<p>Hi, im going to college next year and planning to continue a career in medicine. However, i don't know which major to select ( im indeed going take premed courses) because a lot of people say that the best major is biology but others say that is doesnt really matter as long as you're taking pre-med courses. Does it matter? HELP PLEASE!!!</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter. Biology is often recommended because then most of the pre-med requirements satisfy your major.</p>
<p>Thank you, but they say that most of the biology courses are often unnecessary and contain a lot of details we dont actually use in medical school. Is it true? I’m thinking maybe a “Medical Laboratory Science Program” as a major, it can give me more practical experiences and if usually less competitive…</p>
<p>What brown means is that, if you choose bio, there’s a good chance all the premed prereqs will be part of your bio degree. </p>
<p>Regardless of what major you choose, it’s unlikely the content from the courses you take in undergrad will give you enough of a boost in med school that would justify choosing that major over others. Med school and UG are just different from each other. This isn’t a problem and it isn’t something you need to plan around. Just recognize that you’re not taking classes in UG so you have a boost in content knowledge for med school. </p>
<p>It doesn’t matter what major you choose, but (like brown said) if you choose something like bio, the premed prereqs will likely be part of your degree program. This gives you freedom with filling the rest of your schedule with electives, if you want it. If you were to choose a different major (say, econ), in addition to doing all your econ major requirements, you’d have to do the premed prereqs. Neither path is better than the other. The only majors categorically recommended against are health science, nursing, or other vocational majors. The difference between academic (science, history, math…) and vocational (health science, nursing, etc) is that academic majors are mostly training you to be a critical thinker and vocational majors are mostly training you to do a specific job. Since med schools like critical thinkers (they can teach you the medical skills no problem), they seem to prefer academic majors. Sometimes engineering is considered a vocational major.</p>
<p>And I’m not quite sure what you mean about bio courses being unnecessary and containing details you won’t use in med school. Regardless of the major you choose, you won’t be using much (any?) of the content you learned in med school. Again, this isn’t a problem, because the point of UG is to start teaching you how to think critically about (whatever subject matter you choose). </p>
<p>You should major in something that you like and find interesting. I think a good way to gauge your interest is to flip through the course catalog and look at the jr and sr level classes. Which ones sound really awesome to you? That would probably be a good major for you. It’s important that you maintain a very high GPA during UG, and one way to facilitate that is to take classes you find fascinating.</p>
<p>And finally, there’s no reason you need to know your major now. Many people change their major multiple times throughout college. My brother (a soph undergrad) has changed his major from Mech E to business/finance to computer science. It’s just about finding what you like and going with it.</p>
<p>Thank you so much i feel so relieved!</p>
<p>Kristin when you say that engineering can be considered a vocational major does that mean that some medical schools won’t accept an engineering degree for undergrads? Sorry it’s just I may want to go to medical school and I never realized being an engineering major could ruin my chances (other than people advising against it for the gpa drop)</p>
<p>yea i would say just pursue biology as a major, since it covers almost everything, and is pretty broad. you can narrow it down in your later years!</p>
<p>No no. You misunderstood her. The engineering thing was just an example of switching majors. Engineering is not considered vocational.</p>
<p>How difficult is it to have more than one major and minor?</p>
<p>Maybe at one point, med schools may have considered “engineering” to be vocational. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Engineering majors (particularly ChemE, BioE, and BiomedE) are getting accepted to med school all the time. </p>
<p>As for other vocational majors (such as nursing), that wouldn’t be recommended. However, there have been employed nurses who later apply to med school and have been accepted. That’s different. They didn’t major in nursing and directly apply to med school. That would be strange unless they had some epiphany as a senior and changed their minds.</p>
<p>Ok thank you for the clarification!</p>
<p>How difficult is it to have more than one major and minor?</p>
<p>And emerge with a very high GPA? It’s very difficult unless the majors aren’t very challenging.</p>
<p>And another point, Charlie:</p>
