<p>Are there any majors that require all of the pre-med classes for med school? if so, what are they?</p>
<p>No single major will cover ALL of the premed classes.</p>
<p>Most require:
2 of Bio
2 of Gen Chem
2 of Orgo
2 of Math
2 of Physics</p>
<p>Biology will cover your Bio and depending on institution one or two of the 4 chem requirements and one or two of the math.</p>
<p>Physics will cover both physics and maths but usually only one of gen chem.</p>
<p>Engineers (like me!) have things covered a bit easier.</p>
<p>Chemical Engineers will have 2 math, 2 gen chem, 2 physics, one of bio and one of orgo.
Mechanical Engineers will have 2 math, 2 physics, 1 gen chem.
Biomedical Engineers (Like me!) will have 2 math, 2 gen chem, 2 physics, 2 bio and depending on institution 0 or 1 of orgo.</p>
<p>YMMV.</p>
<p>Cheers!</p>
<p>Thanks, I was considering doing Biomedical Engineering or Biochemical Engineering…</p>
<p>Generally, Bio majors are required to take almost all pre-med requirements, especially if Physics is required as well. Biomedical Engineering would probably cover everything, although maybe not Orgo. It also varies from school to school.</p>
<p>Neuroscience.</p>
<p>Is the purpose of this question so you can avoid duplication or needing to take classes outside your major? There’s no need for this thinking. Many US Med School students majored in huge variety of areas. Taking the pre-reqs outside their major is just another thing. Major in Art History if that’s really your passion. Then take the pre-reqs on the side. You’ll be a Physician for the rest of your life (according to you). Why not study something you’ll really love (even if it’s not science) as a College major?</p>
<p>It is rumored that a science major premed with little interest outside the science area tends to have a trouble when he or she takes MCAT, especially its verbal section.</p>
<p>It is a fact that more students have difficulty in obtaining a high MCAT verbal score than the scores in “science-y” MCAT sections – Actually, it is rumored that more “advanced” science classes will not necessarily be translated into a better score even in MCAT science sections, but a good reading skill obtained by reading widely (a humanity major is required to do so) will. A trouble for reading science textbooks is: they are too easy English-wise. So it will likely do you good if you could take as many non-gut classes outside of science prereqs – especially those hardcore humanity classes (if you are capable of doing well in these classes.) Some philosophy, religious study, English, or linguistics majors with a good science aptitude tend to beat science majors on MCAT because it is often the MCAT verbal score that distinguishes a great test taker from a good test taker. Each year, there are well too many students who are struggling with getting high enough verbal score – And it is rumored that medical school adcoms pay more attention to the score of verbal section than others. This is because they may look at the lowest section score, which is almost always the verbal score for most test takers.</p>
<p>OP, since there is the word “Ivy” in your screen name, you may be from one of these colleges. If this is the case, a CCer called “mini” once posted that the most noticeable characteristics of a school of this kind (and most top LACs as well) is in the not-necessarily-science-y liberal art-ish aspect of their education. He even hinted that if a student does not like this kind of reading/writing-intensive education, he may not get all the benefits in this kind of education environment. A tech school (cal tech, MIT, Harvey Mudd, engineering/science departments of many flagship state schools) may be a better fit.</p>
<p>Zoology…</p>
<p>A Biochemistry (sometimes Biochem & Microbio) would pretty much cover the requirements for medical program.</p>
<p>Where I’m going the Biochem+Microbio BS degree requirements pretty much covers everything (including math and physics).</p>
<p>I was thinking a double major in some type of Engineering and some type of Business with Italian on the side… with pre med reqs… how possible is this?</p>
<p>Correct, a Biochem major covers all the requirements.</p>
<p>Biochem and BME both do a good job of covering the reqs. </p>
<p>“It is rumored that a science major premed with little interest outside the science area tends to have a trouble when he or she takes MCAT, especially its verbal section.”</p>
<p>‘It’ is wrong.</p>
<p>“It is rumored that more “advanced” science classes will not necessarily be translated into a better score even in MCAT science sections,”</p>
<p>That’s really not true. More advanced science classes, if anything, require you to understand the basic material even better than you would in other instances. I will agree that its a mental shift (you actually have to dumb down your thinking a little), but on sum it does help to have a deeper knowledge of whatever they’re testing you on.</p>
<p>“but a good reading skill obtained by reading widely (a humanity major is required to do so) will. A trouble for reading science textbooks is: they are too easy English-wise. So it will likely do you good if you could take as many non-gut classes outside of science prereqs – especially those hardcore humanity classes (if you are capable of doing well in these classes.)”</p>
