Our daughter will be a high school senior this year. She is interested in medicine and, despite the cost, I sure don’t want to discourage her.
I would like to encourage her to get an undergrad degree that is especially marketable if she decides that 4 years of college is enough and wants to hit the real world. Any suggestions? She is very capable of doing well in the sciences.
TIA
Pre-med are the requirements most med schools look for to be concidered for admission.
They generally include:
1 yr inorganic chem+ lab
1 yr organic chem+ lab
1 yr Calculus
1 year physics+lab
1 year Cell bio/genetics/general bio+ lab
1 semester biochem
plus other gen ed requirements (english and so forth).
Most people accomplish this with a science degree- chem, bio, biochem etc.
Many people take those courses and also take another major (I had a friend who was a french major, eg). So, your daughter could couple pre-med with a business/econ degree for example. If she was interested in teaching k-12, middle school and high school science teachers (esp chem) are in demand. She could take some ed courses as an undergrad. I’m not as familiar with that route.
If she wants to be in science there are jobs availible as lab techs for biology and especially chemstry grads with a BA/BS in those areas. However, she would have to be flexible in relocating to industry hot spots. A master’s degree would beven more useful if that was her path.
Grad school for a PHD is another option, since most pay tution and a stipend (aprox 12,000) while in school. However, faculty/research positions are quite tight right now.
Good luck!
Most of the students that get accepted to the medical school that I work at have a BSc in Biochemistry.
True but that is because many people major in biochemistry or chemistry to go to medical school. Medical schools are always open to that student who did well in Spanish or Philosophy or French Lit and still managed to do well in the pre-med classes. In fact, doing that sets someone apart from the legions of prospective doctors who cram the hard sciences full-time. You can major in anything and still get into medical school as long as the prereqs are there.
Usually, the requirements to get a biochemistry degree and those to get into medical school overlap a great deal, which is why it’s a natural major for a pre-med.
However, that means you become one of the herd when you actually apply as 3/4 of the applicants are also biochemistry or biology majors. To set herself apart, your daughter might consider a science intensive but untraditional major - something along the lines of engineering.
I think the OP was asking about majors that would also provide career options should her daughter decide not to go to med school after all.
I agree with Shagnasty; compared to (my impression of) the situation twenty years ago, most med schools no longer care what your major is as long as you do well in the pre-med courses, so the options are pretty much wide open. I personally got in with a sociology major (with a focus in Marxist studies) and a German minor, which is probably close to the antithesis of the sort of readily-employable profile the OP is looking for, but demonstrates my point. Even better, one of my med school classmates had majored in glass-blowing! (it probably had some fancier name in the catalog, but that was what she always said)
As a current medical student who was accepted with a bachelor’s degree in psychology (plus the science pre-reqs taken as electives), I would agree with the consensus above.
Just make sure that she majors in something she enjoys enough to be motivated to do well in it. The admissions folks definitely look at your GPA in your major even if it has nothing to do with science.
I knowingly chose a degree that isn’t very marketable simply because I knew I’d be going on to some kind of grad school even if med school didn’t pan out, so I figured I might as well study something fun for undergrad. I have no regrets about that path. I’ll spend the rest of my life learning bio and chem-related stuff for med school - so I’m glad I got a chance to enjoy my undergrad years studying something a bit different than the traditional bachelor’s degree in bio or chem.
Nursing is a very marketable degree that would give her many employment options right out of school. The only downside is that if she did want to continue on to med school, she’d have to be prepared to defend to the admissions people why she decided she didn’t want to be a nurse (and with the nursing shortage, they probably would ask her that).
Engineering seems like a pretty good employment option as well (although I understand that depends somewhat on the particular type of engineering, so research that carefully beforehand). Since admissions people know that engineering is a pretty rigorous courseload, if she excelled in it she would probably look good to them…but if she did badly because of the intensity of the workload, obviously that wouldn’t look as good.
Even knowing that engineering is a tougher degree, I think most admissions people would look more kindly on an applicant with a 4.0 in some liberal arts degree than a 3.0 in engineering.
Just some thoughts. Best of luck to her in figuring out what she wants to do. I knew I wanted to be a doctor from the time I was in high school, and here I am more confident than ever that it’s what I want to do with my life. 
Definitely. As someone who’s gone through this meat grinder twice so far, I know they don’t care what your major iss so long as your grades* are solid (and MCATs are good). But that’s the short version.
