Health Sciences as a Major for Pre-Med Students
The Health Sciences major can be a great way to get the courses required by medical schools. Many pre-med courses are part of the Health Sciences required curriculum:
- General Biology (BI 121 + lab; BI 131 + lab)
- General Chemistry (CH 101 + lab; CH 102 + lab)
- Statistics (MA 207 or MA 315)
- Psychology (PSY 105)
Other pre-med lab courses (Physics, Organic Chem, Biochem, and Genetics) meet required lab credits for the Health Sciences degree, or can be taken as electives.
In addition, Health Sciences students strengthen their medical school applications in unique ways by taking HS 230 Epidemiology, HS 303 Public Health Nutrition, HS 307 Evidence-Based Research in Health Science, and PO 260 Health Politics and Policy. These courses give students a head start in understanding the issues that physicians deal with daily. One student reported that the med school admissions committee smiled and said "Enough!" when he was sharing ideas about how to improve the US healthcare system.
Health Sciences majors can also easily add a Public Health minor or even a double major, options that are not available at most undergraduate institutions. Public Health allows pre-med students a chance to step back from a clinical perspective and gain a better understanding of the larger community issues that result in people needing health care in the first place.
