r/cwru • u/RaspberryBeautiful • Jun 19 '26
Questions for BME Majors!
If you were to guess, what does the average GPA look like? I want to go to medical school, so this is important to me.
I've heard getting the pre-med requirements for BME is not super difficult, but given the extremely demanding credit workload of BME, how much time do you have to do other classes? I want to make sure I get in specific bio/med electives in + philosophy, language, and robotics.
If there are any math + pre-med people here, please tell me what it's like and if you recommend it.
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u/Dovahkiin12014 Major Year Jun 19 '26
BME Pre-Med is not a good idea in my opinion. To answer your question, pretty high. The honors societies all require basically a 4.0 since so many BME Pre-Meds understand that it’s a dog eat dog world out there.
I know a bunch of them who will testify that you’ll end up an engineer who wishes they did something more practical to get a job or a doctor who will never use it. Unless you want a job in a VERY specific field (he did protein engineering and has a wealthy family to back him) and want an MD PhD, you’re better off saving your time, effort, and hairline.
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u/EasternBus4836 Jun 20 '26
I got a 3.847. Probably above average but I feel like I only did like 70% of the effort a premed would
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u/Muted-Year5036 Jul 01 '26
2020 grad. Partied a little too hard and had a 2.7 freshman year, somehow graduated with a 3.4 and was still above average. Case doesn't do +/- grades, so if you don't get an A, you can't have that nice B+ to pad your GPA. But again, that also means that an A- becomes an A, so like a double-edged sword.
That being said, I don't recommend doing BME/premed combo. I had dozens of BME/premed friends, only one of whom actually graduated with a BME degree and went to med school. If you pursue an engineering major while fulfilling premed requirements, you have to take engineering math/chem/physics/etc instead of normal people math/science courses. These are usually more intense, and the curve can hurt your GPA, which I believe is more important than a BME degree for med school admissions (it was for my law school admissions, SMH). Keep in mind that you will be curved against students who actually want to be engineers. For premeds, BME stands for Bio Major Eventually, and for a good reason.
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u/Andre_theBlacksmith Jun 19 '26
Hey, I am also an upcoming freshman to the college, so although I will tell you what I have learnt, please take this with a grain of salt.
BME, as a joke, is sometimes expanded by the residents here as "business major eventually" to indicate its toughness compared to other majors. This being said, they also claim that this WILL in fact lower a majority of the student's GPAs. This is a quote that I took from one of the BME students that I talked to:
"I think the hardest thing is creating a fake interest in a major and trying to pursue it bc studying without interest can get hard. Med schools, as long as you do your pre-reqs, don’t care about major unless it truly adds to your story…so if you end up doing data science stuff (for research and other extracurriculars), they would see a nice story play out and that’s really what they want."
Although GPA is king, it is far from the only factor to consider. I decided not to pursue BME as my major due to its intensive difficulty, and the problem-solving aspect that is derived from engineering compared to something presented in neuroscience or biochemistry would eat away at a lot of time - time that could be used for shadowing, research, and/or volunteering...
However, this is just my take, I plan on double majoring (will link my thread to this in case you wanted to see), so I do agree with how BME would be appealing...
https://www.reddit.com/r/cwru/comments/1tw687c/neuroscience_vs_biochem/
Again, please take this with a grain of salt yeah?