Medical School Requirements For the Future

Medical school requirements have remained unchanged, but will medical school admissions requirements soon catch up with the sweeping advances in scientific knowledge?

Many of the leading people in the medical community argue the standard medical school requirements are great for weeding out the applicant pool, but do very little in preparing for becoming a doctor.

Dr. Dienstag, dean for medical education at Harvard medical school believes a change is needed where the focus is on science that “matters” to medicine.

Medical students need advanced knowledge in molecular and cellular biology, along with genetics if they are going to be a good physician in today's era of genomics and informatics. To produce great doctors it will be important for them to have a solid science foundation which spans across all disciplines.

For instance, a sick patient is not a biochemistry problem, an anatomy problem, an immunology problem or a genetics problem; instead, each person is a combination of molecular, cellular, genetic and environmental factors which will influence disease and health.

Consequences for Your Education

If you want to give yourself a head start for medical school I would go beyond the basic medical school requirements.

You want to be well grounded in biochemistry, because most medical schools expect their students to be familiar in this area before arriving. You want to think about taking course which have a biological focus and good choices would include molecular and cellular biology.

Try to get into the habit of honing your analytical and quantitative abilities because you will need this when encountering human biology and its complexities. In the words of my high school AP biology teacher, "math is the language of science," so having a strong background in algebra and trigonometry, combined with calculus and statistics will give you the tools to excel in medical school.

Do not view your college years as merely a task or obstacle to be checked off in-order to get into medical school. Take the time to immerse yourself in all the opportunities and experiences that college offers. At Northwestern we were taught:

To play it safe – to take only courses that you need to take for medical school, plus ones you think will enhance your chances of admission, and to postpone to some other day the pursuit of your real interests – is to cheat yourself of much else that Northwestern offers.

Just to Get Admitted

Dean Dienstag makes a convincing point when he mentions you do not need to concern yourself with:

• ethics
• compassion and skills of health policy
• economics

At the expense of a strong science preparation, medical schools can teach you all of these things in the appropriate context.

If I could do my undergrad years over again I would definitely follow many of the guidelines outlined in this article.

Take as many science classes which are relevant to medicine and the corresponding math classes, but also be a well rounded student who has experience in a second language, the humanities and the social sciences.

As Bob Dylan sings, "The Times Are A Changing" and the medical school requirements must soon evolve to reflect what it means to give ourselves the tools to succeed in medical school.

Source Information

This page was developed after reading, "Relevance and Rigor in Premedical Education," a perspective on Becoming a Physician taken from the New England Journal of Medicine Volume 359:221-224 July 17, 2008 Number 3.