Your career should not be about what your parents want for you (I’m sure they just want the best – but sometimes they are wrong) but you have to decide what YOU want to do. If you want to be a bio major you can do a lot after school – med school, law school, grad school to get your PhD, hs teacher, lab assistant/researcher/technician, researcher. It depends what is interesting to YOU. Do you want to do research for medical companies?

A pharmacist does make good money, you help people and it’s a stable job. I know my old roommate did that and then became a rep for a drug company and flew all over the country (first class and for free) explaining drugs to people and talking to doctors.

As far as your GPA / SAT go – can you re-take the SAT? Do you have another year to bring your GPA up? If you’ve focused on hard classes (AP science etc) colleges won’t ding you too hard for your GPA and I bet if you wrote a strong personal essay/statement and have some internships showing you’re motivated to study in the science field you could get into a decent college.

Also, when considering colleges think about where you’re most comfortable: 100s of kids in your class or 30? Big campus? Small campus? Get to know your teachers? etc.

Sort of a big deal lately is kids who went to smaller colleges (either Liberal arts or chrisitan/catholic) who are getting into the top medical schools in the country because they got specialized attention and were able to get better internships through their profs. So think about the kind of school you want (big, small, close/far to home), then look at their science programs and start applying.

It’s been a while since I took the SATs but some good schools for bio/pharmacy: Vassar, Tulane, Duke, UT Austin, UCLA, and some of the smaller ones that I don’t know as well but have had smart friends grad from: Amherst, Colby, Harvey Mudd, Cal Poly Pomona and Cal Poly San Louis Obispo.

There’s a site: www.collegeboard.com where you can plug in your GPA and SAT score to see which schools are likely…

As for the work load, yes, ESPECIALLY if you do pharmacy or another science major it’ll be HEAVY. But, if that’s what you love to do, then just buckle down and get it done. However, I would really encourage you again, do what your heart says, do what you enjoy doing. I switched my major 4 times in college until I found something that fit – and it was the best (and scariest) decision I’ve made.

Best of luck to you.

Don’t rely on your SAT score and high school gpa too much. They are not good predictors of success in college. I was a C student in high school and ended up graduating Magna *** Laude from college. It’s what you do with your time in college that counts.

There is no medicine, vet, pharmacy, or optometry major. You have to go to specific professional grad schools to become those things. In general, those 4 have very similar lists of required courses before you’re eligible to apply to them. You can be a bio major and still fulfill all those lists of requirements.

So, pick bio as your major and tell your parents that it is “pharmacy.” Or, tell them you’re doing a “medicine” major to shut them up.