Pre-Med-
Take your pre-med courses, make sure you don't get blown out of the water. While I was at Rutgers, the pre-med office told students to take Calculus, Biology, Chemistry and the Freshman writing/English class all at once. They were all weed out classes and designed to destroy most pre-meds. Yes even the writing class was too. There was a recent Rhodes Scholar at Rutgers who couldn't get an A in that class. My brother, who got an SAT score of over 1200 in 8th grade (using the old grading system where 1000 was an average score) got a C in it. Don't ask me what's going on there. Former roommate in college--was the valedictorian of his high school--he got a B in the course & said it was the hardest class he took in his life.
Several big universities that have large pre-med populations often have a weed out curriculum, not designed to teach but to destroy. Other schools I've heard of with similar pre-med philosophies are NYU, UCLA & Cornell. A graduate of one school may have gone out with a 3.8 while at another school a 2.9 while putting in the same amount of effort. I remember getting about a 40% on my Chemistry Lab final exam, and the class average was a 40% which suggested to me that the exam had no validity in terms of it trying to gauge how much we knew our chemistry. I worked my tail off for it, didn't feel I learned much and hated the experience.
I went to Syracuse U, didn't work much, actually enjoyed the classes I took & left there with a GPA >3.5. I transferred to RU, was working my tail off and didn't feel I was learning much. Several of the classes I took, the only way to do well in the class was to get a hold of the old exams & memorize all the answers. If you actually tried to learn it for real--forget about it-C or worse. IMHO it was a product of the school trying to weed out several of its students & at the same time having several professors that were generating a lot of money in research & publications, so the school didn't mind if they gave subpar teaching.
Bottom line is, you got to make sure you are doing well in your pre-med classes. If you are in an environment where you can do well & real teaching & learning are encouraged-good for you, take advantage of it. If you were in a situation like I was in pre-med at RU, you're going to have to be a bit more cynical, investigate which classes to take before you sign up for them to make sure they're not the weed out classes. There are several weed out classes you cannot avoid, in which case take them during the summer at a nearby college where they don't have a weed out mentality. Also try to figure out if your pre-med advisor has a weed out mentality or is someone who really wants to help you get into medical school. Unfortunately that too followed parallel paths with both schools I attended. RU told you to take the hardest classes not caring if you could survive--SU, they treated you like you were a paying client wanting the best advice.
To get a taste of the mental health-several psychology classes may be of interest to you.
General Psychology
Abnormal Psychology
Psychopharmacology
Physiological Psychology
Child Psychology
Adult Development & Aging
Endocrinological Psychology
Social Psychology
I felt I learned a lot of useful things taking these classes for the psychiatric profession that are not typically taught in a psychiatric curriculum.
