Ex ante, I don’t think having a gatekeeping committee or not is likely to be a meaningful choice factor for any student. But the OP in this thread isn’t operating ex ante. The OP is already at a specific college.
In planning a somewhat belated shift into a medical career track, the OP may want to figure out what the deal is at the OP’s college. If there’s a gatekeeping committee, the OP wants to know what the OP has to do to get the committee’s support (and to figure out how likely that is to be achievable). If it looks like there’s no way the OP will ever get support from the committee, the OP will need to rethink the flight path to medical school. He or she may have to transfer to a different, open college, or come up with a plan to do the med school requirements in a post-bac program that will substitute for the unavailable committee support.