Pre-Health
Pre-Health
"The college years should not be designed primarily to prepare students for professional schools. College should be a time to explore and stretch academically and intellectually; to engage creatively in an expansive liberal arts education encompassing literature, languages, the arts, humanities, and social sciences; and to prepare for citizenship in society."
- Jules L. Dienstag, M.D., Dean for Medical Education, Harvard Medical School
New England Journal of Medicine, July 18, 2008, vol. 359, pp 221-224.
The College of Wooster offers many opportunities and advantages to students interested in medicine and other areas of health care. We serve pre-medical [link to medicine page] students in addition to those interested in veterinary medicine [link to vet page], dentistry [link to dentistry page], nursing [link to nursing page], physical therapy, pharmacy [link to pharmacy page], and other fields. We use the inclusive term "pre-health" (versus "pre-medical") in our advising to reflect the many ways in which our graduates can help others in health care. Students interested in the advising at Wooster may be interested in viewing the New Student Orientation Handout [link to New Student Orientation Handout PDF] distributed at the beginning of every year to incoming students.
Wooster maintains a steadfast commitment to educating students -- enabling them to become creative, critical, and independent thinkers -- rather than simply training them for a job. Many pre-medical students at Wooster choose to major in the physical sciences, but there is no required major for admission to medical school and other programs. A degree from a strong liberal arts college like Wooster can be attractive to an admissions panel looking for well-rounded and broadly educated students. In fact, the advantages of a liberal arts education have been widely recognized for many years.