About going into med school for grad studies

WayOutWestMom
Tue, 12 Aug 2014 15:16:37 +0000

PhD student means this individual is working towards earning his/her doctoral degree in a specific field.

A PhD takes anywhere from about 4 years to as many as 10, depending on the individual, the school and the field of study.

There are 2 phases to a PhD program. The first is academic. The new grad student begins by taking more in depth and more specialized coursework. This phase lasts about 2 years. Grades are important and B- is usually considered a failing grade. A student will be dismissed from the program if his GPA drops below a certain point. This phase is capped by an exam or series of exams (varies by school) called qualifying exams. Qualifying exams are comprehensive tests of knowledge in the student’s field. The exams cover not just the student’s specific interest (e.g. pharmacology), but all topics in chemistry (or biology or physics or whatever field the student is studying). Not passing this exam means you are dismissed from the program.

The second phase is the research portion. The student chooses a topic that interests them and basically becomes the world foremost expert of their tiny piece of the scientific universe. They do this by self-studying other people’s research & publications and by developing an unique hypothesis which they then test thru a series of experiments. Lots of stuff can go wrong during the research phase and it’s quite possible to end up with negative or inconclusive results. Hopefully, you will eventually end up with positive data and then you write your thesis, present it to a committee of experts in your field who then question you in detail about your results/ideas/general knowledge of the field–and either they accept or reject your thesis.

So there are lots of pitfalls along the road to a PhD.

After completing your PhD, you look for a job. Academic jobs (college professor or doing research full time) are difficult to get and go only to the very best students. More commonly, a new PhD gets a job in industry or government doing something that is not research and/or is not related to their PhD topic. Or the new PhD accepts a post-doc (temporary research position) that lasts 1-3 years and tries to improve his CV and publication list before looking for an academic position again. Rinse. Repeat. Some PhDs never find a job in their field. Or they find jobs that do not require a PhD. This is especially true in glutted fields like biology and chemistry.

Pharmacology & toxicology fall under either biology or chemistry.

So a PhD does not come with a job guarantee. A MD/DO or a PharmD have much better employment prospects.

I’m not trying to discourage you from considering a research career, but you need to know the path is neither straight-forward or easy.

Also, you say you like the hands-on lab part, but have you ever really worked long-term (a year or longer) in a research environment? Until you have, you really don’t know. It takes a special personality to thrive on both the intense intellectual competition and the repetitiousness of daily life in the lab.