Is Pre-Med a Major? Best Majors for Pre-Meds
What’s Covered:
- Is Pre-Med a Major?
- Required Prerequisite Courses for Medical School
- Best Majors for Pre-Med Students (Including Humanities Majors!)
- Applying to College as a Pre-Med Student: What You Need to Know
A lot of students who want to become doctors plan to enter college as a “pre-med,” but what does that even mean? Is pre-med a major? Will it give you a leg up when applying to medical school? To learn what exactly pre-med is, along with some important information about working towards medical school whilst in high school and college, keep reading.
Is Pre-Med a Major?
While it would be extremely convenient if each college offered a major called “Pre-Med” that only taught the courses necessary to become a doctor, no such thing currently exists in a normal college curriculum. So what do students mean when they say “I’m pre-med”?
Pre-med is a college track—it’s a set of courses (and often extracurriculars) that you agree to take as prerequisite courses for medical school. These pre-med courses don’t necessarily need to be a part of a student’s major. A student can complete a completely unrelated major (e.g., Music or Spanish) and still take all the necessary pre-med courses as electives so that they’re still on the pre-med track.
Admittedly, undertaking an unrelated major is not the most common path that aspiring doctors take. Most pre-med students choose a major in the hard sciences like Biology, Chemistry, or Physics such that their pre-med courses also fulfill the course requirements for their major.
One primary reason students often major in a field relevant to medicine is to ensure that their major courses and their pre-med courses can have considerable overlap. When certain courses fulfill both major requirements and pre-med ones simultaneously, this effectively reduces the workload required to graduate in a timely manner.
Another reason pre-med students might decide to major in a hard science is to build a strong foundation in the concepts that are essential in both medical school and a career in medicine. With that in mind, some of the most common hard sciences majors that pre-med students choose are Biology, Biochemistry, and Neuroscience.
Required Prerequisite Courses for Medical School
So now we know that pre-med is basically just a set of required prerequisite courses for medical school, but which courses fall into this set? In other words, which college classes do you need to take in order to apply for medical school?
As a general rule, pre-med students need to complete the following coursework in some capacity at their respective universities in order to apply to med school:
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), you should take the following courses as a pre-med:
- Biology – 2 semesters with lab
- General Chemistry – 2 semesters with lab
- Organic Chemistry – 2 semesters with lab
- Biochemistry – 1 semester with lab
- Physics – 2 semesters with lab
- Math – 2 semesters (A semester of Calculus is recommended)
- English or Writing (2 semesters)
- Some schools also might require Psychology and Statistics
While these are the general courses you’ll need to take to apply to medical school, the specific requirements do vary by medical school.
For instance, these are Harvard Medical School’s requirements:
- Behavioral Sciences – e.g., coursework in psychology, sociology, etc.
- Biology – 1 year with lab experience; should include cellular and molecular aspects
- Chemistry/Biochemistry – 2 years (4 courses) with lab experience, including inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry
- Physics – 1 year; lab experience desirable but not required
- Math – 1 year, including 1 semester each of calculus and statistics (preferably biostatistics)
- Writing – 1 year; writing intensive courses are preferred, but humanities or social science courses involving substantial expository writing will satisfy this requirement
And these are OSU Medical School’s requirements:
- Biology – 2 semesters or 3 quarters
- General Chemistry – 2 semesters or 3 quarters that consists of a general chemistry series including laboratory work incorporating quantitative and qualitative analysis
- Biochemistry – 1 semester/quarter course in biochemistry
- Organic Chemistry – 2 semesters or 3 quarters of an organic chemistry series that includes one year of a lab experience or equivalent
- Physics – 2 semesters or 3 quarters with a laboratory experience
The school additionally recommends coursework in the following:
- Anatomy – 1 semester/quarter course
- Writing/Speech – Courses that emphasize written and verbal communication in English
- Social Sciences – e.g., psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics
- Humanities – e.g., art, music, drama, literature, and languages)
- Cultural Studies – Courses that focus on the culture, history and/or current state of various populations
- Ethics – Courses that address questions and issues related to morality and moral behavior, such as meta-ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, moral psychology and descriptive ethics
Required courses like the ones above are not just necessary to show medical schools that you have the prerequisite knowledge needed to become a doctor—they will also be extremely helpful in preparing for the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). This is an over six-hour computer-based exam that you’ll need to take as part of your medical school applications.
Some of the subjects tested on the MCAT are psychology, sociology, physics, chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, and biology. Does this list sound familiar? That’s because it overlaps almost exactly with the required pre-med course list. So while you’re on the pre-med track, you’re preparing for both the MCAT and med school in general.
Best Majors for Pre-Med Students (Including Humanities Majors!)
In theory, if a student is on the pre-med track, they should just select the major that requires them to take all of the pre-med courses, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that cut and dried. First of all, most college majors won’t require you to take the full breadth of courses required for the pre-med track.
Furthermore, the major you choose should not just be about checking off a required list of courses. It should be a subject that you’re genuinely interested in and passionate about, while also preparing you for your future life as a doctor.
To be the absolute most competitive for medical school admissions, you should first try to double major in a STEM field and a humanities field if you can. This may be quite difficult at a school with many general education requirements and major requirements, but it’s very doable at many liberal arts colleges.
