About going into med school for grad studies

WayOutWestMom
Mon, 11 Aug 2014 05:17:40 +0000

I am not a toxicologist or any other kind of professional scientist. I’m actually a biomedical research librarian. (My husband is the scientist in the family, but he’s a physicist. Both my children are in med school.)

I cannot see how medical science fields are ever going to go away. I think there are funding issues and that the current funding crunch will continue for the foreseeable future. So the number of research jobs in medical sciences might decline, but the need for toxicologists/pharmacologists/epidemiologists will never go away.

Pharmacology/epidemiology/toxicology all have their own separate departments at a medical school or pharmacy school. Those fields are not taught to med or pharm students, but are taught to PHD students studying at the med/pharm school. (Not all students who take classes at medical or pharmacy schools are med students or pharm students; some are graduate students earning MS or PhD degrees in medical science fields.)

I think that you may be taking too big of bite trying to cover all your bases for med, pharm and grad school at the same. I think you need to think some more about what appeals to you. Do like hands-on lab work? Do like working with people who are sick or injured? Do you like writing computer code?

I would suggest that you try to do some shadowing of pharmacists, doctors and other healthcare workers to see what appeals to you. I also suggest you do some reading about the careers in epidemiology/toxicology/pharmacology because those fields are all very different.