Looking for more info concerning the "warnings" against majoring in Biology

Beyond career aspects, there are other reasons to avoid biology (and really most science majors unless there is true unrelenting passion)…

  1. Science majors require a lot of courses superfluous to pre-med students. Whether it’s ecology or botany in biology or Analytical Chemistry for the chem major or any upper level physics class, the relevance to medical school coursework is essentially non-existant. Biochem is a little bit different but YMMV depending on a number of different university related factors surrounding the decision making about biochem requirements, which as a newer field, sometimes is not its own department and is housed in chemistry or biology departments. The home department can have a significant impact on how the major is constructed.

  2. many of those classes required of majors are freaking hard. Physical Chemistry is often referred to as the 7th circle of hell. Heck, many schools because of it’s use as a weed out course, Bio 101 is an absolute massacre (at my school, it wasn’t so much the Bio 101 lecture portion as it was the Bio 101 Lab course that was so brutal). And upper level physics? Oftentimes not so much.

  3. While it’s not a guarantee, I feel safe in generalizing that most people who get PhD’s in the bench sciences (and doing good enough research to reach tenure) are less than compelling teachers compared to those in Social Sciences and the like. Personality types matter a lot. Having to take a bunch of required courses with terrible teachers is not a recipe for consistent success.

When you take all of this together, the Pre-med who majors in something else doesn’t have to take irrelevant courses, and is by no means blocked from taking upper level science courses that interest them or that have teachers with well earned reputations of good teaching. These are things that create success for undergrads.

1 Like