I am considering premed.
I know any major is good for med school, as long as certain courses are taken, but would cognitive science (possibly specializing in nueroscience) be good? will it be harder?
It seems interesting for me, but if med school doesn’t work out, will cogsci offer good job careers, not just in research?
CogSci is a fine major if it is what you want to study. CogSci is not engineering where it leads to a professional degree. CogSci is different things at different schools. Which school are you looking at? What is your plan B if you don’t get into med school?
im really interested in medical school, but chances are very low.
Im looking mostly at UC’s, particularly UCSD. I don’t really have a plan B, which is why I am considering cogsci.
Will cogsci get good jobs with only a bachelors?
My son is a CogSci major. I asked him this same question last week for another HS student on CC. His response was that people who go into cogsci usually do so because they have an idea of what career they would like to do and know that the interdisciplinary nature of the major will help them get there. For example, S is interested in law school. Law school requires a fair bit of logic, which are philosophy courses, which his cognitive science major has, but it appears UCSD doesn’t. S was also interested in biology and psychology and the mind. So cogsci is a good fit for what he wanted to get out of his undergrad. S wanted to keep his options open, in case he changed his mind about law school.
Other students might be interested in the neuroscience or psychology or linguistics or computer science, especially artificial intelligence, portion of the major. If you specialize in design and interaction or machine learning at UCSD you are more likely to come out with a job. However, those specializations won’t be as useful for med school. They may not get you the high grades necessary for applying to med school either. I also have a D currently in college and both D’s and S’s CS courses are filled with absolutely brilliant people which makes it difficult for the average brilliant student to get good grades.
S’s very large university won’t allow students to take cogsci as a stand-alone major because they feel that students need to have a grounding in a complementary field. Their view is that cognitive science by itself is not sufficient to prepare one for life after undergrad. There are only a handful of professors who teach cognitive science and there are no “cognitive scientists” who are not professors.
Most majors aren’t pre-professional by design. Majors like mathematics, chemistry, English, political science, and cognitive science aren’t designed to prepare you for any specific set of careers. Rather, they give you a base from which you operate - an approach to looking at the world, a foundation upon which to add new knowledge. More importantly, there are tons of careers out there that don’t require a specific major, and that will gladly take applicants who seem to have an “unrelated” major.
So if you’re interested in cognitive science, then yes, major in it. What’ll be most important for getting jobs are the skills you develop and the experience (part-time jobs, internships, etc.) that you get.
UCSD premed prereqs will trash your gpa. The pressure and competition level at that school is brutal. If you are sure you want med school, the UCSD name should at least get you into a DO med school if you score well on the MCAT. I would think psych would be easier to get a decent gpa than cog sci
I know several people at my school who are pre-med and take an essentially behavioral neuroscience major, to the point where it’s become known as a pre-med major. Whether cog sci is considered a typical major for pre-meds will affect the difficulty level. Majors with a heavy amount of pre-meds are more likely to have forced curves and weed-out classes to discourage those who may not have the right skill set for medicine.
Because I plan on going into research I can’t speak much to the job prospects, but I know two things from talking to academics:
- Neuroscience is a very rich field where little is still known, and it's less popular than the other up-and-coming field of comp sci, so the job market will be pretty good.
- It's incredibly difficult to get a job in science with just a bachelor's degree. If medical school doesn't work out you should still work for at least a master's, and know that nearly all your job competition will have a doctorate.
so is cogsci bad for premed?
how about psychology or psychobio at ucla?
My premed daughter is graduating from Ucla in psychobiology. It is definitely easier than biochemistry which she initially started with, and has maintained a 3.91 gpa in three years of studying in there (graduating in her third year). So shouldn’t be that difficult.
What med school is she going to, and what is her MCAT ?
also is it easy to switch majors at UCLA?
JMHO, but…
If I wanted to major in CogSci in order to work in UX or continue to grad school and do CogSci research, then UCSD CogSci would be the best program in the UC system, hands down.
But, if I wanted to use CogSci as a broad-based interdisciplinary undergrad premed degree, then I would major in CogSci at Davis, Irvine, or Santa Cruz.
UCLA has a “Linguistics and Computer Science” BA in Arts & Sciences, which could be a great program if those aspects of CogSci interest you, but it wouldn’t be super efficient as a pre-med major.
The fork in the road here is that, to maximize your med school potential, you need to prioritize GPA and pre-med courses. Whereas, to maximize immediate employability with an undergrad CogSci degree, the more CompSci heavy the program, the better. (And if you want to aim for an academic grad program, rather than a clinical one, then the priorities are different still.) If you don’t know yet which direction you may want to take, then opt for schools where you have the most flexibility.
CogSci isn’t “bad for premed” per se; the requirements just vary a lot from school to school, making some requirements easier to combine with med school prereqs than others. Programs range from psych-heavy programs like Occidental (which didn’t even have a computer science major until last year), to very computation-heavy programs like Carnegie Mellon. I do recommend that if you want to major in CogSci, you choose a school that has an actual CogSci DEPARTMENT or at least houses the program within a single department. Schools that assemble a CogSci degree out of requirements from an assortment of departments, without giving CogSci students a departmental “home,” tend to shortchange those students in terms of faculty support and mentoring.
And be clear whether you’re looking for the opportunity to delve deeply into a specialty area (whether that be psych, linguistics, computation, design, or other) or whether you’re just using the broadness of the major to get a basic “mile wide and inch deep” undergrad education before moving on to get your depth in grad school.