Is med school right for me?

Bigredmed
Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:41:19 +0000

1) What do you WANT to do? I’m not talking about what you’re mom wants you to do, or how great you think it would be to go to 3rd world countries on medical missions and stuff, but truly, what do you want to do?

2) “medicine for many is just a scam game.” What do you mean by this…

3) If you’re after the money, medicine is NOT the way to go. Yes, once you’ve made it through, it provides a nice income for most. However, before that point, you go into insane amounts of debt (I’m one year removed from medical school graduation, and my debt is a lot closer to $200,000 than to $100,000, and I’m fairly average. And further, going into medicine sacrifices the high end money by settling for much more guaranteed income (by this I mean, in most cases if you become an MD, odds are pretty decent that you’ll make >$100k, but fairly rare that you’ll have a chance to make over $500k - compared to say law, in which there are for more extremely wealthy lawyers, but also a lot more who are struggling making only $25,000/yr).

4) In my opinion, medicine is ‘right’ for you if: you enjoy working with people, you like things that are relatively high stress and fast paced, you are willing to sacrifice your 20’s and early 30’s to achieve the goal, you can withstand the fact that people usually only see you when they feel awful (and are ready to be treated by them that way), that you can hold the patient’s trust while they tell you things they would never tell a spouse, parent or sibling, and you can handle the fact that you might fail on a regular basis (and when you do, it could be catastrophic). These criteria are by no means exhaustive, and certainly there are fields within medicine in which some of these things are less true than they are in others. I’ve chosen them, because when I think of things that I see my doctor friends, fellow residents and plenty of medical students struggle with. And they are things that I think most people don’t know about before they get into being premed.

In the end though, no amount of message board pep talk is going to make the decision for you. You have to figure it out on your own. My advice to you would be the following: just because you can’t imagine yourself as anything other than a doctor, doesn’t mean that’s what you should be. It means you need to do more career exploration.