What are your top 3 reasons for med school?What are your top 3 worries/concerns?

[DrArete]

Here are my top three reasons:

1. Desire to help people
2. Prestige
3. Make use of intellectual capability


Top three worries/concerns:

1. Grind of 10 years of training, to be followed by more of same unless I do mission/NGO work
2. The changing nature of medicine and the extremely negative comments I have heard from many doctors and residents. It is also not encouraging for me to hear from a friend who matched up a a Harvard hospital and is now miserable doing nightfloat.
3. The feeling that I would not be able to balance being a doctor with a family/outside interests. To put it another way, I fear that I can be a good doctor OR a balanced person, but not both.

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[Scottish Chap]

Here are my top three reasons:
1. Desire to help people
2. Prestige
3. Make use of intellectual capability
.

#1 is really the only realistic reason. There is nothing prestigious about being an MD/DO, trust me. You're about to see how little prestige has to do with this career. Also, so much of medicine is rote and protocol-driven (thank the medicolegal system in the U.S. for that) that there's no room for intellectualization. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's better you know this now.

Here are my top three reasons:
1. Grind of 10 years of training, to be followed by more of same unless I do mission/NGO work
2. The changing nature of medicine and the extremely negative comments I have heard from many doctors and residents. It is also not encouraging for me to hear from a friend who matched up a a Harvard hospital and is now miserable doing nightfloat.
3. The feeling that I would not be able to balance being a doctor with a family/outside interests. To put it another way, I fear that I can be a good doctor OR a balanced person, but not both.

This is a giving profession. It's a privilege, but just know that it requires you to be utterly selfless. Residents are more negative than most; it's a dark time. You'll have no time to eat, drink, sleep, or pee and for the 30 hours that you're on call everyone wants a piece of you all day and night (patients, families, nurses, pharmacy, the dreaded ED, radiology, the lab, social workers, etc.). It never stops.

 

[NTF]

Closing. Cross-posted in Pre-allo. OP, please refrain from posting identical threads in multiple forums.

Users may reply to this thread in pre-allo here.
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=719567