<p>So I'm currently going into my senior year of high school, and I know for sure that my goal is to study some sort of science and then hopefully get accepted into med school. My question is what are some useful degrees i could earn whilst still fulfilling my reqs to be in the position to apply to med school. I know for sure I want to study science, yet I know Biology is not a degree I would want to attain because if med school doesn't pan out, its virtually useless.</p>
<p>I understand as a pre med, you can study anything, but for me I know I want some sort of science, I was thinking Bio Chem/Chem but are there good jobs out there for bio chemists/chemists, and I was also thinking about graduate school for chemistry if med school didn't pan out.</p>
<p>I’d say biochem is almost as popular, if not as popular a major for premeds as bio, and chem isn’t far behind, so you won’t have much of an advantage there. Are you at all interested in the softer sciences, like psychology? If you’re interested in therapy, a psyc or linguistics degree could help you towards a career as a counsellor or speech therapist.</p>
<p>You have a lot of conflicting goals. You need to figure out what is more important to you - med school and graduate school are very very different and their paths to admission can’t possibly be farther. Or if you know, you didn’t describe it well in your original post. If med school is your end goal you should study the easiest major possible that includes your prereqs (or one that doesn’t if you feel like you can handle your major classes and premed prereqs) that will get you the highest GPA. Biochem/hard science majors are a horrid choice for someone that has his/her 1st priority as medical school admission. Unless there are other reasons you want to study biochem and the like then go for it. But if your priority in life is getting into med school, stay away from majors that will hurt your chances. Good majors are psychology and basic biology (nothing applied bio is easy like molecular cell bio/immunology, neuroscience, etc). Popular nonscience premed majors are anthro, history, and polysci.</p>
<p>You want a meaningful safety major that’s easy if medical school doesn’t pan out.
In all honestly, I would ask yourself this question: are you actually good enough to be at the top of your class? If the answer is no, I’d give up on medical school and pursue a different path. With the current state of pre-med, you really can’t have your cake and eat it too with a good chance for med school and a meaningful career if you fail.</p>
<p>I’m in the exact same situation as you. Everybody in my family is in medicine except my dad, so I’m naturally going to give it a shot. However i find out that one of the highly accepted majors for law school is bio. So that would be my personal back up plan if medicine doesn’t pan out.</p>
<p>That is true. I know a lot of lawyers who have had to take jobs with the government because they can’t get with a firm. It beats working at the local McDonalds though.</p>
<p>That is very true, and if you go to a less prestigious school, your chances worsen. Back to the poster, surely you could find some sort of professional job to use your degree in.</p>
Keep in mind that is that each path requires time-consuming extra-curricular engagement that may not be compatible. If you want to be competitive for med school, you should be volunteering or working in a health care setting. If you want to be competitive for graduate programs in chemistry, you need significant research experience in a lab.</p>
<p>You can keep your options open for right now, but you should probably decide by the end of your second year whether you want to prepare for graduate or medical school if you want to be a competitive applicant at either.</p>
<p>If you want to have a ready back-up career that fits in the time constraints of a pre-med education, consider adding a teaching credential to your science major. Or choose a major that’s directly employable, such as computer science.</p>
<p>Don’t make up any pre-decisions about wanting to be what until you get through at least your first year in college. The number of people who start off as pre-med and end up moving on is always a large percentage every year.</p>
<p>I will tell you that you are right in that it is probably the most difficult to be a biology major, start off as pre-med, and then end up not knowing what to do with your life after quitting pre-med. While it will be the most difficult to manage if you also plan to be pre-med, engineering fields of any kind are the most employable and probably “useful” in that sense if you do not plan on going to graduate school. In terms of non-engineering majors, math/econ and/or physics do end up having the highest applicability to any subject, so those are the “safest” to do (i.e. if you do not get into medical school, you can still go to grad school for pure science or engineering, move into a real job in industry, go into finance, etc.) however they also will probably result in a lower pre-med GPA.</p>
<p>So in the end, the moral is that if you want to major in something science related, yet have good back-up plans while still being able to have the option to do pre-med, nothing is going to be very simple and you should try to make up your mind sometime after the first year of college.</p>
<p>Lots of pre-meds major in biology, biochemistry, and chemistry. Most of them do not get into any medical school. So a flood of them graduates every year, depressing pay levels in those fields. Even at the PhD level, jobs are extremely competitive in those fields.</p>
<p>I’m the type of person that doesn’t want to go with the flow, and i know that I can really major in anything, so I was even thinking of doing something with economics and the other day I read an article on how a student whom went to rutgers got into med school with an accounting degree.</p>
<p>Obviously a background in bio/biochem/chem helps but I’m feeling that those degrees aren’t the right path if I want a good safety net if med school doesn’t pan out. So I’ll definitely start exploring more degrees and other majors now.</p>
<p>As a high school senior i wondering some of the same things. However a question i had to ask myself is why do i want to do that? If your motivation for a career in science is because of money, i think it is unlikely to work out for you. However, if you truly do love science I’d like to hope that you can do whatever you want, but the world is not always that nice. Personally i know that i could never pull the kind of grades to get into med. school, I’m just not that kind of student. You just have to be honest with yourself about what you want, why, and if that is a reasonable goal for you. Taking into account of course what you honestly know you are and aren’t capable of doing. I’d say just get a degree in something you love, and if you don’t love anything, get a degree in something close. I’m hoping to major in Apparel design, however I’m not going to let that stop me from my true goal which is to provide medical assistance to those who need it. Figure out what your goals really are, then go from there. But be realistic about it, because it wouldn’t be a good idea to go out into the world with false impressions of reality.</p>