There are lots of things to consider when choosing university courses in general. As a student applying to a professional school, however, your strategy for choosing course electives should be much different than say a student who hopes to work right after finishing his undergraduate degree.
Let me preface the article by first saying that there will be students who disagree with my viewpoint on the issue of course selection. I’m going to share with you my opinion on course selection, under the assumption that you are serious about maximize your chances for getting into medical school. If you aren’t, that’s fine, and you may very well disagree with some of my suggestions.
You have to take prerequisite courses for some medical schools
Like with your compulsory courses, some medical schools have prerequisite courses that you must take by the time of your admission to their school. For example, the University of Toronto’s medical school requires: “One of Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages; two Life Sciences”.
It is important that you find out what these prerequisite courses are, and make sure you complete them by the end of your application year.
Fortunately, there aren’t too many prerequisite courses in general. Most of them are usually part of the basic science undergraduate program, and tend to overlap with prerequisites of other medical schools. There are also some schools (e.g. McMaster and Western) that do not have any prerequisite courses.
But assuming you are applying to a reasonable number of medical schools, I advise you to fulfill all of the prerequisites.