Hi all,
I have been lurking these forums for some time now as I struggle with the prospect of completing my PhD. I joined for the right reasons. I thought I wanted to be a physician scientist, though I don't know that I fully understood what that meant when I joined the program.
I enjoyed the first two years of medical school, particularly the times I got to be with patients in the clinic. My research rotations before first and second year were largely failed due to bad luck and not lack of effort.
My first year of PhD has been only modestly productive. I keep running in to stop signs, botched experiments, and attempts at experiments that are extremely low throughput and/or difficult. The only thing that is going well is a project one of the postdocs started and will be her primary authorship. When it's over, I don't know where I could possibly go with the project.
Furthermore, I miss the clinic and I miss patients. I was good at that - I connected with patients and worked them up well and made progress. On the other hand the PhD has been a completely demoralizing undertaking. I'm no good at it, and I can now say that there is no way in hell I want to maintain a basic science lab in the future at the expense of clinical service. I am staring down qualifying exams and writing an NRSA. I will feel like a fraud doing both of them.
If I woke up tomorrow and never had to do bench research again it would be like Christmas. I would take the loans on back tuition without batting an eye. The only thing holding me back is worrying about how this will ruin my prospects during the match. I have a competitive step I score and decent preclinical grades - I have no reason to believe I won't perform well in the clinic as this is generally where I shine most relative to my peers. Can anyone who has actually dropped out and gone back to clinic give me some insight? I feel like once (read: if) I bring this up with the program I will be a black sheep. But it's time to stop worrying about everyone else and do something for myself for once.
tl;dr: I am mediocre at best at research, I am good to great in the clinic, and I miss learning medicine. I don't want to be a basic scientist and finishing this out will take 4 more years if I'm lucky. Am I committing suicide in the match by dropping the program?
I have been lurking these forums for some time now as I struggle with the prospect of completing my PhD. I joined for the right reasons. I thought I wanted to be a physician scientist, though I don't know that I fully understood what that meant when I joined the program.
I enjoyed the first two years of medical school, particularly the times I got to be with patients in the clinic. My research rotations before first and second year were largely failed due to bad luck and not lack of effort.
My first year of PhD has been only modestly productive. I keep running in to stop signs, botched experiments, and attempts at experiments that are extremely low throughput and/or difficult. The only thing that is going well is a project one of the postdocs started and will be her primary authorship. When it's over, I don't know where I could possibly go with the project.
Furthermore, I miss the clinic and I miss patients. I was good at that - I connected with patients and worked them up well and made progress. On the other hand the PhD has been a completely demoralizing undertaking. I'm no good at it, and I can now say that there is no way in hell I want to maintain a basic science lab in the future at the expense of clinical service. I am staring down qualifying exams and writing an NRSA. I will feel like a fraud doing both of them.
If I woke up tomorrow and never had to do bench research again it would be like Christmas. I would take the loans on back tuition without batting an eye. The only thing holding me back is worrying about how this will ruin my prospects during the match. I have a competitive step I score and decent preclinical grades - I have no reason to believe I won't perform well in the clinic as this is generally where I shine most relative to my peers. Can anyone who has actually dropped out and gone back to clinic give me some insight? I feel like once (read: if) I bring this up with the program I will be a black sheep. But it's time to stop worrying about everyone else and do something for myself for once.
tl;dr: I am mediocre at best at research, I am good to great in the clinic, and I miss learning medicine. I don't want to be a basic scientist and finishing this out will take 4 more years if I'm lucky. Am I committing suicide in the match by dropping the program?
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