M.D-PH.D degree track help

juillet
Tue, 28 Dec 2010 01:25:16 +0000

You don’t need a PhD to be a neurosurgeon - unless you want to do research in that particular field, a PhD will be more or less useless to you. Especially given that the PhD will add at least 3 years onto an already grueling training (4 years of med school + 3 years of a normal residency + 3-5 years of a surgery training), and you will be wholly uninterested if you don’t want to do research.

Assuming that you DO want to do neurosurgery research of some kind, though, the ‘best schools’ are going to depend largely on what your research interests are. You have to go based on fit - find professors at those places who are doing research in the fields that you are interested in, who can show you the ropes, introduce you to the right people, and help you learn the techniques you need to learn to do research in that field. If you are a high school senior then it is way too early to begin thinking about this - you will shape your research interests and goals when you are in college, and you probably won’t have a real solid idea until you are in around your junior year of college.

If you are serious about an MD/PhD program, however, try to do some research with a professor as early as you can in one of the science departments at your school or a nearby university. This will probably realistically happen in your sophomore year at the earliest.