Hi, I’m a senior this year and I have made a verbal commitment to play women’s lacrosse at Bowdoin College. I want to go pre-med and I have heard that you can basically have any major with pre-med, so I want to major in Sociology because it is something I am very interested in. I founded my own organization dedicated to helping kids in the inner city so I think a Sociology degree can help me with community service in the future since I want to do that for the rest of my life. However, I am worried that I won’t have the time to keep my grades that high to stay on the pre-med track/be able to go to a good med school because I’m playing a sport. I’m not really a math/science person now, but I go to an okay public school, unlike the prep schools that a lot of Bowdoin students come from. That being said, if I decide to let go of pre-med, I feel like it will be difficult to get a job with a Sociology degree. Is playing a sport at a DIII school going to affect my grades enough that I won’t be able to go pre-med with a major that has almost nothing to do with medicine?
Your major doesn’t have to have anything to do with medicine. You can be a music major, you can be an art major, you can be a history major…it doesn’t matter. Just major in what you like.
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able to go to a good med school
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All US med schools are good…all are very good.
My sister was a sociology major at Bowdoin and got a pretty good nonprofit job right out of college. At a school like Bowdoin, pretty much nothing you can major in has a direct career path - you can’t major in business or nursing or engineering, so you may as well go wild and follow your interests. Playing a sport definitely helps with networking.
I know DI sports can cause real conflicts with science courses (esp. labs). I don’t know as much about DIII; I would ask around about it, see whether it’s been done.
The career services offices at Bowdoin can give you great guidance on your questions. Almost half the student body are athletes, and many of those pre-med, so it’s an issue career services (and probably your academic advisor) will be familiar with navigating. Honestly, this personal attention is one of the advantages of choosing a LAC. Good luck.
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I know DI sports can cause real conflicts with science courses (esp. labs
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Two of son’s housemates are former big Div I football players (one from Oregon, one from Auburn). Neither of them were able to do the premed prereqs as undergrads. Both did relatively easy undergrad majors to protect their GPAs, and then did post-baccs to get their premed prereqs done. It pushed back the time a bit, but they’re only abou 3 years older than son.
This seems like an excellent strategy. Their cum GPAs were very good, and then their science GPAs (mostly from postBaccs) were also very good.
I will say that as someone who did much less serious D1 athletics than football in a power five conference, I did all the pre-med prereqs and the same majors (yes, majors, I did a double in bio and classics) I would have done I hadn’t been an athlete. I took a single gap year which was more about building my ECs than my grades or pre-reqs because my ECs definitely took a hit because of sports. That being said, my program specifically said that my participation in varsity (I say varsity because your D3 would be just as valuable as my D1) athletics was a major plus. I’ve seen the same statement echoed by other schools.
I would imagine D3 lacrosse is closer to my athletic experiences than it is to power five football.
@iwannabe_Brown so you are saying that participating in college sports helped you get into med school? (All else being equal, meaning you had a good GPA, MCAT, etc). That surprises me… Although it sounds like it did “hurt” in the fact that you had to do ECs post grad (assuming these were research or medical related ECs).
To clarify, my program is MD/PhD, but I’ve seen the sentiment reflected in MD only admissions too. Honestly, if I had been doing MD only I probably wouldn’t have needed the extra year. Also it’s not so much that I had to do the ECs post grad as much as I needed senior year. A straight through med school applicant applies the summer after junior year. I applied right after I graduated.
Athletics (and music too) are activities that people view as requiring many of the characteristics they seek in physician(/scientists) because they are lifelong pursuits, require constant fine tuning/improvement of skills, and perseverance over adversity (the opponents and musical pieces always get better/harder). Athletics needs to be at least at the club level if varsity is not offered at the school, varsity if it is, music needs to be in an organized, performance based fashion (ie busting the guitar out on the quad doesn’t count, performing in the marching band or some orchestra would).
My MD/PhD class of 11 has me (D1) and 2 club athletes. I guarantee that 1/3 of the MD/PhD admissions pool is not club level or greater athletes.
Bowdoin, for reassurance, gets a mention in this online list: “The Experts’ Choice: Colleges with Great Pre-med Programs.”
S did a Division III sport while a pre-med at a LAC. He had to be highly organized and during his game season, he purposely took a lighter than average course load (3 classes, not 4). He had enough AP credits that this wasn’t a problem, but even without, he could have made up the reduced units during quarters when he wasn’t on the road for away games, helping manage the team, dealing with the occasional injury or just plain beat from practice…It also meant that he did his shadowing and research over the summers rather than during the school year. So if you plan your workload carefully, you can manage this.
And yes, it seemed to be a significant positive for his application to med school: Most of his interviewers picked up on his sport as something to talk. I think what the schools were seeing is the self-discipline, the interest in the human body that athletes tend to have, and the teamwork that goes with many sports.
One of DS fraternity brothers did two Div III sports at an LAC. He ended up taking a gap year because he wanted the extra research year, but it was possible. N’s Mom has it right that the shadowing, research and volunteering may need to be emphasized in the summer. In his interviews, the adcoms expected that he had shown a commitment to working with the disadvantaged and knew why he wanted to go into medicine.
My stepdaughter was a pre-med lacrosse player at Bowdoin. She handled it well and went on to Dartmouth for med school. Remember, you don’t actually have to declare your major until second semester sophomore year. While you will have to take some science courses to get a good start on the pre-med track freshman and sophomore year, you will also have room to try other courses (sociology) and work on getting some distribution requirements out of the way those years…and…play lacrosse. Once you get there you will be able to assess the workload. If you think it will be too much you have the option of picking a non-science major or not playing lacrosse.
Also, I echo what others have said here, you do not have to major in a science to go to med school. A word of caution though, you will have to be able to handle a lot of science both undergrad and in med school if you want to be a doctor.