"I think it's nuts to do a residency unless you're really interested in actually practicing that kind of medicine. I'm not saying, be committed to doing it your whole life, but I think it'd be a big mistake and a waste to do a psychiatry residency (no matter how much research time you had) unless you wanted to become trained as a psychiatrist. Wouldn't you do better to spend those four years as a post-doc?"
Hm. I'm not really certain I agree with that.
Even the two years of medical education I've had have already given me a much broader perspective (to re-use an overused but accurate phrase) than most of the straight PhD students seem to possess. I'd guess the same will be true of residency.
At no point in this process did I think I wanted to become a practicing clinician. On the other hand, I'm deeply interested in the brain, and specifically the human brain; and I think there is no better way to get insight into how it all happens than to work with actual humans who have actual brains that behave in various different ways.
So it's not that I don't think a residency would be valuable for me; I think it would be very valuable. It's just that I'm starting to get a little freaked out by the realization of how long it's all going to take. I guess the question is not whether it's valuable, but whether its value is four years' worth, if you understand what I mean.
"And it really sounds like you're not particularly into
any medical field, you just want to get your research career going. So I'd say just do it; you'd just be miserable in a residency (to say nothing of internship!), and it wouldn't really get you where you're going."
I suppose I can't really say how I feel about the actual practice of medicine until I get back in the clinic and see it for myself. On the other hand, at my school MD-PhD students in the research years do spend time hanging around with clinicians to keep their hands in the game. I've been pleasantly surprised at how interested and engaged I was in the patient contact part.
(I say surprised because I never found the clinical bits of the first two years of med school very rewarding. But it turns out that the brain-focused parts of clinical medicine *are* interesting to me. Which in retrospect shouldn't have been all that startling, since I think I was first turned on to the brain by reading some of Oliver Sacks' clinical vignettes, around age 12 or so.)
"Now, for some cheap psychotherapy (and worth what you paid for it!
): Are you worried about "wasting" your medical education? Are you under pressure from family somehow? From an advisor, from someone in your MSTP? It sounds like you
know what you should do, and you think you need permission from someone to do it."
I definitely think there is pressure - or at least very strong suggestion - from the MSTP program here to complete residency training. But there's really no incentive on my part to knuckle under to it if I don't want to. It's my life, right?
My dithering is really more about whether the training will be worth the time to me, rather than a response to any external pressures.