What major would best prepare one for the MCAT

i_wanna_be_Brown
Wed, 31 Jul 2013 15:29:21 +0000

I remember when I was applying to schools that many classics department heads cited similar stats.

My theory, based on very little evidence, is that the majority of classics majors had exposure to the field in high school and that high schools that have offer extensive classics classes are generally better high schools. So right off the bat, classics majors are enriched with kids from high performing high schools, and if you then isolate the classics majors who are also pre-meds, you’ve got a very select group of students who obviously have not only strong writing/language/communication skills but also good science/reasoning skills.

Of course many other types of students have all these skills too, but no other major/pre-med combo seems to attract such a universally strong subset of students on such a nationwide level.

I obviously wrote about the classics extensively on my applications and had two major themes that I featured a lot:


The fact that you’re trained to deduce a whole universe from small snapshots. In biology it’s pretty much impossible to ever see a whole system at play at once, and similarly ancient history doesn’t have the documentation that say 20th (or even any post renaissance) century history does. Both fields are about taking disjointed snippets of info and weaving them into a cohesive unity.
Greater appreciation of the significance of context. This was more with regard to my why MD/PhD essays but I focused a lot on experiences of reading poetry in translation vs the original language. There are many elements of style and creativity that really are just lost in translation or references and connections that are missed if one doesn’t have the adequate background knowledge of the era (more so for theater than poetry) and I basically said that doing scientific research as an MD or PhD was essentially like reading in translation or without the proper background.


A PhD doesn’t provide adequate training in disease management or the greater workings of the human body and how the organ systems interact with each other while an MD doesn’t provide enough scientific exposure anymore since our scientific and clinical knowledge has grown exponentially for the last few decades and it’s just too much to learn in 4 years and once you get out of med school you have to learn all the nuances of your own field and without formal training in scientific practice there’s really no way to keep up anymore.

This is not to say that there’s anything bad or wrong with the kind of research that MDs and PhDs do just like there’s nothing wrong with reading in translation. You’re still going to learn something. It’s just not what I want. I want the richness of the full experience.