What majors should i take to become a surgeon

Candidates for admission to a general surgical residency must first graduate from medical school. Medical school typically requires four years of full-time study to complete. The first two years are heavily weighted toward classroom studies and laboratory work, while medical students in their final two years are more involved with clinical practice under the direct supervision of experienced doctors. Candidates who successfully complete medical school are awarded either a Doctor of Medicine degree or M.

According to the American College of Surgeons , physicians must complete at least five years in a surgical residency. Once you complete training, you then need to spend three to 10 years as a resident.

This post-doctoral training is important, because surgeons gain their skills through experience. How long you must spend as a resident depends on the surgery specialty that you choose. Related Resource: Sports Medicine. Surgeons need to be experts in what they do. If you want a fulfilling job where you can make a difference in the lives of many, you may want to work to become a specialist in surgery. Review the areas you can specialize in as a surgeon, and then you can start to earn the doctorate degree needed to become a surgeon.

Featured or trusted partner programs and all school search, finder, or match results are for schools that compensate us. This compensation does not influence our school rankings, resource guides, or other editorially-independent information published on this site.

Not only is it a challenging and demanding profession, you'll need to invest well over a decade of your life -- and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition -- just to get there. With that kind of pressure to get it right, a lot of aspiring medical students spend way too many hours obsessing over their choice of premedical major and minor.

Your choices can be important, but probably not in the way you expect. Every medical or osteopathic college has academic prerequisites for admission.

They vary among schools, but overall, they're pretty similar. You need to take some humanities courses, either calculus or statistics, and several basic and advanced science courses. These can be incorporated into any degree program, either in the arts or sciences. Science majors are the traditional choice, since your med school prerequisites can do double duty and help you fulfil the requirements for your major.

However, there's no reason you can't choose an arts major, if that's where your interests lie, and make up your prerequisites through electives or a minor. A few schools offer a formal pre-medical major, but that's the exception rather than the rule. More often, aspiring physicians or surgeons choose to major in biology, chemistry, or physics. These are all worthy choices, but not your only options.