After finishing your bacc—baccalaureate or bachelor’s degree, for those who are unfamiliar with the term—you may suddenly decide that you want to be a doctor. Once you do, you’ll need to find the best pre-med programs. A pre-med program or course allows you to receive the required credits and learn prerequisite subjects to be qualified and admitted to a med school.
Unfortunately, passing your pre-med program doesn’t guarantee that you’ll become a doctor or get admitted to a med school. You’ll need to ace the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) first to raise your chances of getting in. And for you to do that, you must go through the best post-bacc pre-med programs.
So, here are the questions you might be asking: what are the best pre-med programs colleges offer, and what does it even mean?
What Should a Post-Bacc Pre-Med Program Give You as an Aspiring Med Student
Aside from helping you ace the MCAT to get admitted to a med school, the best colleges with the best pre-med programs will make you benefit from the following:
- Solid Knowledge Base: Doctors are expected to have minds like search engines for medical knowledge. They should be confident when it comes to matters involving medicine, biology, and the basic sciences, even before they step into their med school of choice. The best pre-med post bacc programs should bestow them with a solid knowledge base on medical science.
- Critical Thinking Skills: Most people think that for one to be a doctor or lawyer, they only need to be good at memorizing to graduate and get their licenses. That is further from the truth. Critical thinking is vital in both those professions, and the best pre-med programs ingrain it in their students.
- Stress and Time Management Skills: Doctors always deal with pain, sickness, and death. They will often be around people undergoing tremendous stress. And they are required to endure everything and live through to the following day with their minds stable and resilient. The best pre-med program conditions them to be well-prepared for those situations even if they haven’t spent any time in med-school and residency.
- MCAT Prep: Not all med schools and med programs require enrollees to pass the MCAT. However, you should know that MCAT results can easily influence your acceptance to a med school. The best post-bacc pre-med programs will equip you with all your knowledge to ace the MCAT.
What the Best Post-Bacc Pre-Med Program Should Have
The primary purpose of a pre-med course is to allow an aspiring student to get all the experience and classes required to be a med student. The best post-bacc pre-med program should provide you with the following, which are the bare minimum for a med student:
One year of classes in a lab in the following:
- Biology
- General Chemistry
- Organic Chemistry
- Physics
- One Semester of Biochemistry Classes
- One Year of Math and English Classes
Depending on the school where you’ll take your pre-med, you will also receive additional extracurricular classes. Most of these classes focus on volunteering and research. And if you’re interested in those, you may want to check the programs offered by IMA.
Why Is Post-Bacc Pre-Med Better Than “Pre-Med Majors“
Sometimes, people already know they want to be a doctor early on. Those people often don’t want to undergo classes unrelated to medicine and health during their time in college, so they go for a pre-med major. Pre-med majors are supposed to be courses offered to students to allow them to get to med schools earlier without going through unnecessary subjects.
However, most med schools don’t recognize these courses. Most of them would prefer their students to get their baccalaureate in related fields. The question is, what is the best pre-med major? According to med schools, students should take majors in biology, psychology, chemistry, and even philosophy and get the best post-bacc pre-med program or best online pre-med programs they can afford.
Another thing, these pre-med majors aren’t offered by major universities. In line with this, according to MCAT results, pre-med major exam takers do poorer than their counterparts who took a post-bacc pre-med program and majored in other fields before trying to become med students.
What Colleges Have the Best Pre-Med Programs
Now that you know well what an excellent pre-med program should be, where can you get it? Here are some of the schools that have proven to be the best places to get your pre-med, in no specific order:
- Harvard University
- UCSF School of Medicine
- University of Pennsylvania
- Duke University
- Columbia University
- Goucher College
- Johns Hopkins University
- Washington University in St. Louis
- Northwestern University
- Stanford University
Conclusion
These are the things you need to know about what the best post-bacc pre-med programs are. Note that this is more intended for a US audience as the schools or colleges listed here are primarily in the United States. Indeed, you can find schools in your area with the same prestige as the ones listed here.
