<p>So, I’m an incoming freshman interested in pursuing business, with strong interests in medicine. To eventually work in managing a big medical company (like when people start having their DNA sequenced), what should I do academically? Would economics, supplemented with a few Bio and Chem courses work? Would I need to do full pre-med? Ah! Confused.</p>
<p>What? You already have planned out that you want to manage a big medical company? If that’s the case, then just study what you’d need to know about them on your own. You can be a comp lit concentrator, taking all your extra classes in africana studies and history, and end up managing a big company. Take what you’re interested in, and go from there. There’s no set of courses that will assuredly lead to one “type” of life after college (excepting maybe pre-med for medical school and engineering for working as an engineer), especially provided that you’re going to go on to grad school anyways (you’d probably be getting an MBA anyways, so study what interests you as an undergrad).</p>
<p>Undergrad is not where you learn the knowledge needed for your career, it’s where you learn things like “how to think” or “how to research a topic” or “how to write a great research paper” or other skills like that.</p>
<p>LOL: OP has mistaken Brown for “business finishing school” or “corporate big shot academy”.</p>
<p>Google “liberal arts education” before you get to Providence. You’ll enjoy your time there more if you do.</p>
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The most recent featured thread on CC suggests that not everyone holds your view. However, Brown’s take seems to be pretty much that in almost all areas.</p>
<p>Uroogla, I would imagine that one’s answer to that question is dependent on what kind of job/career path you’re on. I can only speak anecdotally, but my experience so far in biotech and now in medical school relied much more on things like “using pubmed” and “study/writing/reading skills” than any actual facts I learned at Brown.</p>
<p>If you’re going on to graduate school, then what you learn there will be much more important than undergrad. At a lot of jobs that my friends who did not go to grad school took, the knowledge they needed was so specific it was not something you learned at Brown.</p>