This article is an excerpt from the book Guide to College Majors

Pre-professional degrees are designed to provide a specific base of knowledge for the professional degree you're assuming you'll want to pursue after graduation. In Guide to College Majors and on this website, we detail six pre-professional degrees you might consider: pre-veterinary medicine, pre-seminary, pre-optometry, pre-medicine, pre-law, and pre-dentistry. In all cases, these majors will prepare you for the rigors and curriculum of the corresponding graduate program.

Majoring in a pre-professional field, however, neither guarantees you acceptance into graduate school nor prohibits you from pursuing other options. With these majors you'll simply focus your attention on a particular field, gaining all (well, almost all) of the valuable knowledge you'll need to succeed. Generally, majors like pre-medicine, pre-dentistry, pre-optometry, and pre-veterinary medicine will be heavy on math and science courses, while pre-law and pre-seminary will focus on subjects like philosophy, religion, English, and logic. Also, keep in mind that not all colleges will offer these particular pre-professional degrees-some schools may instead offer them as concentrations, or not at all.

One of the most attractive qualities of pre-professional majors is that they are usually designed to prepare you well for the standardized tests you'll be required to take for entrance into professional schools: the GMAT (business school), MCAT (medical school), and LSAT (law school) are the big three. These exams are intense, and to score well you do indeed need a strong background in the appropriate subject area. Plenty of students, however, take these tests without having majored in a pre-professional field and score very well. (And plenty of students major in a pre-professional field and bomb the test, too.)

If you're absolutely certain you're going to attend medical school, law school, or whatever, then with a pre-professional degree you know you'll have at least most of the knowledge required for a good head start. If you're sure you're going to medical school, though, does that mean you must major in pre-medicine? No. As with all of these professional fields, you can come at it from a variety of angles-there are English majors who go to medical school, math majors who go into law. What could be more appealing to an admissions committee than an applicant with amazing reading, writing, thinking, and communication skills? There isn't just one thin path you must follow to your goal.

So if you think you want to go on to professional school but you're not sure, consider majoring in a field where your options will still be open if you change your mind. For example, a biology degree might serve you better than a pre-medicine degree if you don't go to medical school, and a classics or English degree will give you excellent preparation for a range of careers besides the law.

Actually, graduate or professional schools generally don't favor applicants whose majors are pre-professional. What matters to them are your grades, your college achievements, and your standardized test scores. Bottom line: These degrees can be valuable if you're sure of what you're doing, but there are other degrees that can give you just as good a foundation. Pre-professional degrees aren't your only option if you're considering one of these fields. (And if you think majoring in a pre-professional field will make grad school entrance exams a snap, think again—all students study for these exams, regardless of their major. That's just the way it is.)

Keep in mind, however, that to gain admittance to medical school with a non-science undergraduate degree, you may need to investigate post-baccalaureate programs that are designed to give you the prerequisite courses you'll need (because face it, your Chaucer seminar won't be much help with organic chemistry), and you'll probably need to do some intense studying for the MCAT (even more intense than your pre-med friends). But don't let this scare you off. The hard work you put into these extra studies will pay off.