<p>Hello CCers...my name's Dan and I'm currently a senior in high school. Next year I wil most likely be attending either Georgetown University or University of Notre Dame (accepted EA). Anyways, in high school I volunteered at a hospital for many hours and loved it! Watching doctors interact with patients and watching the relationships form truly inspired me. Anyways, it sort of inspired me to be a doctor one day. However, I have one major issue. While hate is a strong word, I really prefer humanities subjects to the sciences, and while I understand I wouldn't have to major in a science to go onto med school, I would still have to take the prereqs. I did do well in science classes but only because I studied and forced myself too. Nonetheless, my grades in social studies and english were somewhat better. Anyway what I guess I was wondering was, are there any premeds out there who really disliked science in high school and who went on to become doctors? Is it necessary to enjoy science to succeed in college premed courses? Will med school really be a chore if I do not like science now? Thank you!</p>
<p>i mean, so much of college prereq and med school is just science, so forcing yourself to study all through this time for subjects you just dont like doesnt seem like it will work out; and i dont see how you can not be interested in biology if you want to become a doc</p>
<p>though obv you could major in a nonscience major (what im doing), but still you have to take alot of science classes</p>
<p>thanks for the input stonecold....My biology grades (I take AP this year) are actually among my best grades in high school and I do enjoy that class for the most part...Chem and physics, however, while i made A-s and low As, I never enjoyed...is becoming a doc still impossible given this info?</p>
<p>Many doctors do not love math and science; most pre-meds study science out of necessity, rather than affinity for the subject matter. The actual number of required pre-med courses is small enough to allow you to complete a humanities major without too much hustling. Humanities majors, as a group, do better than life science majors on all subsections of the MCAT.</p>
<p>Doctors who don't like science? Where?</p>
<p>There's a ground in between what $.02 describes and what the OP seems to be describing. While I'd agree that many medical students, at least, do not innately love science, I'd argue that very few of them would be able to handle the premedical track and medical school while actually hating or even disliking it. It's hard enough being (as I am) apathetic towards it. Actually disliking it would make things orders of magnitude more difficult.</p>
<p>BDM has a good point: hating science will make an arduous task miserable and perhaps intolerable. Doctors, in fact, do things every day that they dislike or hate -- charting, dealing with unpleasant patients, arguing with insurance companies and taking call -- but that doesn't keep them from doing it well.</p>
<p>The fact that you can earn A's and A-'s indicates that you can do the work. Several threads here discuss the relative difficulty of the bare minimum college pre-med material as compared to high school AP science material.</p>
<p>Thanks for the input guys...now that I think about it, I guess I'm more like bluedevilmike in being APATHETIC towards science...couldn't think of that word before. Anyway I'm pretty sure I will be starting a pre-med track with a humanities major (history/english/political science)...should I get a jump start on this whole thing this summer with something at my local community college or try to get a position in a lab somewhere? I mean, as of now, I'll be working as a park attendant...not very academic/science oriented...any advice would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>Do not take CC classes on a whim, as they have the potential to seriously harm your medical school application.</p>
<p>If this is the summer before college, any research experience you could gain would be very helpful. Community service and international travel would be the same way. None of them are mandatory, and you are certainly entitled to take this particular summer off. (I do NOT say that about your future summers.)</p>
<p>You dont have to make a decision now , but you ought to re think this I will be a pre-med student and I love science and math more than anything else!! After spending 8 years in college and doing residence for about four years . I better love my job.</p>
<p>depends on what type of science you hate. do you hate life science, human biology type science or sciences like physics and chemistry? If you hate the life sciences then med school will be hard because med school (obviously) is all about anatomy, system functions, immunology, biochemistry, etc. If you hate physics and general chemistry, then you are not alone (most premeds hate these courses as well).</p>
<p>Hating the courses is very normal; hating the subject matter itself would probably prove problematic. Physics in particular is extremely important in physiology (go figure) and is at the heart of many medical principles. I'd imagine that organic chemistry in particular becomes relevant for pharmacology.</p>
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Humanities majors, as a group, do better than life science majors on all subsections of the MCAT.
