<p>^I am unsure when I’ll actually take the MCAT since I’m yet to begin college =]</p>
<p>Thanks for your advice.</p>
<p>Consult your colleges pre-med advisor(s).They can provide professional opinions and hard facts.</p>
<p>Hi, i know this thread is over two years old, but if anyone is still interested in providing anymore input that would be amazing. After finishing this ENTIRE thread, i found a lot of useful information and had many of my questions answered about being a nursing major to apply to medical school, but i still have a few questions. For background, I am about to go into my sophomore year of college, and have already finished all my pre-med requirements. Biology, Inorganic chemistry, Physics, organic chemistry, English and calculus are all taken care of. That being said, I’m looking at three more years of science classes and labs to fulfill a B.S degree in Neuroscience. But my passion for being pre-med comes from not only having an intellectual curiosity for the sciences, but also, mostly, for helping people. A big argument against nursing here seems to be that nursing requirements aren’t the same as pre-med ones but also that nursing isn’t seen as intellectually equivalent with liberal arts degrees. If I became a nursing major now, not only would I have all my pre-med courses done I could be looking at three years of patient care experience as well as cultivating hospital experience that would make me a better doctor in the future. If I’ve done everything to make myself equivalent to other medical school applicants, why wouldn’t focusing on my passion for helping people make me a stronger candidate for being a successful medical student and doctor?</p>
<p>Just one opinion here: We are talking not only about facts, but also perception. Your grades in your premed science courses will determine to a large degree your chances of med school admission, along with your general GPA and your MCAT scores. If your general GPA is in a traditional academic major, then it “counts”. If it is in nursing, fairly or not, you may find that it does not count as much. Nursing students, ON AVERAGE, do not have the academic talents as successful premeds. So nursing courses ON AVERAGE, are not graded as rigorously. This is not an attack on any nursing program or student. Just stating facts. So many med schools, fairly or unfairly, will not look at the same GPA from a nursing program as from a neuroscience program. From a premed strategy point of view they are just different.</p>
<p>On the other hand, no one says you have to major in neuroscience if you don’t want to. However inflexible your college, there must be some way to switch majors? </p>
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<p>Does not make it sound like you are looking forward to this. If you don’t want to major in neuroscience, pick something else that seems more appealing. Not only is it three years of your life, but if you do go to medical school, it will be the last time you get to choose courses and field of study based on your interest. If this is not what turns you on, then the rest of college will be torture rather than exciting.</p>
<p>But you would be better off with general biology, biochemistry, economics, history, classics, English… rather than nursing.</p>
<p>Of course, if you would rather be a nurse, then by all means major in nursing! It is at least as important in the healthcare field as medicine, much lower investment of time and money to get there, and perpetually in demand. I have friends and relatives who are nurses and friends and relatives who are physicians. On the whole the nurses are happier with their lives and careers. Hard to know whether that is because they chose nursing, or because of the personalities that nursing attracts.</p>
<p>You do sacrifice some autonomy, although that is decreasing for physicians, and quite a bit of income potential. The income difference is easy to exaggerate: docs invest so much in getting educated and trained, and take to long to do it, that the rate of return is not all that much higher.</p>
<p>So, major in nursing if you want to be a nurse, but recognize that it may not help you become a physician as much as a more conventional major might.</p>
<p>The roles of a nurse and a doctor in a healthcare setting are distinctly different. I think too many premeds mistake “clinical experience” as 'doctor experience." That must explain why so many of them think being a EMT, MA, CNA, phlebotomist is valuable for med school applications. To be fair, hospital volunteering (which is what most premeds do to get clinical experience) is largely a waste of time too but I’d rather waste 100 hours than 3 years (nursing is a “waste” only if you’re looking to become a physician). I think most med school adcoms would rather you spend your time learning about something intellectual. If you want to help people, there are plenty of extracurricular things you can do to help people.</p>
<p>Closing old thread.</p>
<p>Please use old threads only for reference. If you have a question to ask, please use the New Tread button and start your own thread.</p>