Posting for my brother…he is interested in applying to Berkeley for the Integrative Biology major.
He is not interested in medicine - he wants to focus on ecology and evolutionary biology to become a field biologist studying the environment, wildlife populations, etc. He is definitely interested in going to grad school after that, focusing on ecology and evolutionary biology.
He is, however, wondering if the IB major will be full of students intent on the medicine path, and making it ultra-cutthroat and competitive, both from an application standpoint first, and later in the classes. Are these legitimate concerns, or do most students who are interested in applying for med school going to be in the Molecular and Cell Biology track?
Any advice would be great!
Your brother should make his own account to ask his own questions.
Both IB and MCB have relatively large numbers of medical school matriculants relative to the number of career survey responses in https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2018Majors . Of course, the pre-meds who did not apply to or get into medical school will not be obvious in the career survey. Note also that the lower division course work for IB and MCB overlap with each other and with typical courses that pre-meds of any major take.
If that is the major that he is passionate about, he should go for it and not overthink it. he will find ways to stand out among the premeds who are using it towards a very different career path than him.
Cool, thanks! I’ll let him know. Yeah, he is in the process of setting up his own account. 
**UC Forum Champion Note: **
Since your brother is going to setup an account to ask his own questions, I will be closing this thread. For many reasons, including privacy, users are permitted to ask for themselves and their dependents only.