<p>You should take those if you’re interested in them, not for the sake of the MCAT.</p>
<p>“Some philosophy, religious study, English, or linguistics majors with a good science aptitude tend to beat science majors on MCAT” </p>
<p>Dud[ette?], citation needed. The only people I know who completely destroyed (>40) the MCATs are science majors because the science sections are worth 2/3 of the grade. </p>
<p>“because it is often the MCAT verbal score that distinguishes a great test taker from a good test taker.”</p>
<p>No it doesn’t.</p>
<p>“Each year, there are well too many students who are struggling with getting high enough verbal score --”</p>
<p>Thats because if you miss one on the verbal, in many years, you get a 13. Two points gone. This is not true of the other two sections. That’s also because the verbal section is way more wishy-washy.</p>
<p>“And it is rumored that medical school adcoms pay more attention to the score of verbal section than others. This is because they may look at the lowest section score, which is almost always the verbal score for most test takers.”</p>
<p>Citation needed.</p>
<p>geoforce, I do not have a solid evidence of what I said. Just a few anecdotal examples at best:</p>
<p>A CCer, DocT, once posted that those who have taken too many advanced science classes tend to over-analyze the question. This may not be good for a timed test which may ask for a best possible answer only.</p>
<p>I know one science major who had some troubles in getting a high enough MCAT score. He did tons of research and took a lot of science classes but was not into other disciplines at all.
I also know a religious study and linguistic major who got a VR that is no lower than the perfect score.</p>
<p>One CCer once posted about the importance of the VR score, but I forgot who posted it now.</p>
<p>Geoforce, there’s no need to be rude – especially when the person you’re “correcting” is actually probably right. If you’ve taken the MCAT, then you ought to know that the entire thing is a reading comprehension test. It happens to be true that 2/3rds of the passages happen to be on science subjects, but it is first and foremost an English test.</p>
<p>Take it from a “complete destroyer” of the MCAT (in your parlance): it is vastly more important to read and write well (which I assure you, is certainly not wishy washy when it comes to the MCAT) than it is to know the science material at an advanced level.</p>
<p>Among eventual applicants to medical school, humanities majors score higher than biology majors – by a lot.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/table18-facts09mcatgpabymaj1-web.pdf[/url]”>http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/table18-facts09mcatgpabymaj1-web.pdf</a></p>
<p>^BDM, Thanks for your support here.</p>
<p>geoforce, I look up a couple of your old posts, purely out of my curiosity. From the following post, it appears you do not appreciate the value of core education requirements offered by many ivies. (Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Penn are all “bad”? You may as well add a few more others like Dartmouth here. You probably like physics and math as you left out princeton as an example of being a “bad” one. – Harvard may be “tainted” here because its relatively large social science departments attract too many good students even though its graduate science program is quite strong?)</p>
<p>It is perfectly fine for some people to hold this view if they do not particularly appreciate the value of the core education, but some others may think this is arguably a hallmark of many top college education. This world needs all varieties of talents.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>“Geoforce, there’s no need to be rude – especially when the person you’re “correcting” is actually probably right. If you’ve taken the MCAT, then you ought to know that the entire thing is a reading comprehension test. It happens to be true that 2/3rds of the passages happen to be on science subjects, but it is first and foremost an English test.”</p>
<p>I’m very sorry if I appeared rude to mcat2, as that certainly wasn’t my intent. I was trying to express my incredulity at some of the things that s/he was saying, and I apologize if I came on too strongly. I have taken the MCAT (I’m currently in medical school) and I do remember it being all passages. But I think that the 2/3 of the passages that are on science subjects are tested very differently than the 1/3 that are on verbal - the types of questions that they ask are very different, and the curve is harsher for the verbal passages. </p>
<p>“Take it from a “complete destroyer” of the MCAT (in your parlance): it is vastly more important to read and write well (which I assure you, is certainly not wishy washy when it comes to the MCAT) than it is to know the science material at an advanced level.”</p>
