The best premed major is the one that makes you interesting

There’s a certain look I’ve seen on premed students’ faces—equal parts fear and calculation.

It shows up in office hours. In my DMs. In the way someone asks about “the right major,” as if there’s a single door into medicine and every other hallway is a trap.

In a recent clip, I said something I’ll keep repeating until it stops being controversial: “Don’t use college just to become a doctor. Use it to become an interesting person.” (Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCrwVAFw9VU)

That line gets interpreted as permission to ignore the hard stuff.

It’s not.

The misconception: there’s a correct major

The myth is simple: if you want to get into medical school, you should major in biology (or something adjacent), because admissions committees “prefer it.”

The American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) says it plainly: “There’s no required or even preferred majors that medical schools are looking for.” (AAMC — How to Choose the Best Premed Major)

Read that again. No required. No preferred.

What schools do care about is whether you can handle the curriculum that’s coming, and whether your story makes sense.

And yes—whether you did the prerequisite coursework for the schools you’re applying to. (AAMC — How to Choose the Best Premed Major)

The nuance: prerequisites are real, and so are tradeoffs

If you major in philosophy, you don’t get to pretend chemistry doesn’t exist.

You still need to be fluent in the language of the body: physiology, biochemistry, mechanisms, probabilities, uncertainty.

But “fluent” and “major” are not the same thing.

You can build scientific fluency while studying something that forces you to sharpen different tools.

- Literature teaches you to read a human being the way you read a paragraph: context, subtext, what’s missing. - Engineering teaches you systems thinking, failure modes, and humility in the face of complexity. - Anthropology teaches you that “normal” is often just local culture dressed up as truth.

If you’ve ever taken care of a patient long enough to learn their actual life, you know those tools matter.

Here’s the part people don’t say out loud: major choice is also about stamina.

A major you chose to impress someone else is a major that will grind you down when you hit the inevitable wall—organic chemistry week 6, a rough semester, a family crisis, the first time you realize you’re competing with 10,000 people who are also smart.

If you’re going to do hard things, you should at least do them in the direction of something you actually care about.

What I meant by “interesting”

When I say “become an interesting person,” I’m not talking about trivia.

I’m talking about being the kind of person who can sit with someone else’s fear without rushing to fix it.

The kind of person who can ask a better question than the one on the template.

The kind of person who has seen enough of the world—through books, relationships, travel, work, or a weird elective you took on a whim—that you don’t confuse grades with character.

In the clip, I pushed back on the idea that your undergraduate major defines the physician you’ll become. “Use [college] to become an interesting person.” (Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCrwVAFw9VU)

Because medicine is full of people who were trained to be correct.

What we need, just as much, are people trained to be awake.

What a reader should take away (premed or not)

1. If you’re applying to medical school, don’t pick your major out of fear. 2. Do pick it with your eyes open: you still need the science foundation and the prerequisites for your target schools. (AAMC — How to Choose the Best Premed Major) 3. Remember that the goal isn’t to look like a doctor by 21. The goal is to become someone patients can trust by 31.

Even if you’re not premed, the principle holds.

Most of adulthood is people trying to reverse-engineer a life from a résumé. College is one of the rare seasons where you can build the person first.

So take the class that scares you for the right reason.

Write something that requires taste.

Learn to speak in public.

Take a lab where the data doesn’t behave.

Do a semester where your identity isn’t “future anything.”

That’s not a detour.

That’s training.

If you’re reading this and you’re in that fear-and-calculation phase, reply and tell me what major you’re considering—and what you actually want to learn, if nobody was watching.

Dum spiro, spero. — Ugo