Parents won’t let me major in pre med

Parents Forum
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I know pre med isn’t a major but i don’t know how else to describe it.

Basically my parents don’t know want me to become a doctor, well they’ll love it if I become one but they don’t want me to try since it takes so long and it is too expensive.

For some more background they only want me to pursue nursing or become a physician assistant. I got into this dual degree PA program and it’s nice because I can do undergrad and PA school together. There’s less risk. But I’ve always wanted to be a doctor. It’s always been in my head. At first it was because my parents said so but now I really think it’s what I want to do with my life. I’m still stuck between PA and doctor because they both have their positives. I was thinking of taking the summer after high school to really think about what I want. I already committed to the school with the dual degree PA program because they also have good pre med resources in case I change my mind.

At first my parents said I can choose and do whatever I want. But recently I brought up my confusion to them and we had a huge fight and discussion. They brought up every single reason in the world why I shouldn’t do pre med. They told me how they don’t have money, and how they want me to finish school fast so I can get a job and make money to help them pay the mortgage. They also said that studying to be a doctor takes too long and that I’ll spend all my twenties which I don’t really mind that much but it’s a problem to them because then I can’t get married by 25 and have kids by 30 if I’m still stuck in medical training. Because apparently no one will marry a woman if she’s older than 27. They are also saying they are becoming weak and can’t work anymore and they will need my support.

I still feel confused. Both PA and doctor are amazing positions in healthcare. On one hand being a PA doesn’t seem bad to me but my biggest fear is what if I become a PA and regret not trying to become a doctor? It feels like I’m giving up on something I’ve always wanted deep down. (For more background info, my parents were completely willing to let me try to become a doctor if I got into any BS/MD programs but I unfortunately didn’t get in anywhere). On the other hand, if I pursue pre med I feel like I would be selfish and going against my parents plus I would be completely draining all their savings and would have to give up my 20s. I will also be unable to help them financially for a good chunk of my 20s. I feel so stressed out and tired of being unsure. What should I do???

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This is all very personal, but you don’t necessarily need your parents to help with med school, nor do I personally think you should feel obligated to pay their mortgage or have their grandchildren right after college.

But you don’t need to get their permission now anyway, since you don’t have to decide now. You can just start taking the courses you would need to take and sort this out later, if you still even want it by then.

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Good thing you noted - it’s not a major - so change your title.

What they want or don’t want isn’t relevant.

Pick a major, take the required classes, and then you can reassess in four years.

For now, they should be proud of you.

They needn’t know you are building a curriculum around required classes - and frankly, the activities you would pursue would be good for all health careers.

Focus on you and being a great student and they needn’t be involved at this time.

Good luck.

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Well, your parents are not wrong.

At the end of the day being a PA and being a doctor may end up being the same thing for most people.

If someone had told me when I was 18 that life is not linear, my own trajectory may have been significantly different.

In you case, I think you are assuming being pre-med, you will get into med school. Whereas our forum experts will tell you that chance is less than 1/3. You are in a dual degree PA program and that is impressive. If you finish the PA program, work a few years, then decide you still want the MD after your name you can always go back to school. Chances are, you may not want to.

Having kids and getting married part, plenty of people take the time during school to do all of that. Your age and chosen professor matters less than your own decision making ability. Lots of people have kids during med/law schools as well as during residencies.

Besides, the classes you will take for the PA program will probably meet med school entrance requirements anyways.

Other posters have said, you don’t need their permission, but sounds like you do need their money.

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I think that this is exactly correct. You do not need to figure this out right now.

I have not checked out the required courses for a PA program, but it would seem that there must be significant overlap with premed classes. Take appropriate classes next year, do as well as you can, and see how it goes. If you can also get some clinical experience then this would also be a good idea regardless of whether you end up as a PA or an MD.

For most of us our life and our careers take some unexpected turns along the way. At the point that I graduated with my bachelor’s degree I still had no idea what I was going to do for a career. That is okay. We each figure it out over time.

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You can take all the premed requirements without your parents’ permission. You can decide later whether you want to pursue medical school.

As for the rest? You’re not under any obligation to help them pay their mortgage. In fact, no matter what you’re doing in your 20s, you probably won’t be earning enough to do that. You decide when you get married, not your parents. It is definitely not true that you will miss your shot if you’re not married by age 27 … sorry, I need a moment to finish laughing at that one … (I was 31 when I got married, 34 when I had my first kid, and 37 when I had my second). In fact, people who pursue graduate and professional degrees tend to marry and have kids later than average, so you’d be in good company.

Now - if your parents can’t afford to send you to med school, that’s a consideration. You’d have to come up with the money somehow, and med school is expensive. So that’s something to think about. But for now, all of that is far in the future. Take the premed requirements and do well, but also be open to changing your mind if you discover new interests.

