<p>I'm a rising senior and I've been trying to decide what major I'd like to do. I'm all but set on computer science, but I hear that it and other engineering majors make for a very heavy workload. If I couple it with premed, would my schedule be unreasonable in the sense that I wouldn't have time to do much else or take non premed/compsci courses that I would find interesting? And a more general question: what type of work do compsci majors generally have to do on a daily basis? If it matters, I hope to attend a top ~30 liberal arts national university.</p>
<p>How crowded your schedule will be if you put pre-med courses around a CS major depends on the school. You can get an idea by just counting courses or credits in each
category:</p>
<p>A. CS major courses.
B. Pre-med courses.
C. Breadth requirements.</p>
<p>And then subtract any overlapping courses. Compare the total to the number of courses or credits that you will take during your eight semesters or twelve quarters at the university.</p>
<p>But note, however, that many CS courses have time consuming programming assignments. Couple that with the time consuming labs in many of the pre-med courses and your workload may be heavier than the number of courses or credits may otherwise indicate.</p>
<p>Industry jobs for computer science majors are mostly software development and QA. Some do hardware design, if that is their interest and they have taken the relevant courses. The courses whose concepts most used in industry jobs are operating systems, computer networks, algorithms, software engineering, databases, and security. However, some areas will use concepts from other courses as well, such as compilers, graphics, computer architecture, etc…</p>
<p>If I were you I would pick either computer science or engineering or pre-med. Not both. It would be way to time consuming and the jobs are pretty unrelated. It would be extremely difficult to graduate in 4 years.</p>
<p>What’s the point of taking both? They do not complement each other well. The only application of CS to medicine that I can think of is medical imaging, which doesn’t exactly follow from going to med school.</p>
<p>Step 1 - Decide if you want to be a physician or a computer scientist.
Step 2 - Based on your decision to step 1, become either a premed or a CS major.
Step 3 - Once you have decided, do the best you can to reach your goal.</p>
<p>I want do both CS and Pre-Med because I love computer science yet I’d rather have a career in medicine. Everything I’ve read has said you don’t need a Bio or Chem major to complement Pre-Med and I’m not a humanities person, so that leaves me with basically Business or Engineering (am I missing anything?), of which Engineering (more specifically CS) appeals to me much more. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I’m not wholly invested in either so maybe my mindset will change completely after a few semesters and I’ll be dropping either Pre-Med or CS. As it is now I don’t feel comfortable throwing everything at natural sciences by planning to major there, but I do want to give Pre-Med a shot. Though from what you guys are saying I might not have any other choice but to drop one… Would it be easy to switch out of a CS major after say a year in college? It seems like its courses would be pretty specific and I would have wasted at least a semester or 2 trying it out.</p>
<p>Also, do CS majors often go on to grad school?</p>
<p>@geo - How can I decide with only the most limited exposure to both…</p>
<p>Caperi, we make all of our decision about the future based on limited information. But I do understand where you are coming from.</p>
<p>Have you seen this:
[SMU</a> School of Engineering](<a href=“http://lyle.smu.edu/academic/degrees/bs_cosc_premed.html]SMU”>http://lyle.smu.edu/academic/degrees/bs_cosc_premed.html)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In a CS major, most of the upper-level courses have the lower-level courses as prerequisites, so it’s easier to switch out of CS to something with fewer linear sequence course requirements, than to switch in later. Pre-med, as I understand it, does not require a specific major at the undergrad level – only that you take biology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, and perhaps a few others.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Some do, some don’t. It mostly depends on what the individual is trying to accomplish.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You should try to do internships in both. If you cannot find a CS internship, find an open-source project to get involved in.</p>
<p>I wanted to be a doctor while I was in HS. However, I also had a strong interest in math and computers. (I’d already taken a programming class in my junior year, and liked it enough to want to learn more.) But I still wanted to be a doctor, so I participated in a weekend program at a lab in a hospital. I didn’t enjoy it much, and enjoyed calculus and the next programming class I took much more, so it was much easier for me to decide to study CS as an undergrad.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The question is more like, what majors would it be easy to switch in to.</p>
<p>However, if you are doing both CS and pre-med, you will likely be taking most of the prerequisites for most the majors that are “hard” to switch in to, due to prerequisite needs. The math you take for CS will be the same as for any other math-based major; if the CS major requires physics for scientists and engineers, that will cover any required physics (though if not, pre-med physics will not cover physics for physics, chemistry, and engineering majors). Pre-med courses in the first year will cover prerequisites for any biological science major.</p>
<p>Most of the other majors (i.e. humanities, social studies, and business) tend to have fewer prerequisites and shorter prerequisite chains, so switching into them is not a particularly difficult task in one’s second year.</p>
