which department do i need to apply if i wanted to be a physician?Answered
which department do I need to apply to if i wanted to be a physician?
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Hi @tetra._.0,
If you wish to one day become a medical doctor in the US, you have to apply to medical school.
Historically Medical School is graduate school, not undergraduate school. Sometime in the last 50 years, Medical Schools attached to Research Universities like Brown, Boston University, UPitt, Baylor, and U Cincinnati started offering an accelerated combined Bachelors of Science dual degree with an M.D program. This is called a BS/MD program. This allows you to apply right out of high school. The major benefit is that you do not have to take the MCAT standardized test and do not have to apply separately to medical school.
https://blog.collegevine.com/a-complete-list-of-all-bs-md-programs/
I would say that historically the very best medical schools still remain just graduate schools. These prestigious highly ranked medical schools will probably never offer BS/MD programs. These are schools like Stanford, UCLA, Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Cornell, JHU, Duke, UPenn, University of Washington, WashU, Vanderbilt, and Yale.
In the UK, you must apply through UCAS to Oxford, Cambridge or St.Andrews, UCL or Imperial college right out of high school and straight into medical school.
If you do not wish to apply to a BS/MD program, then you should first apply to a good college that will give you some foundational core competencies in STEM courses like Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Statistics, Psychology, etc. You do not have to major in Biological Sciences to get into Medical School although it's very popular. The best colleges are agnostic really as to what your undergraduate major is. As long as you have a very high MCAT test score, high grades (3.8-4.0), and great recommendations, it really doesn't matter so much what your major is.
This article by the American Medical Association agrees that majors do not matter in admissions decisions.
Another take on this.
https://www.zippia.com/advice/med-school-major/
Good luck.
Assuming you're talking about universities in the US, you usually don't apply to departments at all. You apply to universities. Some universities (like Cornell, UPenn or Columbia) will have you commit to something along the lines of a school in your application. In that case you're gonna wanna apply to a school that either offers biology or, in the best of all worlds, pre med as a major.
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Hello, thank you so much for the information and for answering my questions. This helped me a lot!! I'll try my best :) sincerely,