- Joined
- Oct 18, 2005
- Messages
- 257
- Reaction score
- 5
I love science. Dissecting a fetal pig and getting to poke around in what looks like almost human anatomy, feeling like a mad scientist in organic chemistry lab, getting my mind blown by quantum mechanics in pchem. And the human body? The more I learned about it, the more incredible I saw it was. I also truly enjoyed volunteering at a hospital during my summers. Taking care of patients, working with nurses, watching procedures. It was rewarding and interesting.
It hadn't been a childhood dream of mine to be a doctor, but I became very interested in it during my freshman year of college. I took honors gen chem and spent lots of time in office hours talking with my professor about his research. He was studying quantum states in supercooled helium - I was completely into it. The scientific method had always resonated with the way I thought about most things in life. In my sophomore year I buckled down and took bio, organic chem, and physics, with the all the labs. It was a ton of work, but my reward a much greater understanding of the three main branches of science, and I began to realize what it meant to study science.
I had taken multivar and diffeq my freshman year, and the more science I studied the more I realized that science was a way we understand the universe, and math is the language of that rigorous study. I had always been strong in math, but never considered it for extended study; math was too dry, it was just a tool to investigate "interesting" things. My view changed in college, when, for the first time, I was being taught by mathematicians. I was the same wavelength as my math professors during lecture, something I had never experienced with teachers in HS. I still remember the feeling of seeing liquid flowing down a drain as vector field, a wave of understanding. I declared math as my major.
Having finished all the prerequisites out of the way early (after my sophomore year), and with physics, ochem, and bio fresh in my mind, I took the MCATs the summer before my junior year. When I got my scores back, I knew that I had the gpa+mcat to be competitive anywhere. This impelled me to pursue my goal with a greater intensity. During my junior year I found an incredibly supportive professor in a research area, structural biology (specifically solving protein structures), that was an intersection of my interests and talents. Being a math major with programming experience, and with organic chem and biology lab experience, I was able to jump right in to multiple parts of the lab operation. My lab professor was very responsive, he gave me my own project to work on after only a few months of working at the lab. I had a (small) paper published as first author right before last summer.
I had made significant progress on the trinity: stats, volunteering, and research. I had been on a path straight to medical school. I had pursued it with intensity and purpose, worked hard to put myself in the best possible position. I was successful, it may sound overconfident, but I was certain I could get into some medical school with my application. As far as midway through my junior year, I had not seriously questioned if med school was the right path. It had and led to so many of things I wanted - I loved the idea of learning a practical science, learning about the human body, being a *healer* - being actually able to positively impact someones health, and yes, some of the reasons that aren't as noble, I was looking forward to the competition in medical school and residency, the financial stability (would not have to worry about not being able to pay for kids college, etc.), and the prestige of being a doctor. I was also aware of the arguments against med school / being a doctor. They float around on studentdoctor, the change of the medical profession to be less about patient care, dealing with insurance companies, 95%+ of the cases you encounter you immediately know the diagnosis, inane paperwork, malpractice and generally dealing with demanding patients, the monotony of the profession (doing 15 lowers in a day in a gastroenterology lab...). Also the negatives of medical school and residency, that it will crush your soul, that it's all about memorization and not necessarily "difficult" material, that it will push you 200k into debt, the patients being unimaginably badly off, and that you can't know what you are getting into until you're at clinicals... but these were not real for me. I focused on the good parts and did not deal with the bad on any more than an intellectual level. I thought no matter what the cost or downsides the rewards of helping people and of learning medicine would outweigh them. It was probably naive, but it's impossible to judge until you've gone through it, and then you can be financially stuck.
Focusing on the positives, I was still set on a course to med school. However, a couple major things happened in the spring of my junior year that brought uncertainty.
