Good Grad Program as Back Up for Med School?

juillet
Mon, 19 Aug 2013 11:35:30 +0000

First of all, I am wondering how you think that having the average GPA for medical school means that you don’t have very good chances. By definition, if your GPA is about the average that means about 50% of people who get into medical school have GPAs lower than yours. You’re in the middle. You’re the average applicant. Med school has low acceptance rates anyway so a back up plan is always a good idea, but I wouldn’t panic just yet.

Secondly, not getting into medical school doesn’t mean that you have to get another graduate degree, and right after college. If you don’t know what else you want to do besides medical school, going into another graduate program just “because” is actually the worse thing you want to do. Honestly the best thing for you to do is get a full-time job and work. You may decide that you want to try for med school again, or you may find your passion on the job. But you don’t just go to a grad program to figure out what you want to do; you figure out what you want to do first, and then go to a grad program.

Grad programs don’t make money, people do. You can get an MBA at a mid-ranked business program and make $50,000 as a middle manager in a non-profit. Or you can get a master’s in political science and get elected to office and make $174,000. One of my former students got his BA in philosophy but is running a start-up now.

You also don’t have to go right after undergrad. You can work for a year or two (or 5 or 10) and return. If you need to take cal II before you get an MS in bioengineering, if that’s what you want, then take a year or two, take cal II and then apply. No engineering program is going to let you in without cal II (and probably cal III and differential equations, too). Personally I don’t want anyone engineering anything that hasn’t taken calculus II, much less something that may go into my body. You can still take the class at your school, they just may not give you any credit for it towards graduation.

Here’s the other thing - you may be interested in jobs related to medicine that allow you to do a lot of the same things, or similar things.

You may want to be a nurse practitioner, which is a primary care provider with at least a master’s degree (and often a doctoral degree). NPs can easily start at around $70-80K a year and can often top six figures within 5-10 years. Some specialties, like nurse anesthetists, start out making six figures. One example: Mount Sinai hospital in New York pays new NPs, with no experience, $96,000 as a starting salary. Experienced NPs often move into clinical or hospital management and administration, research, teaching, or some combination thereof.

It used to be that you had to get a BSN, work for 3-5 years and then go back for your MSN to become an NP. Nowadays there are some direct entry nursing programs; they are 3-year programs, typically for people with bachelor’s degrees in another field who want to be NPs. In your first year you get your RN license, and in years 2-3 you earn the MSN and your license as an NP.

There are also physicians assistants. PAs are “physician extenders” or “mid-level providers”. They provide primary care and work with/under the supervision of physicians. You would get an MA in a physician assistant program and get licensed. Most PA programs require some direct patient care experience (2,000-4,000 hours, which is like 1-2 years of full-time experience or 2-4 years of part-time experience), so most PAs were nurses, EMTs, paramedics, or CNAs before they became PAs. PAs earn salaries similar to nurses.

Both PAs and NPs can prescribe medicine in most states (I think it’s every state). I’ve looked at job listings at hospitals in my city (New York) and they have dozens and dozens of pages with job listings for NPs and PAs; they’re high demand fields and are expected to grow.