I know you can major in any subject as long as you complete the required courses for med school, but would engineering do me good? I’m also thinking that if I don’t get into med school, then I could have engineering as a back-up. I don’t really want to take the “traditional” route of majoring in biology.
Well, there’s bioengineering. For med school you need a near perfect GPA, and that is hard to do in many engineering programs. I think it takes a very particular type of genius to fit in med school prerequisites with difficult engineering classes, but it probably isn’t unheard of. For sure you’d want to examine graduation requirements very closely. The engineering programs we’ve researched don’t seem to have a lot of spots for electives. If you can afford an extra half year or year of college (on top of the med school to come), that may not be a problem, but you need to consider that funding in advance in any case.
@WayOutWestMom can probably help you more
At my daughter’s school, a T20 Engineering school, they do NOT recommend pre-med students major in engineering, including biomed. I assume because it’s hard to keep the GPA you need for med-school. In some cases, the pre-med kids take different versions of classes. For instance, the engineering kids take a calc based physics where the pre-med kids take an algebra based physics.
You can certainly major in engineering and go to med school, but then the question becomes whether it is smart decision.
Engineering has a very lock-step curriculum with little room for electives you’ll need to take in order to complete your pre-med admission requirements and/or take the MCAT.
(This lock-step situation is further complicated by the fact the USMLE, LCME, ACGME and AOA jointly announced today they’re changing the Step 1 exam to P/F. This may greatly change the way med school admission is done, adding 4+UL bio course requirements to current admission requirements. If this happens majoring in fields other than bio will become increasingly difficult if not impossible to complete during a 4 years undergrad.)
The second issue is that many engineering students find maintaining the high GPA needed for med school admission very difficult to do. In engineering, a 3.0 GPA is good GPA; for med school, it will get your application tossed straight into the trash.
If you want a major with better post-graduation employment prospects than bio, consider mathematics, physics or chemistry.
With a math or physics degree you can qualify for MS in biomedical engineering by taking 4-6 additional undergrad engineering courses–some of which you can enroll concurrently in with grad engineering classes. This was one option that both my daughters looked at (one physics/math major and one math/neuroscience major) had they not gotten a med school admission.