Pre-health frequently asked questions (FAQs)
ANSWER: You don’t! Just get yourself admitted to UNA, declare a major, enroll in BI 100 (Pre-Health Professions Orientation), and make sure you tell your academic advisor right from the start that you are a pre-health student – your advisor will either be able to help you directly or will put you in touch with one of our specific pre-health advisors.
ANSWER: You don’t – UNA does not offer dedicated pre-medicine (or other specific) pre-health majors, mainly because they are not a good idea for you as an undergrad student! You should be majoring in a “regular” academic discipline so you get a Bachelor’s degree that leaves you with more options than just going to professional school, which is the only thing a dedicated specific pre-health major would prepare you for. UNA does offer some pre-health concentrations within majors (e.g., the Pre-Health concentration of the Biology major), however your degree will ultimately be awarded in the subject area, not in pre-health (e.g., you are getting a Biology degree, not a pre-health-only degree, if you complete the Biology major pre-health option). You can declare a pre-health interest area along with your declared major and concentration within the major, but this does not entail any actual academic requirements – really it just helps us identify you in the system as a student in need of pre-health information and guidance.
ANSWER: Professional schools don’t actually require any specific undergraduate majors, nor are they going to give you special consideration because your major contained the specific words “pre-medicine” (or whatever) – you are much better off majoring in a subject area that is of general interest to you and/or which will enable other paths after UNA if you aren’t able to gain admission to professional school! With that said, some undergraduate majors (especially in STEM areas) are naturally better suited to accommodating professional school admissions prerequisites in their curriculum, while with other majors you’ll have to find room in your schedule to take most or all of those prereqs as “extra” courses. This is usually very doable, but can sometimes cause financial aid issues.
ANSWER: Admission to a professional school does not require any transfer of credits, rather the professional school will have a set list of undergraduate (Bachelor’s-level) courses that you must have already completed before you can start in their postgraduate (Master’s- or Doctoral-level) program. It is your responsibility to be informed about what those set admissions prerequisite courses are for your professional school programs of interest and make sure you are taking them as you complete your undergraduate degree. With that said, UNA absolutely does offer all of the possible admissions prerequisite courses you might need at the undergraduate level!
ANSWER: We don’t deal in percentages here because they will generally be misleading, especially given that UNA is a smaller university and so we will never have a large number of students applying in any given year. For example, in the 2025-2026 academic year, we had one (1) student apply to dentistry school and they were accepted – we could claim this as a “100% acceptance rate to dentistry school” but a sample size of one applicant is hardly statistically valid! What we can say is that we do have multiple students gaining acceptance to various professional schools each year, and more importantly, our graduates always report feeling very well prepared for professional school once they start, and they have an outstanding success rate in terms of professional school graduation rate, successful residency matching, etc. UNA can absolutely provide you with the educational foundation and advising guidance needed to succeed in the pre-health journey, but ultimately it’s up to you as the individual student to do the work – no one can get you in to professional school except yourself!