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So, if I have this straight, they want you to spend your 20, your 30s, and possibly your 40s raising children so that they can have grandchildren, taking care of them, and possibly taking care of a husband, AND holding a full-time job, to help support them financially.

Their reasons all sound extremely selfish.

Do you have any brothers? The reason I ask is those demands are usually only made on women.

What have you done as chores around the house growing up?

You should do what is best for you

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As you know, you can do a combo-type undergrad + PA program, or a straight undergrad degree followed by a separate PA program.

The pre-PA prerequisites are nearly identical to premed prerequisites. You could do all the med school prerequisites and your parents probably wouldn’t even notice.

I’m a bio prof and I had a student who was in my classes and then became my research student. I told her she had what it takes to become a physician (there’s an extra little something, and she had it). But she was insistent on wanting to do PA school and is now in clinical practice. Of course I was totally supportive. If she ever changes her mind, I know that she knows that she can decide to go to med school at any point and be successful.

I don’t love BS/MD programs and I think it’s best you didn’t get into any. You’re in a great position. Do your PA combo program and, if you want to, be sure you’re fulfilling premed prerequisites along the way.

You have plenty of time to think about how far you want to take your education. By the time you’re ready to graduate, you’ll be an adult who can make your own decisions that are in YOUR best interest. You can also change your mind after you’ve been a PA for a while.

There’s no rush in figuring out what you want. Try to focus on thriving in your first year or two of college, don’t stress too much, and you’ll do great!

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First I want to say that I am sorry you are in this position. While I do not know the details of your family situation, I do have some understanding about these issues in general because I have seem them up close. It is not easy, and you are going to have to work hard to go against family expectations and control.

Here is my advice: do not discuss this with your parents. Go to college and make sure that you take all of the prerequisites for medical school. Make sure to also volunteer, etc. Shadow during school breaks- your parents do not have to know it is for medical school.

Once you have 1-2 years of school under your belt you can decide what to do. In the meantime…begin college, enjoy yourself, make friends, get good grades, volunteer and get involved, etc.

You can revisit this when you are in your sophomore or junior year. At that point you may be in a better position to determine whether PA is for you, or whether you want to apply to medical school. Also keep in mind that many/most premeds take time after college to volunteer, take the mcats etc. You do not have to go straight to med school.

Remember- many premeds change their mind for a variety of reasons (low gpa, discovered other interests etc).

One step at a time. Good luck!

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Go to PA school. You can always choose to go to med school later.
What happens if you forgo the PA program and then don’t get into med school?
Happens all the time. Just happened to a family member who is now pursuing nursing/nurse practitioner.

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It sounds to me like your parents are concerned about their own finances as they age. Who is paying for your undergrad studies?

@WayOutWestMom probably knows if the courses PA students take are the same required courses for medical school applicants.

I’m not going to try to talk you out of applying to medical school, but think about what you actually want to be doing with patients. You might be able do those same things or similar as a PA.

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I am thinking the same thing. The prerequisites are pretty similar. The difference will come once you get your degree. To apply to med school you must take the MCAT. I’m not sure with a PA degree which I believe is 2 years after undergrad. I think I’d meet with an advisor primarily to determine what classes are needed for both paths and what differences there are for shadowing, volunteering and the like. As you get closer to graduating you should have a better idea if you want to pursue an MD, DO or PA path. I don’t think it’s something you need to commit to at this point.

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Go watch some YouTube videos on the Med School Insider channel. They do a good job comparing MD vs PA vs NP careers, education requirements, etc.

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The prereqs are similar. Dou your prereqs, get a killer mcat score, delay decision for 3 years. No need to fight with them now.

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The beauty of your prePA program is that you can pursue this AND be a secret premed at the same time (premed is just an intention, it’s in your head+sth mentioned to your adviser so your parents wouldn’t know about it at all.)
All these courses overlap and would count for PA, DO, and MD schools (and typical gen eds):
Common classes
Freshman Composition* , English for your profession, Interpersonal or Intercultural Communication (or Communication, Speech, etc.)
Sociology*, Psychology
General Chemistry with lab, 1*&2
General Biology with Lab 1&2
Spanish for Health professions*
Organic Chemistry 1&2
Biochemistry
Statistics or Biostats*

(* = 1st semester classes - the full schedule is IDENTICAL. The only difference is that as a would be premed you need to get As.)

