med school vs graduate school

Bigredmed
Sun, 04 Mar 2007 10:17:12 +0000

The original poster is correct on length.

Med school: 4 years (2 years of basic science classes, 2 years of clinical clerkships).

Residency in Neurology, requires 1 year in a transitional or preliminary medicine internship followed by three years of neurology for a total of 4.

So total of 8 years. A PhD plus post-bacc will be at least that long, if not longer. (google search for “average length to complete a PhD” yielded several sources that say 6-7 years).

Can you tell me what exactly you like about neuroscience? If I have a better picture of your interests, why you are interested, and more of your personality, I might be able to give you a better idea of whether medicine is what you should be looking at.

On the flip side of what musicmom posted about getting research, I’d recommend that you take the time to shadow some physicians to see if you actually enjoy seeing patients and the sorts of things that doctors do. I’d say avoid shadowing a neurologist right off the bat simply because you’ll probably be so “into” the fact that you’re close to your interests that you’ll be making a judgment about liking neurons rather than examining if you enjoy being a physician (I hope that makes sense). In other words, if you shadow a neurologist, you’ll think the neuroscience aspect is awesome and be really excited about your time spent there while ignoring how you feel about what the neurologist actually does, when you need to be looking at whether you enjoy the part about being a doctor or not.