First, I signed up for a course on financial derivatives in our math department. I had only a vague interest in the stock market, and an even vaguer understanding of it. We focused on stock options, the market mechanics, no arbitrage pricing theory, risk-neutral pricing, and the stochastic partial differential equation describing asset movement and how it leads to the closed form Black-Scholes formula. It was very math heavy and I loved it. We had the freedom to do a final project, and I spent 30 hours (over three days) writing a program and accompanying theoretical paper to price exotic options. I loved it and I was good at it. This planted serious doubt in my mind. There would be no frenzy of calculus, probability, and exotic options in med school or beyond. The fact that I was this passionate about something other than medicine, something that until very recently I had *no idea was out there* as a result of the focus of my undergraduate study, made me question if I had neglected to explore other career paths.
Second, one of my roommates is studying finance and was going through the interview process for a summer internship at an investment bank. In spite of my (very narrow) exposure to the financial world via stock options, I had *no idea* that there was even a profession of investment banking until my roommate was knee deep in interviews. And I thought doctors and lawyers made a lot of money until I heard about the kind of bonuses people 7-10 years out consistently get. Hell, after three years (out of undergrad!) they are making more than the average doctor. What impacted me much more than the money was the realization that I had no idea what was out there as a possibility. Studying the sciences and math primarily, I was completely in the dark about the business world. The fact that I had no idea that Mergers & Acquisitions advisory was a big deal was a wakeup call to me that there was a ton of other stuff out there.
My state by the end of my junior year was more confused than anything. My application to medical school was together, and I could still easily see myself going to med school and being happy with the decision. The major change in mindset wasn't an amplification of the negatives of medicine, but a realization that I hadn't really explored other opportunities. A big barrier to this exploration was that, under only cursory consideration, most jobs appear to suck. My understanding of what it meant to be in "business" was closely approximated by Office Space. My understanding of what it meant to be in law was being buried in esoteric research ordered by higher ups. But a doctor, that was more easily romanticized. I could see myself repairing a faulty heart valve or pouring through texts trying to fit the symptoms together to arrive at a diagnosis...I could more easily see it as something challenging and rewarding. During the summer after my junior year I started to look at other options, and once I dug a bit below the surface, I could see how these other jobs could be interesting and challenging.
My parents were incredibly supportive of me during the tumult, which made it much easier. When I slammed on the breaks while speeding toward med school, they didn't object, and they were really key in helping me explore other directions. Because I had been preparing for the very competitive med school application process, resume was pretty unique (those who have a resume who looks like mine were all going to med school), and it was strong. I networked through family friends and friends of family friends and came across interesting opportunities. I talked to people at big pharma, biotech engineering graduate school, someone in securities law, a few in strategy consulting, a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund, really a ton of people. I noticed two things, how excited most of them were about what they did, and the flexibility so many had exercised to move to a different area if they werent happy originally.
One example that I thought was especially interesting (to me, and I hope to you also) opportunity I learned about during that summer was an MD who was working for a biotech-specialized venture capital firm. What they did was work very closely with fledgling biotech companies with a promising product, give them money in exchange for a stake in the company, and help them (with the new flow of cash) develop, market, sell their product, as well as fit together a working business infrastructure. The end result is hopefully either an IPO (initial public offering where they sell shares of the company to the public) or being acquired by a bigger biotech company. It sounded fascinating to me, the MD got to take part in the evaluation of new medical devices as well as the business side of it. He was nice enough to talk to me about his experience. I had been tossing around the idea of going to medical school and then if I didn't like it, I still had all the MD knowledge if I wanted to do something else. One of my first questions to him was if, knowing what he knows now, he still would have gone to medical school i.e. is the knowledge he gained worth the investment (time and money). He laughed and said emphatically, "No, absolutely not." He explained that medical school was not a PhD program, it was a preprofessional school. He told me that there are opportunities for MDs who don't want to practice, but if you know you don't want to practice, you are better off (for mental health and financial reasons) to skip the ordeal.
