Wow, I always thought I was weird for having worked in IT and now doing medicine, but I see I'm not alone!
I was one of those 'hard core' premeds back in college (I wanted to be a doctor since I was 13 blah blah). My parents had sent me to an elite college and didn't want me puttering around getting a nonmarketable degree so I agreed I'd do something engineering related (it would give me a marketable set of skills).
I was thinking biomedical engineering but found my school's biomedical engineering program lacking (should have stuck around a year, the program has gotten so big it just got a nice shiny new building of it's own). I liked my programming class back in high school so I did computer science instead. Through sheer willpower, and despite the fact I really couldn't program (I just don't 'think' that way), I managed to get through my classes.
The heavy load of schoolwork, along with my own high expectations and the incessent academic competition in college burnt me out and I didn't want to do another four years of med school. I decided that finishing my degree w/o worries about grades or med school would alleviate the stress in my life. Fearing I would leave with 'only' a bachelors, my parents convinced me to stay another year to finish up a Masters as well (to do a combined BS-MS program).
I graduated right after the bubble burst in '02, and started working for a software company that specialized in healthcare. I hated it. I didn't like working with computers as much as I thought, I HATED cube life, I didn't like sitting there not talking to anyone for eight hours a day, and as the months went by, I hated being told to work long hours with no incentives. It must just have been my company, but we were really busy, and management deliberatedly overworked us. Overtime was the norm, with 70+ hours during busy season (which was about 30% of the year). Corporate life seemed so money oriented and empty, I guess I felt I wanted some purpose with what I did and my job didn't fulfill that.
Moreover, I was starting to feel jealous of friends that were going through medical school. I felt I was really missing my calling. I felt a deep regret about not doing medicine and saw co-workers (and there were plenty) that were once also med school bound but for various reasons fell off the track and couldn't get back on it after kids and mortgage. I felt it was a wake up call for me. If I really wanted something, I HAD to go out and get it NOW.
So I took the MCAT, realized I did poorly on it, quit my job, and now focused on taking some postbacc classes and retaking my MCAT as well as getting more clinical experience under my belt.
I am lucky to have sympathetic parents who are willing to take me back in, and for the first time in a long time, I feel I am once again on the 'right' track. It's nice to hear of others who have worked in IT longer than me and still decided to take the plunge into medicine.
You have NO idea how many times I've heard people ask me why did I quit such a nice job without even an acceptance letter in hand.....most think I'm nuts to make such a sacrifice. I was making more money than a lot of adults coming out of college, certainly more money than most of my college friends, and I was willing to give it all up for four more years of school, plus 3-7 years of slave labor, but as someone else pointed out, we are talking about working until we are 65........for me that's another 40 years. I think I can sacrifice a couple of years of my life so I can get a job that I'll probably be doing for the next 30 years. Besides, it's easier to go from medicine back to IT than to go from IT to medicine when I'm 40, right?