NUrsing to pre med???

mjscal
Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:20:36 +0000

Most who enter College considering medicine are not successful. It is hard to know the statistics because many do not declare their interest. My friends and I guess that 60% to 90% don’t make it due to change of interest, failure to thrive, or rejection. The study of Nursing as an undergraduate will reduce your chances of medical school admission for the reasons outlined above. Working after a BSN than going back to pre med will help in applying to medical school but it is not the best financial planning as you are trading attending pay in the future for early nursing income. Nurses even after working for a while still face tougher odds for medical school compared to traditional applicants.
There is no free lunch here. If you get accepted into nursing school and graduate as a nurse you have a good future with good pay and high chance of job security but lessen your chances for medical school admission. A liberal arts degree increases your chance for medicine but if you fail you will have to go back to school for a RN/BSN.
Doing an EMT is somewhat helpful in applying to medical school in a much as it exposes you to a part of the medical system but it does nothing to promote your academic credentials.
The use of AP courses to skip required courses has some good points and bad points. AP courses are not taught to the same level as good college courses. Skipping your college medical school pre reqs may leave you less prepared for the MCATs. Some medical schools do not accept AP credit. Other schools will only accept AP credit if you take upper division courses. Upper division courses are populated with students who have just taken a year or more of work in that subject and may be better prepared than you. Skipping one term of intro biology on the other hand may be helpful by allowing you to skip something like botany and take courses such as genetics, physiology, biochemistry, cellular biology etc. that would be more helpful to you. Now you may be a great talent in which case you could certainly skip many pre reqs and excel in upper division courses. The problem is that one really does not know how good of a student you will be in College until you get there. The safe play would be to use your AP work in HS to insure that you do well in College.
Courses such as Calculus, Statistics, Biochemistry and English are helpful to your application and required by many medical schools. Obviously if you do not do well in any of these classes it will hurt your application but this opinion also extends to any other course you take. When a medical school states that they recommend something it means that if you do well in those courses it will help your application.
The general rule is that the easiest and cheapest way into medicine is through the public medical schools in your own state. There are obviously exceptions to this rule but you need to pay particular attention to the medical schools in your home state when you plan your undergraduate course.
There are many paths one can take to enter medicine but the traditional path or close to it is the easiest of a difficult road.