How to Choose a Pre-Med Major: Which Degree Is Best Before Med School?

We tell students, go to what your passion is. That’s what we want to see in them. If they haven’t done a hard science major, that’s the least of our worries. We need them to do science classes only because we need them to speak the language of science. That’s what we do in medical school. We need to know they can handle basic biology, chemistry, and organic chemistry as the building blocks of our language, so that we can engage with them once they join us.

To me, the biggest red flag is not having an understanding of what it means to be in health care. It’s not as glamorous as it’s shown on TV. It’s not even as glamorous as they see it in the life of family members or loved ones in the profession. They see the financial rewards of being in that profession, but they don’t see the work that goes into it. Sometimes when we ask students what was a challenge as an undergraduate, they will answer with something like “getting up early because I was on the golf team.” The time demand was a challenge, but we want more. We need a sense of genuinely caring for others.

Taking care of people is not fun. I always ask students, “how many of you are your best selves when you’re not feeling well?” A patient coming into the office is not going to be polished and polite and pleasant. Generally, they are hurting, something’s broken, they’re angry, they want answers. Students need to be able to look beyond that and make that human connection.

Cultural competence doesn’t come from pursuing a particular major. Cultural competence comes from having experiences and being open and willing to engage with those that are different from you. I always ask students to talk with me about their experiences with students who had different backgrounds. What was a favorite thing that you remember? What was the best thing you learned from them? How did that inform how you interacted with them? Individuals who truly care about this come back with really thoughtful responses. They’ll talk to me about the culture and how receiving and respecting the other is important. I want to separate that from the idea of a traditional major, because we have many traditional majors who are not culturally competent. Even in the academic sense, in that the culture they understand is the culture of science. Qualitative research is foreign to them. Anthropology is foreign to them. Understanding social science and respecting that viewpoint is foreign to them. It goes beyond the major. It comes from stepping out of their comfort zone, respecting the other, and feeling enhanced by having the privilege of learning how to look at the world from another person’s perspective.

My great friend Juliet Hill, Director of Admissions at the University of Florida College of Medicine, calls it a growth year instead of a gap year. I love that new name, because I think that embodies what we look for as admissions deans and directors.

The first question is “do you feel you need that extra year or not?” If they are a non-science major and all throughout their undergrad they were going to be a sociology major, they may have no other option but to take that growth year. They have to prove that they can handle science even if they are applying to a school that doesn’t have prerequisites and just has competencies. They have to give themselves time to build up the repertoire of things we are looking for, in addition to the shadowing and volunteering and community service and science coursework.

There isn’t a one size fits all model for the growth year, especially if a student feels they need additional time to prepare for this journey. It’s a journey that they can never separate from if they want to be a physician. It’s school, then residency, and then work. This could be the only time in their life that they can develop the cultural competency that they know they want to have. That could be traveling all fifty states and realizing that we still have places that don’t have access to running water or electricity. Who would think that in a first world country? And, what does it mean to live like that?

Checking off prerequisite boxes is the easy part. There are courses that you take, there are experiences you must have, and everyone who is applying to medical school, who should be applying to medical school, will have those boxes checked.

What we’re looking for is the student who can show us who they are as a person and what they will be like when they join us on campus. Tell us what is propelling you and motivating you to spend so many years in training, when everyone is gainfully employed and you are still studying, and to be involved with individuals at the most vulnerable point in their lives. There’s such a big difference in a student who talks to me about working at a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter and how they describe that experience and how they were moved by that. That’s who I want as a student on my campus, because that’s how they are going to take care of their classmates and of our patients, who are generous enough to let our students learn from them and with them. That’s the kind of doctor that they will be. It’s hard, because you have to be vulnerable, to show that side of you that we generally don’t show as a society.

We do want students to be well rounded, because they will get burned out very quickly if they don’t have other things that are of interest to them. It can’t all be muscles and bones and disease, as exciting as that is. We see these documentaries of these brilliant physicians and scientists who live and breathe their profession, but what they don’t show is the other things they are doing. They don’t show that they play the piano or that they play golf or paint or cook. Do I look for anything in particular? No. But, I want to be sure there is something that they do. We see a lot of athletes and musicians. They do very well because they have an outlet when things get rough. There are also character traits that come with that. The first and most important one is that they can take feedback. These are all high performing students, the best students on their campuses. It’s hard for them to take feedback. And, when you are in the clinical rotations, it [can be very] subjective. Students can take feedback very personally. We already know you’ll have [the right] characteristics, because we know how much you got beat up as the quarterback on your football team or as the lead dancer in your school’s dance troupe. It’s not only helpful, it’s necessary.