Can I Get Into Med School with a Chemical/Bioengineering Degree?

[godwinscareer]

Is it possible to get into med school if you get a bachelors in chemical or bioengineering??
Or do med schools strictly look for pre-med students??

 

[user101]

Is it possible to get into med school if you get a bachelors in chemical or bioengineering??
Or do med schools strictly look for pre-med students??

As long as you have the basic pre-medical requirements before entering medical school, yes. It doesn't matter what your major is, actually.

http://www.bestpremed.com/preMDreq.php
http://www.princetonreview.com/medical/research/articles/criteria/prereqs.asp

A friend of a friend, whose dad is in the Med School AdCom said that they separate the biology majors and the ___ majors. Guess which group is graded more harder? Yep, the "biology" separated group. This is only one school though, not all schools use this method of reviewing applicants.

 

[gravenewworld]

Is it possible to get into med school if you get a bachelors in chemical or bioengineering??
Or do med schools strictly look for pre-med students??

Doesn't matter what degree you have. If you do decide to do engineering just make sure you ace all the prereq. courses AND ALSO take a lot of humanities courses. Med schools demand these days that students have a well rounded education and love to see english, foreign language, philosophy, ethics courses etc. on transcripts. Some med schools in fact have been known to be very hostile towards applicants with a "pre-med" degree.

 

[Moonbear]

Pre-med isn't a major, it's just an emphasis of courses you need to take to get into med school. You can be pre-med AND a chemistry major. It just means that in addition to your chemistry major requirements, you're taking all your medical school admissions requirements. Most of those are going to be included within a chemistry major anyway (i.e., 2 semesters of Gen. Chem with lab, 2 semesters Org. Chem with lab, 2 semesters Gen. Physics with lab), and you'd just have to add in the Gen. Biology and Genetics/Biochem requirements.

You have to take the courses they require for admission. Beyond that, you can major in anything you want. For a while, students were told that med schools liked to see more variety in their applicants, like English majors, etc. However, students who ONLY took the basic pre-med requirements and no other science curriculum have wound up struggling in med school, and that's no longer recommended as a good way to stand out as a unique applicant. You certainly could double major or have a minor in something like English, and be a more appealing applicant...that gets at what gravenewworld mentioned...that they look for well-rounded applicants. Medicine isn't just science, you have to deal with people and social issues, highly charged ethical issues, and just generally be able to relate to the wide variety of backgrounds your patients come in with. For this reason, courses in subjects like psychology, social sciences, study of other cultures (often incorporated into a foreign language curriculum), ethics (often within philosophy courses), improvement of communication skills (English expository writing courses, or communications courses) are all favorable supplements.

Other things that can help your application are shadowing or volunteer experiences in a medical setting, and research experiences (careful, you might wind up like I did and end up enjoying the research experience so much you withdraw applications from med school and enter grad school). These don't all have to be volunteer work. If you can get paid for the experience, there's nothing wrong with that. So, when you're thinking about summer jobs, for example, you might want to look into paid internships in research labs, or work at a hospital or doctor's office rather than heading to the nearest fast-food place or big box store for a job.

 

[godwinscareer]

But an engineering major is hard so my gpa could go down, wat other subject can I major in which can be a fall back If I don't get into med school?

 

[rocomath]

Well think of it this way. Engineering would be a good fall back if you don't get into Med School, and a great prep just in case you do get accepted.

 

[jtbell]

I see from your previous postings that you're still in high school. Why are you thinking about going from engineering to medicine? As others have said, it's possible, but it's not the usual route to medical school. I would expect this from someone who's already halfway through an engineering degree but has decided that he doesn't really like engineering and wants to go into medicine instead. But you're not in that category. So, why?

Do you want to go out and open a medical practice and treat patients (which requires an M.D.), or do you simply like technical subjects but want to apply them to medicine? In that case, you might look into medical physics, or bioengineering, or bioinformatics, or something like that.

 

[godwinscareer]

I want to practice medicine but getting is really hard so I want to use engineering as a fall back. I love bio chem and physics I suppose Biomedical engineering or Bioengineering would be good degree with which to enter med school