cabbagedad posted:I'd like to ask a related question... for the first time, we have a player in our program who is interested in becoming a doc and wants to play college ball. What are the challenges with those four years, aside from the likely difficult class workload and labs? He has the grades and plans on talking to some Ivy's along with others. There have been quite a few threads here regarding the difficulty of the engineering major but I was unable to find much with pre-med and I am in the dark with this one.
I can't speak to this very well, cabbagedad, but I have to think that the amount of dedication needed to maintain the GPA to be competitive for admission to medical school down the road while being a collegiate athlete is tremendous. My daughter is getting ready to start her sophomore year and we are finding out that there is so much more that factors into the equation for medical school admission that I can't imagine a student-athlete doing it and going directly into a medical school program after a 4-year undergraduate program (summer internships, research, volunteering, shadowing).
At some schools like Arizona State, the classes are programmed for self-identified "pre-med" track kids to kind of weed out those that can hang from those who can't. Freshman year, first term my daughter had biology, chemistry, stats, English and another course. Welcome to the grind - hang on if you can.
Sophomore year and she is looking at Organic Chemistry (a litmus test of a class if you want to be a physician from what I understand). Don't wish that on anyone. I know there are special kids out there who can do this kind of workload and perhaps be an athlete (like engineering majors do I guess), but you have to have your act together and incredible discipline.