You can't tell by looking which students at Mount Sinai's school of medicine in New York City were traditional pre-meds as undergraduates and which weren't. And that's exactly the point.

Most of the class majored in biology or chemistry, crammed for the medical college admission test and got flawless grades and scores.

Dr. Raj Mangrulkar and medical student Jesse Burk-Rafel at the University of Michigan Medical School. Good communication skills, teamwork and adaptability will help doctors thrive through swift changes in medical science, Mangrulkar says.

But a growing percentage came through a humanities-oriented program at Mount Sinai known as HuMed. As undergraduates, they majored in things like English or history or medieval studies. And though they got good grades, too, they didn't take the MCAT, because Mount Sinai guaranteed them admission after their sophomore year of college.

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