<p>I didn’t want to bring myself into this too much, but I’m also in that class of people. As were, anecdotally, 5 other people in my undergraduate major. Maybe reading well has become a subconscious thing for me/us; I can tell you that, for me personally, doing well on the MCAT had little to do with the reading done for my humanities classes. I think reading papers and textbooks in science classes helped far more than reading Algernon Swinburne (though he was awesome). I stated before that I did have to alter my mindset and mentality when approaching MCAT science (because its of a lower level) and I think that’s something that trips science majors up, and I really do believe having that extra layer of knowledge is helpful.</p>
<p>Also my point about the verbal section being wishy washy still applies; the questions asked are vastly different and vastly more interpretive, rather than factual. This leads to so many situations in which two answers both appear right that it starts to make your head spin.</p>
<p>“Among eventual applicants to medical school, humanities majors score higher than biology majors – by a lot.”</p>
<p>Let me throw a wrench in your data for a second. This category of biology majors presumably includes several different strains of majors, including human biology, biology, biochemistry and molecular biology, biomedical engineering, and maybe even biophysics. That’s quite a range of rigor. I would imagine if biochemistry and BME majors were given their own category, the numbers would look very different (esp considering the more rigorous sciences, like physics and math, score just as high or higher than the humanities).</p>
<p>I’d also like to reiterate, anecdotally, that the vast majority of people who achieve high outlier scores on the MCAT, in my experience, are lab-dwelling science majors.</p>
<p>“geoforce, I look up a couple of your old posts, purely out of my curiosity. From the following post, it appears you do not appreciate the value of core education requirements offered by many ivies. (Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Penn are all “bad”? You may as well add a few more others like Dartmouth here. You probably like physics and math as you left out princeton as an example of being a “bad” one. – Harvard may be “tainted” here because its relatively large social science departments attract too many good students even though its graduate science program is quite strong?)”</p>
<p>This is a simple misunderstanding of my point in that post, so please allow me to explain. The word “bad” in this context simply means “constraining”. I was trying to illustrate the point that many people believe that Brown’s open curriculum frees them from the constraints of a core, but for pre-meds that advantage is nullified due to medical schools wanting applicants to appear well-rounded. I do value a core education, and while at Brown I made sure to take english, history, art, and mathematics classes in addition to courses for my major. Outside of this board, I’ve even argued that the open curriculum is self-contradictory, because while it purports to the be epitome of a liberal education, so many people simply use it to avoid subjects that they don’t like rather than being truly well-rounded.</p>
<p>“It is perfectly fine for some people to hold this view if they do not particularly appreciate the value of the core education, but some others may think this is arguably a hallmark of many top college education. This world needs all varieties of talents.”</p>
<p>I don’t hold this view, as I’ve illustrated above, and this world would be a pretty dull place without a nice cross-section of talents.</p>
<p>Of course the sections are different, but they are nonetheless variations on reading comprehension. As is obvious, the physics parts of the MCAT are much closer to a hypothetical “Reading about Physics” class than they are to “Physics 101.” In fact, there are passages which will actually instruct you to make incorrect scientific assumptions.</p>
<p>(For example, my exam had a passage asking us to interpret Rutherford’s gold foil experiment in the context of physics knowledge at the time, as described in the passage. The correct answer for testing purposes was thus scientifically incorrect. It would be more important there to read the passage carefully than to be a nuclear physics expert.)</p>
<hr>
<p>The reading comprehension on the MCAT is vastly simpler than scientific journals. Obviously reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets isn’t particularly relevant either. But the MCAT’s science passages are typically similar to an article that you’d find in “Scientific American” or “Popular Mechanics.” In that sense, they’re closer to The New Yorker than they are to The Journal of Biological Chemistry. The point is that you’re not there to assess reliability, methods, etc. You’re there to evaluate premises and conclusions.</p>
<p>It’s an English exercise that requires scientific background knowledge, not a science exercise that happens to be written in English.</p>
<hr>
<p>If you were a high scorer on the MCAT, then (unless you just happened to get lucky on test day), you’re perfectly aware that the Verbal section is every bit as predictable and reliable as the science sections. There’s a reason that some people can consistently get perfect or near-perfect scores on the VR section.</p>
