Recommended Undergraduate Courses for Medical Physics

[grantwilliams]

Hi guys, I'm a 2nd year physics student at uni and until recently i was planning on going to graduate school for condensed matter physics, but i realized I'm most interested in medical physics. What courses would those of you who are in medical physics recommend to prep me for grad school? I'll be taking all of the physics courses for a standard physics degree and i dropped my math double major to make more room for bio/chem courses. I'm planning on concentrating on nuclear, quantum, and optics courses for my high level physics courses and I am also going to be taking organic chem I (but not II), physiology, and microbiology. Are there any courses that you would recommend I take other than those?

I have googled around for help, but because all of the medical physics graduate courses differ so much in terms of prereqs, i thought i might ask on here. I have already talked to my adviser and some friends in the medical physics program at my uni, but i figured the more information the better!

Thanks for all the help!
Grant

 

[Choppy]

Courses that I would consider part of a standard physics education (although I'm not sure they always are) that I've found to be particularly helpful in medical physics:
- mathematical Methods for Physics
- senior lab
- electronics
- senior E&M
- numerical methods or computational physics

Courses that would also be helpful...
- first year biology
- first year chemistry
- organic chemistry
- statistics
- anatomy and physiology
- image or signal processing
- nuclear physics

Don't read that like a laundry list of "must haves." With a solid physics background you can generally pick up what you need to know as you go through graduate school. And a lot can depend on the program that you get into, your area of specialization and the research project you take on for graduate school. If you get into biological modeling for example it will obviously help to have a stronger biology background. If you get into MRI, then the image processing and programming courses will help you out more.