@Data10 I have to side with @eyemgh on this. While I agree that it would be nice to be able to do some real detailed analysis and quantitatively evaluate the effect of specific majors on medical school admissions (beyond what general data is available from the AAMC), I think it’s irresponsible and misleading to claim that “biomedical engineering is actually one of the majors with the highest rates of med school admission”. Do you have a source for this? Claiming that one study found this to be true is meaningless without further information, and could have been due to any one of a number of confounding factors, including sheer dumb luck. The only such study I found was from the AIP, and it wasn’t really a study at all–just an unexamined, unexplained, and unqualified table of majors versus MCAT score.
The facts are that 1) engineering majors have lower GPAs than other majors, and 2) GPA plays a large role in medical school admission without regard for major, based on data from AAMC. Looking at the proportions of applicants to matriculants (https://www.aamc.org/download/321496/data/factstablea17.pdf), assuming that “Physical Sciences” includes engineering majors, we see that about 39% of biological science majors matriculate versus about 44% of physical sciences majors. Is this significant? I don’t know, maybe. There’s not enough information to say, but it does seem like the sample size of physical science majors was considerably smaller than that of biological science majors, which doesn’t help. There also isn’t any real information on how many of these physical science majors were engineers, if any, or how many were biomedical engineers. If self-selection among engineers really led to significantly higher admission rates, then we might expect to see considerably higher matriculation rates among these individuals, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, in the same table, we also see the GPAs of matriculating students, and find that a similar GPA is required regardless of major.
Combined with the fact that engineering majors tend to have lower GPAs than their LAS counterparts (for example, see this publication from the NCES, among others: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013150.pdf), it’s very reasonable to say that majoring in BE/BME will decrease one’s chance of medical school admission. This doesn’t mean that specific students or schools don’t have better outcomes, but generally speaking: yes, majoring in engineering will hurt your chance of getting into medical school.
Which is why I think it’s misleading and disingenuous to people like @AnthonyZ to suggest that majoring in engineering won’t potentially negatively impact their ability to get into med school.