Hi all,
I have some of the required pre-med courses from my undergraduate years, and will fulfil the basic requirements at the end of the fall semester. Here’s my quick question: How important is it to take additional science courses?
It’s not essential, but it’s nice to have some additional bio courses. There isn’t enough time in med school to learn stuff properly from scratch, and most of the faculty aren’t very good at teaching at an intro level. But you can’t understand the more complex stuff without the basics, so you end up self-teaching and not doing it very well.
I was very grateful that I’d taken a good intro genetics/mol bio course. I wish I had done one more molecular/cell bio course, and a neuroscience course of some kind. Some people would vote for immunology here, but we actually had a very good immuno prof and I learned the material.
I would say it primarily depends on your GPA. If you have some lower grades in the pre-reqs from earlier, you might want to consider taking some upper level courses to prove that you can do them.
Another consideration - a lot of schools have additional courses beyond the pre-reqs that they require or “strongly recommend”. The big trend seems to be toward requiring Biochemistry. Genetics and cell biology also seem to be popular. So, you might want to look at the websites of some of the schools you are applying to and see if they have additional “required” or “recommended” courses.