They don’t just look at grades as an indication of ability/intelligence/responsibility/etc, it’s also a way to roughly assess your dedication to your interests, which in turn speaks for how dedicated you will be as a physician. Your numbers ultimately play an important role in demonstrating how well you’ll handle med school academically and in getting you an interview, which is a positively HUGE factor in a school’s decision to accept or not. They want to see that you have interests and a sincere desire to be a doctor and that your major, extracurriculars, etc. weren’t just a means to an end. Many applicants who majored in bio did that because they saw it as a route to medical school (but don’t rule out bio, by any means!). As Thing Fish said, that’s not the case. They look for people who are passionate about their interests (among which must be medicine, of course).
As for premed classes, to clarify IvoryTowerDenizen’s list, the most basic requirements are 2 semesters/1 year each of:
General chemistry
Gen chem lab
Organic chemistry
Orgo lab
General Physics
General Physics Lab
Biology
Biology lab
English/literature (definitely required)
Calculus (occasionally you’ll run across a school that doesn’t ask for this explicitly)
The biology requirement is very open-ended in that you can include any course from your school’s bio department, or a relevant course from another area (as a physical anthropology major, I could have conceivably used some of my classes there for the bio requirement). I wouldn’t include biochem or cell bio in this because more and more schools are adding separate requirements for those. Schools are NOT generous with letting a single course meet two requirements. For example, USC needs you to have taken a biochem as well as a molecular biology class. I had two bio courses, biochem, and I took cell bio for the molecular requirement (among other reasons).
Good grades in these areas as well as overall will show ability, and that will get an interview, but medical schools really want dedicated and compassionate people to train. Extracurriculars, community service, and maybe time spent shadowing a doctor will help demonstrate that, so it’s important that your daughter find an activity that means something to her too.
The bottom line is that it’s hard, hard work, but if you take satisfaction from it as an end unto itself, you’re on the right track. I hope this helps, but many, many books have been written about this subject, each with their own unique gem of advice. When your daughter starts school this fall, What the … !!!, she oughta check with the career services department to see what they offer premeds as far as advisors and mock interviews go.
And as a parting thought, don’t let that list of pre-reqs be discouraging. Assuming 9 credits a year needed to graduate, with 1 for every one-semester class, 2 for every full-year class, and 0.5 for a lab, that works out to 20 credits out of 36 for premed classes. That leaves plenty of room for completing a major as well as some exploration. If you help her space things out right, and it’s what she wants, it’s well within her grasp.
Hope this helps.
*I learned this the hard way. After two application years with only placing on alternate lists, the chickens clearly have come home to roost despite my MCAT score and experience
Biomedical engineering. Though she’ll probably have to add some organic chem, as that’s not usually a standard for biomed majors. I mean…it wasn’t for me. A bio course might also not be standard, but an anatomy/phsiology course almost always is, and often med schools are OK with that in place of a bio course.
Like everyone else has already said, as long as she has solid marks in her prerequisite courses, she can major in whatever she likes. A lot of the folks going through with me (pre-vet/pre-med/pre-pharmacy) are majoring in business. A business degree, so they tell us, is becoming increasingly marketable and, particularly for those going into private practice, is useful if she does graduate med school.
Not me, though. I majored in biology.
My college offers a degree in Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior that seems popular with pre-meds, also BioChem, and BioPsych
It seems worthwhile to mention that some schools take note of students who pick majors outside the box. In other words, if she applies to med school with a solid major in theatre or economics or tourism, she is a candidate that sticks out in the minds of admissions. She’s more well-rounded. She’s not just another one of us biology majors.
So sticking to a major that she can ‘fall back on’ if med school doesn’t pan out can actually help her get into med school.
I work with a person who got her two-year degree in Radiologic Technology, then her BSc in Radiation Therapy. She’s going to be a radiologist, but that’s the route she took to get into Med School.
I’ve been told by many people, including those on medical school admissions committees that there is absolute GPA cutoff where they were (not necessarily everywhere) of anywhere between 3.3 and 3.8. I’ve also been told by these people that people with chem degrees have a lower cutoff than people with bio degrees. Also, interms of marketablity, me and my chem friends had a lot easier time finding work after college than the bio kids. Some of them make enough to make me serious question grad school, but that’s another thing. As for biochem degrees, they weren’t offered at my undergrad school, but with my brief attempt at Davis I met a few there, pursuing PhDs in chemistry, and just seemed like less competent chemists. Their biochem wasn’t great, either, so I’d be careful about those programs and make sure they’re well established and that their students get good job prospects afterwords, as that was another thing I heard them complain about.