My Mom said I can't do Medicine if I don't get into a BSMD program

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Are there any premed where i can also do engineering bc i couldn’t find anything like that</p>

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<p>Absolutely…and many students do this.</p>

<p>My son was a premed Chemical Engineering student. He just finished his first year of med school.
there are combo chemE/premed tracks, Comp Sci/premed tracks, and so forth.</p>

<p>BS/MD programs are not cheaper in many situations. Some are 8 years, so not cheaper. Some are OOS publics, so you’re paying very high OOS rates for med school and sometimes for undergrad. My son’s med school has a BS/MD program, but an OOS student would be pay about 80k per year for med school…when a better deal could be found at a SOM in your own state.</p>

<p>Well, I think your parents are terrible for changing their minds all the time, but “it doesn’t interest me” is frankly an insufficient answer to me for engineering if astronomy is supposedly your first love since there is a decent amount of overlap between astronomy and some engineering majors. What exactly about engineering doesn’t interest you, and what about astronomy does? Or are you saying that medicine/bio is your first love? That wasn’t the impression I got from the original post.</p>

<p>Please state your likes and dislikes first (in order, if possible) and let’s go from there.</p>

<p>BTW, I don’t believe you have to be an NJ resident to join the NJ National Guard (but check with them first).</p>

<p>ok so basically i have always loved astronomy since I was younger and I know i will work towards it. the only thing im skeptical about is physics bc i dont know if it will click or not but I can work with that. I like more of the theory aspect and research in astronomy more than the hands on work that i feel i will be introduced to in engineering. thats my only reason really. its not clicking (its not like I WANT to do that) with me right now though im sure if i had more exposure it would work. and no medicine isnt what i love but its soemthing that comes right after that or even at the same level so that why im going for that along with the fact that my parents were fine with it until like 2 weeks ago. </p>

<p>1 and 2 are like the same though if my parents were even going to get close to agreeing it would have to be in the engineering aspect</p>

<p>1.Asto- related (i could consider engineering related to this)
2.Medicine
3.any other engineering
4.CS</p>

<p>@mom2collegekids‌ if its not to personal or anything: did your son take a regular premed instead of a bsmd. my parents think that if i get a 30 MCAT i wont get into a med school. How true is that?</p>

<p>Well, astronomy (especially the research aspect) involves a lot of math and physics. Also could involve chemistry and geology as well. Guess what: so do many engineering majors! And nothing says you can’t try to double major.</p>

<p>I’m not sure what you mean by hands-on. A lot of the work that real scientists at NASA do is “hands-on”. A lot more is developing and running computer models. So what kind of non-hands-on astronomy work did you have in mind? Actually, what work <em>isn’t</em> hands-on? How do you define hands-on?</p>

<p>BTW, I understand: teenagers tend to be guided by emotions and maybe mental models of how they picture themselves, so whether something “clicks” is deemed important (since I was a teenager like that once myself). You shouldn’t make decisions based on emotions, though. Instead, you should base it on what is important in life. So what are your goals in life? What do you hope to achieve? What would you be happy doing?</p>

<p>Also, I would describe medicine as very hands-on and CS as probably the most theoretical of the majors you listed (along with pure physics and pure math), so I don’t understand your definition of “hands-on”.</p>

<p>My understanding is that medical schools prefer to admit people from a wide variety of majors, as long as those applying for admission have completed the prerequisites for medical school. Medical schools probably get a zillion applicants with Biology degrees. Astronomy might stand out.</p>

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@mom2collegekids‌ if its not to personal or anything: did your son take a regular premed instead of a bsmd. my parents think that if i get a 30 MCAT i wont get into a med school. How true is that?
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<p>My son was not BS/MD…his undergrad doesn’t have a med school. His med school is at a different school.</p>

<p>what is your home state?</p>

<p>an applicant with a 3.8 gpa and a 30 MCAT and a good app list has a very high chance of being admitted to a US MD school. I will look up the stats, but it’s around 80%. Your parents are wrong.</p>

<p>edit…just looked it up…78% chance of acceptance.</p>

<p>but shoot for a higher mcat.</p>

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<p>Why? Even though there’s overlap, astronomy and engineering are not the same thing. They’re different fields. There’s overlap between math and physics, too, or math and computer science, but there are many students who would happily major in computer science but would hate majoring in math.</p>

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<p>Show this to them:</p>

<p><a href=“https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/2013factstable24.pdf”>https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/2013factstable24.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Just under 60% of people with MCAT scores in the 30-32 range were accepted into medical school. The average MCAT score for matriculants in 2013 was about a 31.3, so yeah, if you get a 30 MCAT and have an otherwise outstanding application you have a very good chance of admission.</p>

<p>“Im going inot 11th.”</p>

<p>By this I take it that you have just finished 10th grade. You have two years to raise your GPA and your ACT/SAT scores. You also have plenty of time to consider what you might like to do in college, and your parents have time to change their minds several more times about what they think you should do. These are not decisions that must be made right now.</p>

