I love medicine!!

norcalguy
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:12:57 +0000

Heck, research shows that med students don’t even have an accurate view of medicine when they first enter med school. Surveys of first year students cite a desire to help people as a primary motivator for entering medicine. Surveys of third and fourth year students cite lifestyle and income as primary motivators for choosing medicine and their specialties. So, how can you expect a 18 year old to know what medicine is like?

Medicine is in every respect a declining profession:

1. Salaries have declined approx. 7% in the last decade when you account for inflation.

2. Debt upon graduation from med school has increased enormously.

3. Physicians have much less autonomy to practice today than they did in the past.

4. Malpractice premiums have risen each year for the last 15 or so years.

5. The healthcare system that you will be working in is horribly broken.

The closest thing to med school that you’ll experience as a college student is not your shadowing or your hospital volunteering experiences. It’s actually in the difficulty of your coursework: staying in on Friday nights to study, filling your head with so many facts that your brain feels like it’s about to explode, not having the same kind of social life as your non-premed friends, sacrificing your summers to study for the MCAT. That’s the very thing that BS/MD programs deprive their students o. If I were to rate difficulty on a scale of 1-10, I’d put the difficulty of HS at a 1, college at a 3, and med school at a 8. That’s roughly proportional to the amount of studying you’ll have to do. I did the traditional college thing, earned a 3.9+ in undergrad, and I am still shocked at what is expected of us on a daily basis in med school. I can’t imagine jumping from a 1 to a 8. Transitioning from traditional premed to med school is tough enough. Transitioning from laid-back premed is that much tougher.