I would like to pursue plastic/ reconstructive surgery as my career; however, knowing that schooling is so extensive, I want to have a degree that I can fall back on. I was thinking to do biomedical engineering as my four year undergrad. I’ve heard that the curriculum prepares you well for the MCATs for medical school entry and you can get a job within the field without going to medical/ graduate school(if in the case that I choose not to pursue surgery/work while I’m in medical school). My main question is: should I major in bio medical engineering, or should I just major in human physiology or another pre-med degree? Bio medical engineering is a good fallback, but will it best prepare me for my main career objective of becoming a plastic surgeon? What is the best undergrad degree option for becoming a plastic surgeon?
There is no pre-med degree. You can major in anything as long as you take the prerequisite courses for med school. You can take business or econ or anything else if you’re truly concerned about job prospects.
You’re not significantly closer to becoming a surgeon in any specialty by pursuing any particular undergrad major. There are too many hoops to jump through first. You don’t just “choose” to become a surgeon – sometimes those hoops clip your ankles. You could major in sociology and have approximately the same odds of ending up in your dream career. I’m not exaggerating. In fact, depending on your aptitude and GPA potential for science/engineering, you might be further from your dream career with engineering vs sociology.
Is your priority med school or finding a good-paying job out of undergrad? It’s best to choose one or the other, or else you might try to hedge your bets with engineering and have your GPA crushed, and the only thing you’ll be reconstructing is where you went wrong. If your priority is med school, then you need to consider your aptitude/interest in various subjects in order to protect your GPA. Are you an elite student in math/science with a serious interest in engineering/design? If not, it’s hard to recommend engineering for a prospective med school applicant.
LOL. There are a number of standard deviations between becoming a plastic surgeon and “having a job to fall back on”.
get a degree in nursing! you can always get a job and you can also use nursing as pre-med (any major can be pre-med)
as long as you take required classes like biochem which some nursing schools require anyway. and if it the med school plan does not work out you can get a job after you pass the licensing exams as a nurse.
I would advise against vocational majors like nursing. If you want to be a nurse, be a nurse. If you want to be a doctor, don’t spend your undergrad years studying to become a nurse.
Plastic surgery is arguably the most competitive medical specialty to get into. There is a very good chance that even if you get into medical school (a large majority of freshman pre-meds don’t even get this far) that you won’t end up as a plastic surgeon. 40% of plastic surgery residents were in the top 15% of their medical school class, the average USMLE Step 1 score (the standardized test that medical students take at the end of their 2nd year) is somewhere in the 85th-90th percentile, and 30% of the people who even were considered good enough to apply to plastic surgery don’t get a spot (in contrast to something like internal medicine where the number is less than 1%). The majority of medical students applying to plastic surgery apply to a backup specialty or two. Just FYI.
a BSN in nursing is not a vocational degree it is a four year bachelors. you can major in nursing and never become a nurse. it is not as ritzy as a bachelors in neuroscience but…you have a two track option after you complete your BSN… on to graduate school in any number of graduate degrees or pass the state exam and get a job. perhaps you mean to say it would be unfair to take a limited spot in a nursing program if you are not going to be a nurse. that is something else.
When it comes to medical school admissions: Just as I would advocate a bachelors in economics over a bachelors in business, finance, or accounting, or a bachelors in pharmacology or chemistry over a bachelors in pharmacy, so too would I advocate a bachelors in biology, neuroscience, biochemistry, etc over a bachelors in nursing, medical lab sciences, and other vocationally based studies.
There’s also an additional issue with a BSN degree in that at some schools nursing students take a different version of the required sciences–biology/chemistry/anatomy etc for allied health professions, not the science classes intended for science majors.
Science classes for allied health profession majors (if separate from science classes for science majors) do not fulfill the admission requirements for medical school.