<p>Med schools accept engineering as long as you take the premed prereqs, which I’m sure you already (correctly) guessed. Engineering is a great thing to pursue if you are interested in it, and surely there are lots of interesting ways to combine engineering and medicine in the future. However, an engineering degree won’t make you look cool or special or uber smart to adcoms, who probably won’t cut you any slack should your GPA suffer as a result of tough engineering classes. Another thing to keep in mind is that engineering tends to be more lock-step than other majors (meaning once you’ve declared your major, all your classes are planned out for you and there’s very little wiggle room/space for extra classes). It can also be pretty time consuming (typically lots of labs), which means you’ll have to work harder to fit in all the extra “stuff” you need to do to be a “good premed.” Having lots of required labs during the day/afternoon is different than having lots of assignments because labs are usually structured around quasi-normal business hours, which means they eat up a lot of time you could be spending at various agencies developing meaningful experiences. </p>
<p>And I went with “sometimes considered a vocational major” because it’s also sometimes considered academic. I’d personally classify it as vocational because it’s specifically training you to be an engineer–although it seems like engineering classes require a much higher level of thought than other vocational majors, which is why I think the line is fuzzy. Regardless, it doesn’t really matter–the point is, engineering and premed is tough to juggle because not only are the classes difficult, but also it’s hard to plan around that schedule academically, and it’s quite time consuming in terms of developing a nice collection of meaningful extracurriculars. </p>
<p>Not meant to deter you from doing engineering, just tossing in my perspective from having engineering friends who were also premed. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one (out of maybe 7 or 8) who graduated with an engineering degree and went onto med school; the others dropped one or the other, and all are happy about their ultimate choice.</p>
<p>I know it’s going to be touch but at my school that have examples of four year course schedules for biomedical engineering and they have one particularly for each specialty as well as for pre meds. I’m doing engineering because if I don’t decide to go to medical school I want to do engineering and if I do the first two years of engineering I can pretty much transfer to any other science major at my school because the pre reqs are the same excepts few extras. Thank you for all the opinions and I know doing both will be really difficult but I’m really interested in both and I’ve been told that’s what will help me do better and I may decide to drop one but for now I’m glad that I’m leaving my options open and that I can ask questions here and get informed but also nice responses</p>
<p>At my medical school, the most popular undergraduate major is biology, but chemistry is a close second. You actually have more chem classes as med school pre-reqs (inorganic with lab 1 year; organic with lab; and biochemistry) whereas only 1 year of bio is required.</p>
<p>Several analyses have shown that liberal arts majors have the same admission probability as science majors, so if you like anthropology, history, classics or literature those are fine undergraduate majors too. You just have to take the pre-med reqs in addition.</p>
<p>Engineering is difficult to combine with pre-med, because both have numerous science courses with labs, which are difficult to schedule concurrently. Ask your school’s pre-med advising and engineering departments about this.</p>
<p>*Engineering is difficult to combine with pre-med, because both have numerous science courses with labs, which are difficult to schedule concurrently. *</p>
<p>That might be true with some eng’g disciplines, but not all. As mentioned above, my son is ChemE and the only premed class that wasn’t ALREADY req’d was Bio II. </p>
<p>ChemE isn’t the only eng’g discipline that requires Bio, Gen Chem I and II, Physics I and II, and Calculus. So, to say that it’s difficult to combine eng’g with premed just isnt’ true since many of the science req’ts are the SAME.</p>
<p>mom2, you’re right, some schools are much better at coordinating classes, and chem eng would potentially overlap with pre-med. </p>
<p>I should have said scheduling so many lab sciences “may” be difficult, because some schools specifically warn pre-meds about scheduling issues if they are engineering majors. </p>
<p>Engineering may not be flexible with course selections and course order, and pre-meds have some time pressure to finish the pre-reqs applicable to the MCAT if they are on a 4 year track. Best to check with your school.</p>
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<p>Most other engineering majors do not require biology (exception: biomedical engineering). Chemical engineering and biomedical engineering also include organic chemistry, which other engineering majors generally do not.</p>
<p>Also, the calculus, physics, and sometimes chemistry courses that engineering majors take are often harder ones than those for biology majors that are acceptable for pre-med purposes.</p>
<p>In the end, the major you pick does not really matter. It is better to pick a subject/major that you are passionate about than one that you loathe or dislike but think would be practical or give you real world skills. Forget all of that nonsense.</p>
<p>Pick the major that you want to get up in the morning for, resolve to master your chosen subject, maintain a high GPA, and spend your free-time do meaningful work preferably in your field outside of the classroom. Doing so lays a foundation that will allow you to present yourself as an exceptional applicant.</p>
<p>Spend some time early making sure medicine is really right for you early on. Shadowing a variety of doctors, residents, and medical students is a good way to get a more realistic view of medicine as a career/career path than that which many of your pre-med peers will have.</p>