Major in Nursing and be in a Pre-med program?

[Tiger291]

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Can you major in Nursing and be in a pre-med program, so you can apply in medical school in the future? Also, I am planning to go to University of St Thomas in Houston. They have a nursing school and also have a pre-med program. Is that a good school to go to? I'm making A's and B's in my classes and go to a college prep high school.What are your recommendations?

 

[QuizzicalApe]

Can you major in Nursing and be in a pre-med program, so you can apply in medical school in the future? Also, I am planning to go to University of St Thomas in Houston. They have a nursing school and also have a pre-med program. Is that a good school to go to? I'm making A's and B's in my classes and go to a college prep high school.What are your recommendations?

If you major in nursing and apply to med schools, they are going to take a very keen and pointed interest in why you bothered studying nursing if you wanted to be a doctor. Likewise, I imagine the nursing program is going to take an equally keen and possibly pointy interest in why they are bothering to train you as a nurse when you clearly want to be a doctor. Your major generally doesn't matter, but if you are occupying a spot in what is essentially a vocational training program, everyone is going to be pretty curious as to whose time you are wasting.

Although you don't need to be in a pre-med "program". You could major in Pre-Industrial Canadian Sociology and apply to med-school no problemo as long as you take the appropriate med school required courses as electives, keep your grades up, and do well on the MCAT.

 

[Tin Man]

Can you major in Nursing and be in a pre-med program, so you can apply in medical school in the future? Also, I am planning to go to University of St Thomas in Houston. They have a nursing school and also have a pre-med program. Is that a good school to go to? I'm making A's and B's in my classes and go to a college prep high school.What are your recommendations?

Erm, I would probably recommend against that course of action. Nurses and doctors train in different ways, and if you train to be a nurse by "majoring in nursing", then all parties are expecting you to be a nurse.

For what it's worth, I've heard horror stories about nurses and those with a lot of nursing education attempting to apply to medical school and having a pretty tough time with it. There are LOTS of people applying to medical school, and since we already have a shortage of nurses, adcoms don't necessarily feel too inclined to remove a trained nurse from the field when they can select someone else from outside. We need nurses, and we can get doctors who aren't already nurses, so it's overall better for the field to not train nurses to be doctors. That's only based on what I've heard, so take it as you will.

What you might consider instead is getting a "normal" degree (not associated with nursing), and instead becoming a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant). They are still health care workers, and you can get the training knocked out in a summer. It allows you to work with patients and gain some great medical experience, but only requires one "class", meaning that you aren't so heavily invested in the nursing field that you raise any eyebrows with pre-med aspirations. Just something to think about.

 

[Coffee Machine]

Can you major in Nursing and be in a pre-med program, so you can apply in medical school in the future? Also, I am planning to go to University of St Thomas in Houston. They have a nursing school and also have a pre-med program. Is that a good school to go to? I'm making A's and B's in my classes and go to a college prep high school.What are your recommendations?

The main problem with majoring in nursing while trying to do pre-med is that nursing generally has a very rigid course progression-- ie, you take class A, B, C during the fall, then take D, E, and F (which have A, B, and C as pre reqs) during the spring, wash rinse and repeat until you graduate.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if there was a large overlap between nursing curriculum and pre-med, but there is. Nurses usually have to take only 1 semester of a science, typically chemistry, that can apply to med school prereqs, then the rest are nurse specific (ie, nursing microbio). My fiancee is about to finish nursing school and she found that she couldn't even fit the extra couple of classes (two or so that she was lacking) to graduate with the next level of distinction from the Honors College.

tl;dr: It's going to be really difficult to take the necessary classes, and frankly if you want to be a nurse, you'd probably hate medicine and vice versa. Also, it won't help you when you apply.

 

[FrkyBgStok]

In addition, nursing schools seem to have this ridiculous requirement of not making class credits indicative of course load. What I mean is many schools seem to have this 1 or 2 credit "clinical skills" class that happens to be monday through friday 7a-3p. So taking 12-13 credits in nursing school can leave you with very little time to take another class. So realistically, you won't be able to start your prereqs until you are done with nursing. (while this post is slightly sarcastic, it is basically true)