<p>Take a deep breath. Go out and enjoy the summer. </p>

<p>When you come back in, go to the Financial Aid Forum, and read up on automatic merit-based aid. If you find your own money to pay for college, your parents won’t be able to say a thing about what you study.</p>

<p>@juillet:</p>

<p>I wanted to get the OP to clear up his/her thinking. Especially since “engineering” is so broad (computer engineers and chemical engineers have pretty much zero overlap). I don’t believe that “I don’t like the sound of being an engineer, but astronomy seems cool!” is really a good way to decide on majors. </p>

<p>With math and CS, it’s more that pure math is all about doing proofs, while CS is more like an applied math. That’s why while you can find CS majors who would hate being a math major, it’s much harder to find math majors who can not at least put up with studying CS.</p>

<p>With astronomy and the engineering disciplines, there are no proofs (and most of the engineering disciplines are pretty heavy on theory; you need to know a lot of basic science for pretty much all of them). Plus, astronomy is kind of an applied science (granted, most chemistry and biology are as well), so it’s frankly hard for me to picture a mindset that enjoys astronomy but can’t get some pleasure out of some engineering major. </p>

<p>Oh yeah, what @happymomof1 said. If you really want to do what you want free of your parents, become either a National Merit Scholar (via the PSAT) or have a GPA and test scores that qualify you for a full-ride somewhere.</p>

<p>In fact, if you had said “my parents are forcing me to be an engineer, but I really want to do creative writing!”, that’s what I would have advised. Astronomy and some engineering disciplines are similar enough, though, that it’s hard to imagine someone who really likes one but hates the other.</p>

<p>Engineering and astronomy tend to go along well together, especially when physics comes into play.</p>

<p>@julliet‌ @PurpleTitan‌ </p>

<p>I took computer science this year in school lets just say it was a nightmare because i would be so stressed about getting a program done, freak out over, it spend all my time doing that and basically be a mess. I cant quite see my self doing that right now maybe later in my life. I didn’t really get much satisfaction finishing a program just im glad im done with this feeling. An i loveeee math so im one of those people. As for astronomy and engineering I can see where your coming from but in the medical aspect the hand on is with people which i feel is different. i definitely will consider more choices ill have to look into specific engineering aspects. </p>

<p>@dividerofzero‌ yes thats why I have considered aero/astro space engineer and i mentioned that to my parents because i did like that but they said something about job opportunity not so good and stuff like that so im just confused</p>

<p>this has helped me out a lot, opened my eye to other fields</p>

<p>@Arya110‌ Yeah, aerospace engineering is a bit of a restrictive major and “job opportunities are limited” is one of the most frequent comments about it. I haven’t looked at it thoroughly, but the main issues seem to be the relatively small market and the fact that it’s highly accessible to non-aerospace engineers while other engineering majors’ primary markets aren’t as accessible to aerospace engineers.</p>

<p>You can always be heavily involved in the medical field even if you’re not majoring in medicine. I’m going into ECE and several of the research activities going on in my field tie in heavily to the medical field- for example, in Spring 2014, one rising junior I know worked on technology that automatically administers medicine with error rates lower than those of actual nurses; and of course there’s the interesting field of brain-computer interfaces which is very multidisciplinary. If you end up not getting into a BS/MD program, I’d accept an engineering major that’s interesting (maybe one that ties to astronomy and/or medicine- ECE also ties to astronomy and there’s opportunities at places like SpaceX and NASA for a variety of engineering majors) and go on the pre-med track to keep the option open (if not, you’ve got engineering to fall back on).</p>

<p>Saying that just because two fields have a lot of math and sciences courses in common, therefore you should like both, just pick one is a little like saying all girls are the same because they have the same parts and happen to be female, just pick one, you’ll enjoy her. </p>

<p>It’s been my experience that it doesn’t really work that way.</p>

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<p>However, the parents have absolute veto over the student’s college choices due to either paying for some of it, or cooperating with financial aid paperwork. No parental cooperation, no college money.</p>

<p>If it comes down to that, the OP needs to find a full ride merit scholarship that does not have a need-based component in order to be completely independent of the parents from a college finance perspective.
<a href=“http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/”>http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“Competitive Full Tuition / Full Ride Scholarships - #50 by BobWallace - Financial Aid and Scholarships - College Confidential Forums”>Competitive Full Tuition / Full Ride Scholarships - #50 by BobWallace - Financial Aid and Scholarships - College Confidential Forums;

<p>Note, however, that pre-med does not require any specific major (whether you are in a BS/MD program or not). You can major in physics or astronomy as a pre-med.</p>

<p>Note also that BS/MD programs do require meeting a high GPA and MCAT score to keep your place in the MD program, although they would spare you the stressful applications and interviews that regular pre-meds need to do.</p>

<p>@dividerofzero‌ thank you for the advice i think iw ill do that the fall back will please my parents and tie in everything i could possibly want to do </p>

<p>@MrMom62‌ I didn’t know how to word that thank you =)</p>

<p>@MrMom62, you have such exacting standards. ;)</p>