Education major and Med School?

mcat2
Wed, 27 Jun 2012 02:59:07 +0000

From the article you quoted:

Education majors enjoyed grade point averages that were .5 to .8 grade points higher than students in the other college majors. At the University of Missouri, for instance, the average education major has a 3.80 GPA versus 2.99 GPA (science, math, econ majors), 3.12 GPA (social science majors) and 3.16 GPA (humanities majors).

Quite an eye opener for me to see such a disparity in grading between majors.

This reminds me of a textbook at the elementary/secondary school level,“Saxon math.” The author of this “old school” math series (sort of like “Kumon USA-style”) was a graduate from Westpoint (likely an EE major) and later became an educator because of his interest. He also wrote that many science classes taken by these education majors are watered-down version of the corresponding real science classes. (He took these classes in order to be certified as a teacher.)

OP, I suspect that being an Eduction major may not benefit you if your goal is to get into a med school. After all, the education major is a vocational oriented major. An applicant with such a major will have an additional burden of demonstrating to med schools that medicine, instead of teaching, is your calling. Also, if you know you could possibly get a higher GPA with the education major, med school adcoms will likely know as well.

Majors do not matter only to a certain extent. It may be better to look at this in this way: If you major in an academic major, and you are among the top 5 to 10 percents among the students with the same major as yours, the GPA will not become your liability in your med school application. In other words, the rank within your major matters more than your absolute GPA. At the end of the day, the class size of a med school may be only a fraction (5%?) of the freshmen year class size of a college (and there are fewer med schools than colleges.)