I don't remember at what point it was exactly, but the sum of my experience over the summer led me to the conclusion that I was not ready to commit to med school. I did not conclude that I never wanted to go to med school, just that I needed to explore before I put myself on that road. I felt that it would be difficult for me to dedicate myself completely to med school if I doubted it was the right choice. If I got out in the job world for a couple years and decided that medicine was definitely what I wanted, I would be better off with those few years of experience. I knew that if I went through the application process and got accepted, it would be difficult for me to explore other options during the process, and especially difficult to turn down an acceptance if I got one. I really felt that I would inadvertently mentally railroad myself into medical school, if I went through the process. I was also confident that I would able to find something to do for the next year, or two, or twenty that I would enjoy amidst the now seemingly vast set of possibilities be it close to medicine, or far away. After exploring and coming to these conclusions, I decided I would not be applying to medical school this round.
If there is interest in hearing about my job search process Id be happy to share via another post or PM. I focused on strategy consulting and finance stuff (from quant to trading to m&a), so it really isnt premed related. My story has a happy ending, next year Ill be on the trading floor for a large international bank, working with derivatives it looks challenging and interesting.
This is not intended to dissuade anyone from going to med school, I just wanted to share my experience. I feel like a lot of people might have had similar thoughts and experiences or maybe someone might find my experience helpful. I would like to end on an optimistic note, because I feel like this has been too negative on medicine as a whole. While talking to doctors I found people that were not thrilled about the profession, but I also found people that absolutely glowed talking about their jobs. For example, an OB/GYN who gets physically excited when describing what she does at work, she says shed work for free and I believe her. She works way more than she needs to because she loves her patients and she loves helping them. Another example is a heart surgeon who has paid for children from third world countries to fly over to the US, and performs the operation on them, out of his own pocket. For all of you in the process or soon to be in the process, I wish you incredible luck, and hope you find the profession as rewarding as those two do. My advice is only to genuinely explore other options. If you decide medicine is for you, I am very glad we have smart and motivated people going into the field.
It hadn't been a childhood dream of mine to be a doctor, but I became very interested in it during my freshman year of college. I took honors gen chem and spent lots of time in office hours talking with my professor about his research. He was studying quantum states in supercooled helium - I was completely into it. The scientific method had always resonated with the way I thought about most things in life. In my sophomore year I buckled down and took bio, organic chem, and physics, with the all the labs. It was a ton of work, but my reward a much greater understanding of the three main branches of science, and I began to realize what it meant to study science.
I had taken multivar and diffeq my freshman year, and the more science I studied the more I realized that science was a way we understand the universe, and math is the language of that rigorous study. I had always been strong in math, but never considered it for extended study; math was too dry, it was just a tool to investigate "interesting" things. My view changed in college, when, for the first time, I was being taught by mathematicians. I was the same wavelength as my math professors during lecture, something I had never experienced with teachers in HS. I still remember the feeling of seeing liquid flowing down a drain as vector field, a wave of understanding. I declared math as my major.
Having finished all the prerequisites out of the way early (after my sophomore year), and with physics, ochem, and bio fresh in my mind, I took the MCATs the summer before my junior year. When I got my scores back, I knew that I had the gpa+mcat to be competitive anywhere. This impelled me to pursue my goal with a greater intensity. During my junior year I found an incredibly supportive professor in a research area, structural biology (specifically solving protein structures), that was an intersection of my interests and talents. Being a math major with programming experience, and with organic chem and biology lab experience, I was able to jump right in to multiple parts of the lab operation. My lab professor was very responsive, he gave me my own project to work on after only a few months of working at the lab. I had a (small) paper published as first author right before last summer.