Only around 3% of med school applicants are humanities majors, so having a humanities background will help you stand out. Humanities majors are also generally accepted to medical school at a higher rate than non-humanities majors year to year: 52.9% vs. 44.3% for the 2024-2025 cycle.
While this 8.6% may not seem like a huge difference, it may come as a surprise to many people that humanities majors have just as good a chance (if not better) of medical school acceptance than traditional STEM majors.
Many doctors also encourage pre-med students to study the humanities, as they believe that the humanities teach students skills essential to being a doctor. Dr. Angira Patel writes in her article “To Be a Good Doctor, Study the Humanities”:
“As a philosophy major in college before medical school, I believe I learned what it means to be a good doctor equally from my humanities classes as from my science classes. Studying the humanities helps students develop critical-thinking skills, understand the viewpoints of others and different cultures, foster a just conscience, build a capacity for empathy, and become wise about emotions such as grief and loss. These are all characteristics that define a good doctor.”
Studying the humanities not only potentially gives you an edge in admissions, but it can also equip you with both the analytical and soft skills that serve doctors well in their daily patient interactions.
If you can’t double major in a humanities subject and a STEM subject, you should also feel free to simply major in the humanities while completing the medical school course requirements. As long as you take the pre-med prerequisites, you don’t technically have to major in the hard sciences.
If you want to complete a more traditional pre-med major—or if you’re simply not interested in majoring in the humanities—here are the best science-related pre-med majors. These top 3 choices are based on how many prerequisites they help you complete, as well as how well they’ll prepare you for the MCAT.
1. Biochemistry
Biochemistry combines two of the most popular standalone pre-med majors, Biology and Chemistry. On the MCAT, you’ll be expected to know about Biochemistry, Biology, General Chemistry, and Organic Chemistry—all of which are topics covered in the Biochem major.
According to MCAT-Prep.com, the four aforementioned topics make up approximately 106 of the 230 questions on the MCAT, accounting for about 46% of the entire exam. Biochemistry will give you a strong background in all these foundational topics for both the MCAT and medical school coursework.
2. Chemistry
A true physical science major, the Chemistry major (in its various forms) is quite popular among pre-med students. There are three subjects on the MCAT that are directly related to chemistry, and a few more that are related to several required classes in most chemistry majors.
In addition, medical students do need to have a background in chemistry to understand several important and high-level med school concepts. The Chemistry major, therefore, will equip you with knowledge that you can use throughout medical school.
3. Biology
Perhaps the most intuitive pre-med major is Biology, whether it be a general study version of the major, or a more specific concentration like Human Biology or Integrated Biology. According to recent AAMC data, around “60% [of MCAT examinees] had an undergraduate major that could be classified as focusing on biological sciences.”
Biology is the most common pre-med major primarily because it covers a lot of the material that you will need to know as a med student—specifically human anatomy, health, physiology, neurobiology, and more. With that in mind, it makes sense that this major also covers most of the material you’ll need to know for the MCAT.
Applying to College as a Pre-Med Student: What You Need to Know
When all is said and done, pre-med students have a lot of work to do when it comes to preparing for medical school, starting from a surprisingly fairly young age. Here are some pre-med words of wisdom that we’ve learned working with thousands of students over the years on their high school and college admissions profiles:
Attend a college that will support your pre-med journey: If you’re planning to apply to medical school, there are a few things you’re going to want to do during college to be a competitive medical school candidate. These things include gaining clinical experience, gaining research experience, and really focusing on the science subjects necessary for the MCAT and med school admissions.
Be sure to choose a college that offers:
- Strong science courses—as getting a good foundation in these classes will help you do better on the MCAT, and set you up to succeed in med school;
- Involved pre-med advising—because schools with pre-med advisors can help make sure that you’re on track to complete requirements, set you up with relevant internships and opportunities, and work with you on your med school applications and interviews; and
- Many research opportunities—since doing scientific research will equip you with laboratory experience and critical-thinking skills, will provide you with opportunities to find mentorship and connections, and will help you engage with original scientific literature.
Don’t only focus on the pre-med courses: When evaluating applicants, med school admissions committees don’t just look at your MCAT score and your transcript to see whether you took all of the pre-med courses. They look at your application as a whole, and they want to see students who excelled not just in pre-med courses, but also in the rest of their academic and extracurricular endeavors.
You should also be sure to pursue extracurriculars that you’re genuinely interested in, whether they’re directly related to the medical field or not. Medical school admissions committees can “sniff out” students who have padded their resumes just to look desirable, and they prefer to see students who have pursued activities authentically.
The path to med school starts earlier than you may think: Many successful medical school applicants started pursuing clinical and research opportunities early in their academic career, sometimes as early as high school.
If you have previous research or clinical experience when you get to college, labs and hospitals are more likely to let you work with them while you’re in college. Experience is key in this field, so the earlier you start building that up, the better it’ll be for your future.
With these tips in mind, you may have some colleges in mind that align with your future med school goals. At CollegeVine, we’re committed to making college guidance accessible to all who want it. That’s why, on our college applications guidance platform, you can use our free chancing engine, build a best-fit school list, and learn how to improve your profile—all for free.
Sign up for a CollegeVine account today to get a boost on your journey to a college as a pre-med. Also check out Sage, our AI tutor and advisor, who can improve your chances of acceptance to your dream school by helping you show what you have to offer beyond the numbers!
