<p>I am currently a senior in high school who is taking AP Latin. I was wondering if I really need to continue taking a foreign language in college as a pre-med student and if I do, which one. I know that taking Latin and knowing Latin vocabulary will really help me memorize medical (and pretty much any other scientific) terms but I heard that the main purpose of medical staff at hospitals knowing other languages other than English is to be able to communicate with patients. Which probably means that Spanish is the best path to take in college. So I was wondering, is foreign language a requirement for pre-med students who are trying to get into med school? I looked at some course requirements for pre-med students at universities and they just list out general (and occasionally advanced) STEM courses but they never mention foreign language. And if so, I was wondering if it would be better to continue the track I took in high school and take advanced Latin classes or start taking Spanish (although I would probably be stuck in basic-level classes). For Spanish, I heard that there are Spanish classes aimed specifically for med students that teach the minimum requirement for communicating with Spanish-speaking patients.</p>
<p>Medical schools do not require a foreign language (AAMC has no listing other than English) although some elite ones recommend it.</p>
<p>However, many colleges have a language requirement to be fulfilled if you don’t have an AP credit or SAT II language test score to get a waiver but some also administer a proficiency test to provide a waiver.</p>
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I took one semester of such a class offered at my med school, and let me say, minimum requirement feels like an overstatement. I learned how to conduct a patient interview assuming the patient answered my questions in one of a couple ways, as soon as they start to veer off script in any way I was lost, and that’s not even getting into the fact that I learned absolutely no “non-medical” terms. I barely knew how to ask someone what they did for a living and definitely didn’t understand their answer unless it was “doctor” or “nurse.” It felt like a total waste of my time.</p>
<p>If you want to learn to converse with patients in another language, do a traditional language learning course and when you get to med school you can learn the medical terms.</p>
<p>All that being said, I believe only a couple schools actually have foreign language requirements, and I think UCLA is the only one that specifically requires Spanish (I might be wrong though).</p>