MD/DO will add:
Algebra-based physics 1&2 (typically taken Jr or sr year)
Calculus (typically taken freshman year, can be recommended by the PA program)
Medical Ethics (can be recommended for PA too)
A diversity-focused class (typically required for graduation anyway)
Cognitive science or Neuroscience

PrePA will add
Anatomy&Physiology 1&2
Advanced Biology course(s)
Advanced Psychology course (s)

All of the differences actually enrich your transcript for both schools.
Out of ~40 courses over 4 years you can easily schedule all this.

In short, you can let it rest. :slight_smile: If your parents ask, say you realized PAs and family doctors do a lot of the exact same thing and shrug. :wink:
Then, start college ready to do your best&ready to hit the ground running; go to office hours regularly and get to know your professors (not just the week before the exam but right from the start). Find volunteering opportunities, work toward your Cna or EMT certificate. Don’t party during the week and see tutors to bring that B+ to an A. Have fun. Enjoy college. Senior year - 2028- you’ll reassess, knowing that you can always become a PA then switch and become a doctor.

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RE: PA vs physician pre-reqs

The pre-reqs for PA school are similar but not identical to those required for med school admission. Pre-med has more math (stats/biostats plus 1 other college math class) and chemistry (Ochem 1 & 2, biochem) and physics (physics 1 & 2). Pre-PA requires more bio classes (typically anatomy/physiology, microbiology)

But if you are a general bio major in college, you can cover both.

However, depending on exactly which 5 year PA program you got admitted to, your pre-PA may not cover the advanced chemistry coursework.

PA-> MD/DO programs
LECOM (an osteopathic med school ) has an accelerated pathway for certified PAs who wish to become doctors. You can read about it here: Accelerated Physician Assistant Pathway | (LECOM)

It’s 3 year program that reduces time during the classroom portion (didactic) of med school. This program is well established and its graduates have matched successful into a wide variety of specialties.

So even if you do take the guaranteed 5 year PA acceptance, you haven’t closed off the door to becoming a physician.

In fact, you haven’t closed the door even if you don’t go to the special LECOM program. PAs certainly apply to med school after working a 2-3 years as a PA (so you have the experience so you can explain why physician and not PA to med school adcomms). There’s no discrimination against PAs (or nurses) in admissions. In fact, their maturity and prior experience in healthcare are considered pluses w/r/t admission.

**

You are not obligated to support your parents. While it would be nice to help them out once you are established in your career, it’s not your responsibility to pay their mortgage or other bills. It’s their name on the contract, not yours.

Neither are you obligated to have a child just so your parents can come play with their grandchild.

BTW, women have babies during med school and residency All. The. Time. Full time working physicians also have babies. (My older D had 3, including one set of twins–which is a high risk pregnancy–while working 50+ hours/week in the ER during covid. It doesn’t get more intense than the ER during Covid.)

As far as paying for medical school…you will pay for it yourself by taking out federal students loans. (It’s how most people pay for their medical education.) There are also some service-for-scholarship programs if you are interested in doing primary care in an underserved area or working for the VA Hospital system. Individual states may also have scholarship programs for physicians who are willing to work in medically underserved areas.

**
I’m sorry you are being pressured to make a decision you’re not ready to make.

Good luck with whichever pathway you choose.

And remember: no decision is ever really final. (Although it may be harder to achieve goals.) You can always change your mind.

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Note that at some colleges, statistics for biology majors may have a calculus prerequisite.

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Just wanted to reiterate a lot of what other posters have stated already. Some general thoughts & advice to consider:

  • I’m going to guess that perhaps your parents were not born & raised in the US. It can be hard at times for a student like yourself to balance between how things operate culturally in the US vs your parents’ frame of reference from their country of origin. My D24 has many friends in a similar situation to yourself. Just know that you’re not alone in this.
  • In the US, it’s actually NOT common for parents to pay for their kids to attend med school. Med school students usually pay for it with massive student loans. Depending on where you go and what the cost of attendance is, you could finish med school owing $400k. That’s like a house payment every month.
  • Legally speaking here in the US, you are NOT obligated to pay your parents’ mortgage. UNLESS your name is on the home loan…THEN you’d be on the hook to help pay for it if your parents reached a point where they couldn’t afford the payments anymore.
  • So basically your parents don’t want you to go to med school because they: (a) want you to get married and have babies before you’re 30; (b) want you to pretty much pay for their living expenses and provide for their retirement when they decide to stop working.
  • You know what? You don’t have to decide everything in your life right now. With PA or med school, you can actually major in WHATEVER YOU WANT.
  • There are pros and cons to PA or nursing or NP or med school. Do your own research. Figure it out for yourself. If possible, go and talk to some people who are actually employed in those different jobs and ask them about the pros and cons of those jobs. And then make up your own mind. Don’t just do something because your parents say so.
  • You mentioned “They are also saying they are becoming weak and can’t work anymore and they will need my support.” Some rhetorical questions to consider ( you don’t have to answer these here in this thread if you don’t want to): Are your parents in physically demanding jobs? Are they disabled or close to it? Are they 65+ years old? Why are they saying that they can’t work anymore? If they’ve been employed in the US and haven’t been paid under the table (i.e., they’re paying Medicare & Social Security taxes this whole time), then when they become retirement age, they WILL be eligible for some social security income & Medicare health insurance.

