<p>Hi everyone. This is my first time posting so bear with me. I am going to be a high school senior this fall and I have started applying to colleges. I am currently stuck on my application to University of Michigan because I have to decide what I want to major in. My main goal is to go to med school and become a psychiatrist. What do you think a better undergrad major would be? Psychology or Neuroscience. I understand that I'd have to take additional courses for med school like biology and chemistry. I am really interested in the human mind, and I also enjoy math a lot. I was thinking about doing a math major at first.. but then I realized that would get me no where if I ever decided to not go to med school. Feel free to bring up any other majors related to psychology or neuroscience! thanks</p>
<p>Go for the one with the best teachers and most engaging classes.</p>
<p>Math major: “that would get me no where if I ever decided to not go to med school.”</p>
<p>LOL: not much confidence in math majors, eh? </p>
<p>You’re quite mistaken</p>
<p>Neuroscience hands down! you will work very hard but if you can hack it then you should be med school material. Psychology, is a social science.
psychiatrist is an md that treats real mental health issues using medicine and science
Psychology is talking to people who are upset their kid did not get into yale.</p>
<p>lol…where did you EVER get the idea that a math degree with get you nowhere? That is so wrong, wrong, wrong.</p>
<p>Anyway…as a pre-med student, it doesn’t matter what you major in as long as you do all the pre-med pre-reqs. You want ot have the best GPA possible, so major in something you like and will do well in.</p>
<p>There is some overlap between those two majors. And some schools, Dartmouth for example, combine them into a single department. But in general, Neuroscience is a science that involves a lot of the other branches of science - biochemistry, physiology, etc. You will automatically cover most of the pre-med reqs in the course of getting a Neuroscience degree. Psychology is often taught as more of a social science - the study of human behavior rather than the study of structure and function of the brain. Many psychology degree programs may not include all the pre-med reqs, so you will need to take extra courses.</p>
<p>Either one can get you into med school provided you have great grades and and MCAT scores. So pick whichever one you like the best and in which you are most confident of getting good grades.</p>
<p>T26E4, Where can you get with a math major? I feel like the only kind of job you could get with a math major would be a high school math teacher or professor. Maybe you could get a job as an accountant or in an insurance agency as an actuarian. I don’t know. Its just not as much money as I’d like to make.</p>
<p>Either psychology or neuroscience could be an excellent pre-med major.
Even if you don’t major in neuroscience, you can still take relevant electives as a psychology major. Although a neuroscience major is particularly suitable for pre-meds who eventually want to go into psychiatry, other aspects of psychology are not irrelevant to medicine and psychiatry. Though some other posters noted that psychology is often studied from a social science perspective, many subfields of psychology (apart from neuroscience) fall into natural science category.</p>
<p>See my post in this thread for one way a math background might be useful in medicine and for some links on careers in math:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/other-college-majors/1337140-math-major-issue.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/other-college-majors/1337140-math-major-issue.html</a></p>
<p>Math also is good in combination with psychology, though probably less relevant for a career in medicine or psychiatry.
See my post in this thread:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/other-college-majors/1178283-psych-math.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/other-college-majors/1178283-psych-math.html</a></p>
<p>Thank you zapfino! I’ll check those out.</p>