Can you get into medical school with a psychology bachelor degree?

3 Comments »

MattMarquis said:

If you’re looking to med school I suggest getting your BS or BA.
- 26 November 2009 at 11:02 am
bluegoat114 said:

You need to decide now. If you want to go on to med school you need to take pre-med classes..lots of biology, chemistry, math. Your course work will have gaps if you just fulfill the psych requirements (psych professor)
- 28 November 2009 at 10:49 am
J said:

The advantage of a formal premed program is that the premed courses are included in your curriculum for your Major rather than being in addition to your Major courses.
Certainly, you can have a Psych Major for medical school. The only caveat is that your GPA in the pre-req courses and your overall GPA are going to need to high. Psychology is well known as being the easiest degree to obtain (not that’s it’s easy, but that it’s the least academically challenging). Admission committees are tasked with identifying applicants who have the proven ability to successfully manage a rigorous credit load. Obviously, an applicant with a 3.8 GPA who only had 12 credit hours a semester is less impressive than an applicant who has a 3.8 who carried 18 to 20 semester hours. In that same vein, if your GPA in your Major courses is a 3.8 but your GPA in the pre-req courses is only a 3.2, you might want to argue that your GPA is a 3.5 average, but that’s not how the AdCom will view it. That 3.2 GPA in the pre-reqs would demonstrate that you struggled with the science courses even though you had a relatively light Major course load. To elaborate further, if your Major was fairly rigorous in its own right (such as engineering) and your GPA in your Major courses was a 3.5 and your pre-req courses were a 3.5, then you would be demonstrating a strong capability of managing a rigorous schedule. The reason that’s so important is that the lightest credit load you’d carry in medical school will be about 23 semester hours.
An option, which rarely appears attractive while you’re an active student, is to complete your degree and then take a Post-bacc program that will allow you to focus all of your time on the pre-reqs without having to carry additional credits. Certainly, this requires more time and people generally are anxious to get their education behind them, but when you consider that you’ll have 30 plus years for a career, taking an extra year or two at the beginning to give yourself a better career is a pretty smart move.
- 1 December 2009 at 10:02 pm

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