A couple of things that my D24 & I found interesting in the Med School Insiders youtube videos I mentioned earlier (she was deciding between med school vs PA school):

  1. Once you finish med school, you enter a residency for whatever your specialty will be. If you change your mind later in your career and want to switch to a different specialty, guess what? You get to go back to “earning peanuts as a resident” mode because you have to do a new residency in that other specialty.
  2. PA’s can switch from 1 specialty to another however often they want.
  3. PA school can sometimes be harder to get admitted to than med school.
  4. PA school doesn’t require as much math (D24 & I looked up many schools; most of them didn’t require calculus) vs med school will usually require 1-2 semesters of calculus.
  5. PA school usually requires a heck of a lot more “direct healthcare experience” hours than med school. NOTE: this is NOT volunteering at a hospital. They’re talking about paid work in a healthcare setting. So like a medical assistant, an EMT, phlebotomy tech, surgical tech, patient care tech, etc. Go look at some of your local PA schools and they all will usually list somewhere on their websites what the average # of healthcare experience hours an ADMITTED student has. At a lot of them, it’s in the 2000 hr range…which is roughly equivalent to 1 year’s worth of full time employment.
  6. PA’s don’t get paid as much as MD/DO’s do, but PA’s only need 2 yr of grad school compared to 4+ 2-7 yr of residency/fellowship for MD/DO’s.
  7. If you got into a dual degree PA program, congrats! Those are hard to get into.

I think that you should attend the dual degree PA program that you got admitted to. And while you’re pursuing that at college, TALK to some MDs. Ask them if they had to do it all over again, what would THEY choose.

At the end of the day, you can always go to med school later if you really want to.

And your parents are wrong about getting married. You don’t suddenly become an old maid if you’re not married by age 27.

Just take it all one day at a time. It’ll all work out. It’ll be ok.

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Getting married somewhat later is very common in the US. I for example married a woman who was quite a bit older than 27, and we had two kids (both of whom are doing very well right now, but are unmarried at 25 and 28). All of this happened for us after age 35. I am not worried about when or whether my daughters will marry – they will figure it out.

I do not know whether this is typical, however, of the marriages that I have attended where the bride and groom were under 25, most of them ended up divorced. Of the marriages that I have attended where the bride and groom were both over 30, most of them are still married and at least seem happy to me. As we get older, we learn about life, and about what we want in a spouse, and about how to get along. In marriage, marrying the right person and going in with realistic expectations is more important than rushing to get married quickly.

Medical school is expensive, and is a lot of work, and takes time. My understanding is that most students in medical school mostly pay for it by borrowing money. Attending a less expensive medical school such as an in-state university can help, but is still expensive. It is common for doctors to be in their late 20’s when they graduate medical school, with debt, and older than 30 does sometimes happen.

However, this is not something that you need to decide upon right now. My wife, both daughters, and I all took some time off after getting our bachelor’s degrees and worked for at least two years before returning to graduate school. In each case this allowed us to have a clearer understanding of what we wanted to do in graduate school (and we did or are about to do four very different things, although all but me did something “healthcare related”).

One more thing that I might add. This is something that I said to my youngest daughter who in high school had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, and noticed that most of her friends did know what they wanted to do. Yes, your friends do know what they want to do. However, in six months they will have a different idea of what they want to do, and two years from now they will have yet another different idea what they want to do. It is okay being undecided, because that just means that you are being slightly more realistic than most people. We all try a bit of this and a bit of that, and we figure it out over time.

Relax. Do well in your classes. Have some ice cream. In September, show up at university ready to put a lot of effort into your studies. Keep an open mind. Have some fun. Have faith that this will work out over time.

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I am guessing that your parents are immigrants. I’m basing this assumption on working with college aged children of immigrants, as well as people I know outside of my work. It’s difficult when cultures collide, because you have to weigh your desires with your parents’ expectations. Only you will know how best to balance that, but the good thing is that you don’t have to do that right now. As others have stated, there is a path that will serve you well for the short term & possibly be a stepping stone for the long term. You may or may not still want to be a doctor down the road … if I had a dollar for every kid I know who changed their mind about med school as they progressed through college, I could take a vacation. But if you still want to do it, you’ll be older, wiser and more mature when the decision is before you. It’s okay to wait before you worry!

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