<p>Just as some kids can routinely get near-perfect scores on the SAT reasoning, or on the LSAT’s reading comprehension sections, too. These are not “wishy-washy” – in their own (perhaps useless) way, they are highly predictable and reliable skills.</p>
<hr>
<p>Well, you should feel free to add this economics major to your list of people who destroyed the MCAT. Besides that, that’s not even the point. mcat2 was discussing avoiding problem scores rather than achieving scores in the genuine upper echelon.</p>
<hr>
<p>If I understand your statistical argument correctly, it seems to be: “The reason biology majors score lower than humanities majors is because the science majors include really easy majors like ‘Biology.’ In contrast, humanities majors don’t have any majors which are that easy – English, Literature, and Art are notoriously among a college’s toughest majors.” Is this a mischaracterization?</p>
<p>"Of course the sections are different, but they are nonetheless variations on reading comprehension. As is obvious, the physics parts of the MCAT are much closer to a hypothetical “Reading about Physics” class than they are to “Physics 101.” In fact, there are passages which will actually instruct you to make incorrect scientific assumptions.</p>
<p>(For example, my exam had a passage asking us to interpret Rutherford’s gold foil experiment in the context of physics knowledge at the time, as described in the passage. The correct answer for testing purposes was thus scientifically incorrect. It would be more important there to read the passage carefully than to be a nuclear physics expert.)"</p>
<p>Interesting. I never had a passage like that. And dumbing down, again, is key.</p>
<p>"The reading comprehension on the MCAT is vastly simpler than scientific journals. Obviously reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets isn’t particularly relevant either. But the MCAT’s science passages are typically similar to an article that you’d find in “Scientific American” or “Popular Mechanics.” In that sense, they’re closer to The New Yorker than they are to The Journal of Biological Chemistry. The point is that you’re not there to assess reliability, methods, etc. You’re there to evaluate premises and conclusions.</p>
<p>It’s an English exercise that requires scientific background knowledge, not a science exercise that happens to be written in English."</p>
<p>I guess I don’t really see the difference from an MCAT passage, reading a textbook, and the introduction/background section of a paper. It might just be me.</p>
<p>“If you were a high scorer on the MCAT, then (unless you just happened to get lucky on test day), you’re perfectly aware that the Verbal section is every bit as predictable and reliable as the science sections. There’s a reason that some people can consistently get perfect or near-perfect scores on the VR section.”</p>
<p>That doesn’t alter the fact that making that jump from 13 to 15 is statistically far more difficult than that same jump in every other section. In fact, this is why originally the highest score you could get on verbal was “13-15”. In the science sections you can train yourself to the point where you get 15 on the bio almost every time, but doing the same for VR is much different. To me, it almost felt like it was two divergent sets of skills at that stage.</p>
<p>“If I understand your statistical argument correctly, it seems to be: “The reason biology majors score lower than humanities majors is because the science majors include really easy majors like ‘Biology.’ In contrast, humanities majors don’t have any majors which are that easy – English, Literature, and Art are notoriously among a college’s toughest majors.” Is this a mischaracterization?”</p>
<p>I’m saying that biology majors vary significantly in raw scientific rigor, whereas humanities majors (with the exception of SS) have roughly the same amount. It has nothing to do with the “ease” of the major. Biochemistry, BME, and Biophysics majors, for example, are expected to be conversant in far more chemistry and physics than their biology major counterparts while maintaining the same level of depth in biology proper.</p>
<p>EDIT: The only way to settle this is to simply find the majors of everyone who got greater than some high cutoff score on the MCAT.</p>
<p>It is interesting to read the posts from two MCAT past takers here. (I am not as I am just a parent who is trying to learn something about being premed. My S is a science major.)</p>
<p>geoforce, just reread my post. I did misinterpret your post and therefore overreact.</p>
<p>Just curious, how many MCAT “overachievers” from a well-known private college or a flagship state university each year? Maybe very few 41+ scorers even from such schools? Or, put it differently, what may be the average score of the top 10 or 20 MCAT scorers from one of these schools? (e.g., brown, cornell, duke, wustl, jhu, penn, hyps, berkeley, michigan, unc, etc.) Cornell seems to have posted a grid about this.</p>
<p>Nationally, there’s probably something like 300+ scores of 40 or above each year.</p>