<p>However, based on your most recent post, it looks like you are more likely to dump pre-med than CS. And if you don’t get at least A- in your chemistry and biology courses and overall, you may not be likely to be admitted to a medical school in the US anyway.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Now that you mention it, I realize that I probably do/will have a decent amount of exposure to both. I’ve taken online programming courses from JHU’s CTY program and I will be taking [the only, also new] programming class my school is offering this year. Besides that I’ve messed around on the internet with small, basic programming communities. On the medical/natural science side, I volunteer regularly at a hospital (though granted I don’t get to see much of the work of actual doctors…) and will be working at a research lab this summer. I’ve sort of gravitated towards medicine because both of my parents are doctors, but reflecting on what I’ve seen I guess Pre-Med isn’t really a sure thing for me and I could definitely see myself dropping it. Maybe I’ll have to look into trying something more involving at the hospital to see if I really want to give Pre-Med a shot.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So you think that it would be overall possible to switch into almost any major and still finish in 4 years? I’m having a hard time figuring out what other majors I might be interested in; I feel like I’m destined to major in engineering, and it seems that going through with both engineering and pre-med would be too much. I doubt grades would make the decision for me (my lowest grade at my competitive private high school has been my lone A-). At this point I’m thinking: I’ll try to get some more exposure in medicine either during the year or the summer before college (this summer is booked), but unless I really dislike it I’ll probably give both CS and pre-med a shot with the expectation that I’ll drop pre-med after a semester or two unless I’m managing fine and something convinces me to continue on the path to becoming a doctor. Many thanks for the help.</p>
<p>Bah, now I need to figure out all the career, higher education prospects of a CS major, and maybe even my list of undergrad colleges to apply to after I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time looking into medicine, hah.</p>
<p>I don’t get all of the people saying that you should pick CS or pre-med. If you go pre-med, you have to pick some major and there is no expectation that it will have anything to do with your future medical career. Why not pick CS? </p>
<p>The pre-med requirements are rather light. They’re classes that most technical majors will end up taking anyway, plus a few extra chemistry classes.</p>
<p>Hi,
I am a mom taking online class and had to do c++ programme. My daughter is rising senior and she helped me so much and fast. She has no experience with this comp. either. She wants to do pre-med and I told her to do both. So , I had same dilema - IS IT POSSIBLE?</p>
<p>I see no reason why it is impossible. Sure it will be a lot of work and you might have to take some summer classes to graduate on time, but it’s possible. Maybe check out biomedical engineering or (bio)chemical engineering.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>College is a lot harder than high school, especially if you want to study computer science in college. You are probably underestimating the difficulty and how much work it takes to complete a degree in the subject. </p>
<p>The only advice that I have is that you should realize that you will have to do very well in computer science if you want your backup plans to be medical school or a good computer science graduate school.</p>
<p>Well, the actual backup plan in the proposed scenario would be getting a software job with a bachelor’s degree in CS, which generally does not require getting as high a GPA as medical school or CS graduate school. Just hope that a tech bubble does not inflate and then burst as you graduate.</p>
<p>Effectively, you are making medical school your backup plan when you choose to study computer science. If medical school wasn’t a backup plan, you’d be picking your coursework so that it would help you get into medical school and become a doctor. </p>
<p>Some people are smart/talented/hard-working enough that they don’t need to worry about maximizing their chances into getting into medical schools and can study whatever they like in undergrad. I don’t think that you can tell whether you are one of these people just based off of high school grades though. </p>
<p>I think that it is worth emphasizing that the OP will have to work especially hard, probably a little harder than he imagines based off of his high school grades comment, if he wants to consider both medical school and graduate study in computer science as possible choices after college.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Before making this thread, I was considering medical school to be my primary plan and CS my backup. From what I’ve read, there is no specific major that would “help me get into medical school,” thus I figured why not have a backup plan in something I enjoy if I realize the natural sciences aren’t my calling. Though at this point, yes, you’re right, I am considering med school more of a backup than CS (but honestly I could see it going either way).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>What would be your idea of maximizing my chances of getting into medical school? An easier major to help keep my GPA up?</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that getting top grades in college is harder/requires more work than in high school. The reason I made this thread is to try to get an idea of exactly how much harder and if it would be possible to do without sacrificing everything but CS and pre-med (i.e. social life, ECs, classes in other topics that might interest me). I don’t think I have doubts about my intellectual ability to go through with this; maybe I should, but really I was wondering if you guys think the sheer workload would be overwhelming. What I’ve gotten from this thread is that it would be pretty difficult, but possible, and I think I’m going to give it a shot unless something major happens over the course of the next year that causes me to change my mind about one or the other.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Interesting…Not sure why I never really looked into biomedical/chemical engineering. At this point I’m pretty set on CS, but if it doesn’t work out I could see myself checking those out (though I presume that doesn’t solve the quandary of engineering major + pre-med since the workload probably doesn’t vary much from one to another).</p>
<p>Caperi, I have to admit, that your original post had an idea that was foreign to me. But the more I read and the more I saw your idea, the more I warmed to it. I posted the SMU link before. Here are a couple more. </p>
<p>Vanderbilt
[Premedical</a> Track in Computer Science | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science](<a href=“http://eecs.vanderbilt.edu/programs/cs-premed]Premedical”>Electrical and Computer Engineering | School of Engineering | Vanderbilt University)</p>
<p>IUPUI
<a href=“http://www.cs.iupui.edu/degrees/bachelor/2010/UC%20CSCI%20Biocomputing_Final.pdf[/url]”>http://www.cs.iupui.edu/degrees/bachelor/2010/UC%20CSCI%20Biocomputing_Final.pdf</a></p>
<p>FYI, pre-med isn’t a major, it is just a class structure which allows you to complete all your reqs for medical school.</p>