Fact: Engineering, chemistry, biology, and physics -- it's all hard. Take your choice. You can spend a lot of your time memorizing stuff or you can spend your time thinking about stuff. Don't let the math freak you out before you even consider physics. Let your mind wander and explore. What do you want to know? What "why" questions intrigue you? Build an AM radio or build a circuit. Investigate something. Physics is observational. Math is a tool to help you explore those observations deeply.

Fact: Your pursuit of physics can be what you want. If you want to pursue whether particles have mass, you can. If you want to know how black holes form, then knock yourself out. But physics is also an applied science. Without three key past discoveries that won the Nobel Prizes in Physics in the last ten years, there would be no iPods, computers, or digital anything. MRI technology, PET and CT scans, and proton beam therapy for cancer patients were also developed from physics principles.

Fact: Most students going to medical school are biology majors. It's hard to make yourself stand out to medical school admissions representatives when you're just one of many biology majors. Also, there are specialties within medicine that are especially suited for physica majors -- nuclear medicine, diagnostic medicine, and proton beam therapy. You can major in physics and be pre-med; it's just that not too many people know it. Lastly, we expect to offer a major in biological physics designed for pre-meds starting in 2011.