Hard school- any disadvantage?

sakky
Sun, 04 Nov 2007 18:16:38 +0000

1.) Changing fields at age 20, while you’re still in college, is VERY easy. You walk over to your registrar and fill out a piece of paper. Changing fields post-degree, of course, isn’t all that easy – but…

2.) American degrees are still very powerful and flexible. Many of my classmates majored in history, worked in consulting, or totally non-science fields, and are now in medical school. Me? I’m an economics major, a pre-law student, a research assistant in health policy, and a medical student.

That kind of flexibility wouldn’t be possible if I’d gotten locked in at age 18 and lacked the breadth to jump in interdisciplinary fashion.



I think one way to deal with this problem is for US med-schools to provide undergraduate credit for med-school classes. Hence, in a theoretical US system where you enter med-school right out of high school and you then find out you don’t like it, you can drop out and transfer to a regular school and use your med-school classes as transfer credits. Or maybe the med-school itself can award you a bachelor’s degree.

Lest you think this idea is crazy, I would point out that the UCSF Medical School actually has a mechanism to award bachelor’s degrees to those (rare) incoming medical students who don’t have such degrees. So if UCSF Med School can award bachelor’s degrees, it seems to me that other med school can too, or at least can make their coursework transferrable.

"Students who enter the School of Medicine without a bachelor’s degree may receive a bachelor of science degree in medical sciences after satisfactorily completing the first three terms of the curriculum leading to the doctor of medicine degree. "

[UCSF School of Medicine - Admissions](http://www.medschool.ucsf.edu/admissions/apply/gettingstarted.aspx#started_ca_pref)

Also, I think we should bear in mind that not every undergraduate program offers the easy ‘field switchability’ to which you refer. For example, the UCBerkeley College of Engineering has the notorious ‘major trap’ in which, if you are doing poorly in engineering, you may very easily find that you can’t get out of your major because no other major wants to take you. That’s because you basically need at least a 3.0 GPA to switch not only into any of the other constituent colleges at Berkeley, but also within majors in the CoE, and a LOT of Berkeley engineering students have nowhere near a 3.0. Hence, you’re forced to stay in the very engineering major in which you are doing poorly. {It’s quite the Catch-22: that the very people who need to leave the major the most are precisely the ones who are forced to stay.} Similarly, there are many highly specialized colleges in the country that really only offer one undergraduate program of study. If you choose to go to, say, Olin College of Engineering and find out that you don’t really want to be an engineer, you got a big problem, because basically the only thing Olin offers is engineering. Webb Institute, same thing. Same thing is true if you go to Juilliard and then find out that you don’t really want to study the arts. All of these types of schools are basically demanding that prospective students choose want they want to study before they are perhaps mature enough to make such a choice.