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</p>
<p>That's almost certainly due to self-selection. Most humanities majors, especially the ones who are bad at science, will never take the MCAT, because they reason (probably correctly) that they would get a terrible score.</p>
<p>As a social science major who took the MCAT, I disagree quite seriously.</p>
<p>The MCAT, even the "science" sections, is entirely a reading comprehension test, top to bottom. You are given information in a passage. While this information must be filtered through background science knowledge, this knowledge is something that all pre-med students have acquired from their standardized curriculum.</p>
<p>What differs is how well and how quickly they read, and how easily they process scientific material (written in an unscientific way) to sort through that data and extract the relevant points. These are skills that reading/writing-heavy majors train their students in, on balance, somewhat more than science majors tend to train their students in.</p>
<p>As BRM also often points out, sometimes too much background knowledge can make reading comprehension more difficult, and this too is a weakness that science majors might run into.</p>
<p>You have to do well in your chemistry and physics courses in college and on the MCATs. After that, you can forget all your physics and most of the chemistry. You will not need them in medicine. People who want to can make medicine very scientific, but that is a choice. Lots of doctors viewed the hard science college courses as the bane of their existence.</p>
<p>If you really hate science, you will really be miserable in all the required med school classes and in the first half of your medical school training. I can also tell you, as an MD, that people who think the patient interaction part of medicine is why they are going into it, will find medicine very disappointing. I frankly think you would be better off in a different profession. And I say that as a psychiatrist - - patient interaction is almost 100% of my job. You really have to love the underlying science in this field. Yeah it's great when patient's thank you and all and think you saved their life (usually it's the one's you don't do much for who think this way) but so many times you really feel very, very unappreciated by patients. If it's not mainly about the science, you are pretty much guaranteed to by unhappy. I would also say that you won't find this out until after your internship. Watching doctors work and being a doctor doing the work are two completely different things. Once the responsibility is yours (and it's never yours until internship) you will have no idea about what I am talking about.</p>
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that, you can forget all your physics and most of the chemistry.
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They come up again in medical school, certainly. I don't know how important it is for day-to-day practice.</p>
<p>
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If you hate the life sciences then med school will be hard because med school (obviously) is all about anatomy, system functions, immunology, biochemistry, etc. If you hate physics and general chemistry, then you are not alone (most premeds hate these courses as well).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Most pre-meds prefer life science to physical science because they are not scientists (or engineers) by nature. Plenty of engineers who go into medicine disdain the life sciences, but they generally master medical school material much more quickly than those who hate the physical sciences.</p>
<p>
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You have to do well in your chemistry and physics courses in college and on the MCATs. After that, you can forget all your physics and most of the chemistry.
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If you forget all your physics and chemistry, you'll be doomed to a career of cookbook medicine.</p>
<p>I am a medical school professor so let me weigh in. Science is an integral part of medicine so the premedical courses in college help prepare students for the medical training. Showing a certain level of competence in science in mandatory for admission to medical school. In fact, performance in them are important critieria for medical school admissions. What is your attraction to medicine? I think in addition to humanitarian and interpersonal benefits of medicine, I do think there has to be some underlying interest in the science of medicine. Why do people become ill? What can be done aout it? What are the reasons for the particular treatment? Someone that has no curiousity about these type of questions will not be an effective clnician.</p>
<p>I do medical research and we are in a golden age of molecular biology. There will be sophisticated and exciting new treatments in the next decades that will require physicians to have some understanding of molecular genetics, physiology, neuroscience, pharmacology, bioinformatics, and statistics to name a few subjects. Even if you are a practicing physician in the community, you will need the tools and ability to learn and analyze new information in order to keep up in your profession. Also, you will be an interpretor of science to the lay community as I believe many scientific advances will raise ethical and economic issues for our society.</p>
<p>By the way, my son is a History major in college and pre-med. I have encouraged him to take science courses and also to participate in research projects. Although his natural bent is towards the humanities, he enjoys using different thinking processes to analyze problems. I would say to go into your pre-med science classes without any pre-conceptions. You may find a professor or a scientific question that may transform your attitude. Your experience in science in college may be very different than the one you had in high school. I thought I would be an English major in college, and was turned on to medical research by an exciting summer experience in a research laboratory. I now spend the majority of my time in medical research although I do teaching and some clinical care. Harold Varmus, who was a previous director of the NIH and a Nobel laureate, majored in Medieval Literature and was in the middle of a Ph.D program in literature when he decided to switch into medicine. I have read some interviews of him, and he credits his training in the humanities for some of the creativity and communication skills needed to be a successful medical scientist.</p>
<p>What if I love science and hate math? </p>
<p>I used to be in an accelerated math course in 7th grade, but I was taken out of it by my parents when they freaked out about me having a B- in it. I thought math was difficult for me in that class (it was accelerated and it was different from 6th grade math), but for some reason, my teacher wanted me to keep going with it. Ironically, in 8th grade, I had recieved a math achievement award from my teacher at Honors Night. Also, the math section of the ACT's were low (but the ACTs do not measure intelligence). </p>
<p>I don't know if I hate math because it takes me some time to figure it out, and I don't just <em>get it</em> once I see a problem, or if it's because I was discouraged from going on to more advanced courses by my parents.</p>