Hello, I am going to UNR for college and need help deciding a major. I plan to attend medical school after getting my bachelors. I originally declared my major as Microbiology and Immunology and then changed it to Community Health Science with an emphasis on Kinesiology. Thank you, any help is appreciated!
As long as you complete the required prerequisites set forth by the medical schools you want to apply to, it doesn’t matter what you major in. Therefore, I suggest you pick the major that you’d enjoy and do well in.
@ahuynh is generally correct, but with certain caveats.
Major does matter somewhat. As long as you choose a traditional, academic major, and fit in the medical school prerequisites, it doesn’t matter what you major in. However, less academic, more vocational majors (like Community Health Science, Kinesiology, etc.) tend to fare relatively poorly in medical school admission compared to every other major. The general consensus that I’ve heard (and which you’ll probably hear from more experienced members in the pre-med subforum, or on sites like SDN) is that medical school admissions committees prefer academic majors and disciplines to vocational/applied ones. Vocational majors also score the lowest on the MCAT. I’m not sure what the current URL is, but you can find data on majors versus average admission outcomes and MCAT scores on the AAMC website.
Essentially, you would be better served with a traditional academic major like Biology (or Microbiology/Immunobiology, etc.) than something like Community Health Science.
I think it maybe be true that more vocational majors can be less rigorous and offer worse preparation for medical school…but community health sciences and kinesiology aren’t vocational majors. Community health sciences is an interdisciplinary major that usually combines study in the social sciences and the natural sciences to look at health on a macro, public level, but it’s pretty academic in nature. Kinesiology is a discipline - the study of movement. Neither is inherently any more or less applied than political science or mathematics.
There are very few actual facts about choice of major and how that matches up to medical school admission from the AAMC. They do have this fact sheet about the average GPA and MCAT scores of applicants and admitted matriculants to medical schools broken down by broad major field:
https://www.aamc.org/download/321496/data/factstablea17.pdf
However, it’s unclear from the table whether, say, a major like community health sciences falls under “social sciences,” “other,” or “specialized health sciences.” Also, it doesn’t report acceptance rates. The “Other” and “Specialized Health Sciences” categories do have lower overall averages for their applicants…but their admitted students also have lower overall averages than students in other majors, which makes it difficult to tell whether their acceptance rates are actually lower.
@Lovenetc, this thread may have some useful information in regards to your question.