I am currently getting recruited for softball from academic colleges. Not ivy league, but D3 academically focused schools. I want to do Pre-Med with a minor in Spanish. I was also thinking about double majoring with a Major in Pre-Med and Spanish and a minor in art. Is this at all possible?
Parent of D3 athlete here – talk to coach and prospective teammates when you visit about how feasible a double major is, particularly with pre-med. The challenge with pre-med is often lab times, as those are usually in the afternoon and can conflict with practice times or travel in-season. Some coaches are willing to work with athletes about that, others less so. Some schools end class time, including labs, before sports practices or other EC-type activities begin, others do not. The best information will come from the prospective coach and teammates – if you ask a coach how many pre-med students he had on the roster in the last 5 years who applied to med school, and they say “none”, that tells you something.
Time commitment may vary by sport and school, so your mileage may vary – my kid spends about 25-30 hours per week in season on his sport, and about 10-15 or more hours per week out of season.
In terms of double major or a minor, one thing to think about is distribution requirements – if a school has gen eds and distribution requirements adding up to about 10 or more courses, that means you are taking a lot of required courses every semester, between your major, minor (or second major) and requirements. That can limit your flexibility to build a more manageable schedule in-season. Say you aren’t a Humanities kind of person and writing papers is your nemesis. Well, with a double major and distribution requirements, you just might have to take that writing intensive course during your in-season semester. That isn’t an impossible schedule, but it can create more stress. On the other hand, if a school allows AP/IB credits to be used to place out of gen eds or even distribution requirements, that gives you more flexibility on your schedule (although I don’t recall many top 50 LACs which allowed a student to use testing to place out of distribution requirements, as the goal is to educate a well-rounded student through that school’s own classes, not check a box from high school testing).
I was told – way back in the seventeenth century – that double majors were a fad. My advisor recommended against it, but I insisted. While I would never concede that he was right, it is important to recognize that a major is just a label. It really doesn’t make a difference in your career, except only in the most general way. If you want to go to med school, great, take the science courses that you need and do well in them and on the MCATs. Does it matter to anyone that you “double majored” in Spanish? Nope. What is the difference between majoring in biology with a lot of Spanish and art classes and double majoring in Spanish with a minor in art? Not a thing. Business employers would only want to know that you are fluent in Spanish. Med schools want uber smart people with high GPAs who did extremely well in the sciences and on the MCATS. I would encourage you to think about it. As @Midwestmomofboys notes, double majoring and minoring usually just results in buying more distribution requirements. You could take the same classes (with fewer requirements) by just single majoring and taking the Spanish and art classes you want to take as electives and/or part of the gen ed requirements.
The real question is not how you can double major pre med and Spanish and minor in art and participate in athletics, but rather whether you will be able to pursue a pre med curriculum and participate in athletics. You can review old threads and find that it is doable, but no one will say that it is easy. Definitely ask the coaches and players how many have done it at the schools that you are considering.
Time commitments vary greatly amongst D3 teams. The strong academic schools (think NESCAC, some SCIAC) take their sports teams very seriously, and you will have big time commitments to them. Also most schools don’t have a pre-med major. So you can major in Spanish and apply to med school as long as you have completed the courses necessary. My husband works at a university where many pre-med students are music majors. That said, many many people change their minds about med school during undergraduate study.
Agree with above comments about double majors. For most people, including pre-meds, cons seem to outweigh the pros. I had a college friend who majored in English, did his pre-med requirements, and ended up at Harvard Med School. So you could even major in Spanish if you wanted. Also agree that whether school has core reqs. and how many also is a factor.
I’d look at the Spanish major vs minor and ask yourself how you’d benefit from the major. Are you just looking for fluency? Have a big interest in the culture and literature? Want to live in a country that speaks only that language?
Art may be a bigger problem than either pre-med or Spanish. My D’s school added and Art History major after she started, and that was really her preferred major. However, there were so many pre-reqs of basic art classes that she’s have to do at least another year of beginning drawing, printing, 3D, 3D color and she wasn’t really interested in all that basic art. She switched to history, with a minor (maybe) in Art History. She wants to take a bunch of religion classes too because so much of the art she likes is religious art. It won’t make one bit of difference if she really gets minors in Art History or religion because she’ll take the classes that make her a stronger student in her interests.
Softball seems to be a sport that requires a lot of weekends. My (other) daughter was a roommate with 3 softball players and they were gone a lot of Fri-Sun to play 3 or 4 games. Hard to work on art projects when you are on a bus.
think that much depends on the two majors and the sport involved. I also think that it depends on the requirements for a major at the school.
My oldest son was an economics/math major and there were many overlapping classes. For instance, all his early math classes were able to be used for his econ major and some upper level econ classes were able to be used for his math degree. He was a football player so all games were on weekends.
My youngest is a freshman at a small LAC that requires a thesis from each major if you double major. He was considering the same econ/math combination as his older brother but he is a lacrosse player (more weekday games) and the fact that he doesn’t think he will be permitted to do a combined thesis is making him think twice about it.