Taking Courses Outside One's Major

Hi all,
I am still a little confused on how exactly college courses work. Are students allowed to take courses that are outside of their majors? For example, if I was to major in finance at a particular university, would I be allowed to also take “pre-med” courses like bio and orgo so that I would still have the ability to apply to med school if finance didn’t work out?

Yes, students at US universities take some of their courses outside of their majors. How many depends on how voluminous in terms of major requirements their majors are. Business majors are moderately voluminous, so you may need careful planning to fit pre-med courses around a business major.

However, medical school admission is so competitive that pre-med should not be thought of as a “backup plan” to anything.

Most schools require students to take gen eds aka “core” classes. You’ll likely be required to take some english, math, science, and history. And possibly a foreign language depending on the school. At a lot of schools, students spend the first 2 years just doing gen eds, and only take courses in their major during junior and senior years.
Depending on your school, you’ll likely be able to take pre-med courses as electives and gen eds.

You can look up the graduation requirements for the colleges and universities right on their websites. Often there are requirements for the major, and additional requirements for the college/university, so you may need to hunt around a bit. The information might be in a PDF with a title like “XYZ major degree plan”.

Most majors at most colleges require some introductory level course work during frosh/soph years, although some of that may overlap with general education courses. For example, a business major may be required to take calculus, statistics, economics, and English composition during frosh/soph years for the major, but these may also fulfill general education requirements in math or quantitative reasoning, social sciences, and English composition.

Pre-med science courses could overlap with any applicable science general education requirements. However, some may have to come from free elective space.

Search for “plan of study” and the major/school - there’s probably a well-defined set of coursework requirements.

Engineering tends to be at the other end of the spectrum. First year engineering is a prescribed set of courses, very engineering-specific, and subsequent years are clearly defined, included a series of GenEd courses. My D had to take 6 GenEd courses - one had to be Economics, one a World elective (language or foreign country culture, typically) and then 4 more In other specific areas (after the required Freshman reading and writing courses).

After everything was accounted for, I think the program had 1 free elective slot, similar to my Engineering program way back. AP, DE, etc., credits may free up a few slots.

Very different than some of the liberal arts, social sciences, etc, IME.