I had made significant progress on the trinity: stats, volunteering, and research. I had been on a path straight to medical school. I had pursued it with intensity and purpose, worked hard to put myself in the best possible position. I was successful, it may sound overconfident, but I was certain I could get into some medical school with my application. As far as midway through my junior year, I had not seriously questioned if med school was the right path. It had and led to so many of things I wanted - I loved the idea of learning a practical science, learning about the human body, being a *healer* - being actually able to positively impact someones health, and yes, some of the reasons that aren't as noble, I was looking forward to the competition in medical school and residency, the financial stability (would not have to worry about not being able to pay for kids college, etc.), and the prestige of being a doctor. I was also aware of the arguments against med school / being a doctor. They float around on studentdoctor, the change of the medical profession to be less about patient care, dealing with insurance companies, 95%+ of the cases you encounter you immediately know the diagnosis, inane paperwork, malpractice and generally dealing with demanding patients, the monotony of the profession (doing 15 lowers in a day in a gastroenterology lab...). Also the negatives of medical school and residency, that it will crush your soul, that it's all about memorization and not necessarily "difficult" material, that it will push you 200k into debt, the patients being unimaginably badly off, and that you can't know what you are getting into until you're at clinicals... but these were not real for me. I focused on the good parts and did not deal with the bad on any more than an intellectual level. I thought no matter what the cost or downsides the rewards of helping people and of learning medicine would outweigh them. It was probably naive, but it's impossible to judge until you've gone through it, and then you can be financially stuck.
Focusing on the positives, I was still set on a course to med school. However, a couple major things happened in the spring of my junior year that brought uncertainty.
First, I signed up for a course on financial derivatives in our math department. I had only a vague interest in the stock market, and an even vaguer understanding of it. We focused on stock options, the market mechanics, no arbitrage pricing theory, risk-neutral pricing, and the stochastic partial differential equation describing asset movement and how it leads to the closed form Black-Scholes formula. It was very math heavy and I loved it. We had the freedom to do a final project, and I spent 30 hours (over three days) writing a program and accompanying theoretical paper to price exotic options. I loved it and I was good at it. This planted serious doubt in my mind. There would be no frenzy of calculus, probability, and exotic options in med school or beyond. The fact that I was this passionate about something other than medicine, something that until very recently I had *no idea was out there* as a result of the focus of my undergraduate study, made me question if I had neglected to explore other career paths.
Second, one of my roommates is studying finance and was going through the interview process for a summer internship at an investment bank. In spite of my (very narrow) exposure to the financial world via stock options, I had *no idea* that there was even a profession of investment banking until my roommate was knee deep in interviews. And I thought doctors and lawyers made a lot of money until I heard about the kind of bonuses people 7-10 years out consistently get. Hell, after three years (out of undergrad!) they are making more than the average doctor. What impacted me much more than the money was the realization that I had no idea what was out there as a possibility. Studying the sciences and math primarily, I was completely in the dark about the business world. The fact that I had no idea that Mergers & Acquisitions advisory was a big deal was a wakeup call to me that there was a ton of other stuff out there.
My state by the end of my junior year was more confused than anything. My application to medical school was together, and I could still easily see myself going to med school and being happy with the decision. The major change in mindset wasn't an amplification of the negatives of medicine, but a realization that I hadn't really explored other opportunities. A big barrier to this exploration was that, under only cursory consideration, most jobs appear to suck. My understanding of what it meant to be in "business" was closely approximated by Office Space. My understanding of what it meant to be in law was being buried in esoteric research ordered by higher ups. But a doctor, that was more easily romanticized. I could see myself repairing a faulty heart valve or pouring through texts trying to fit the symptoms together to arrive at a diagnosis...I could more easily see it as something challenging and rewarding. During the summer after my junior year I started to look at other options, and once I dug a bit below the surface, I could see how these other jobs could be interesting and challenging.
My parents were incredibly supportive of me during the tumult, which made it much easier. When I slammed on the breaks while speeding toward med school, they didn't object, and they were really key in helping me explore other directions. Because I had been preparing for the very competitive med school application process, resume was pretty unique (those who have a resume who looks like mine were all going to med school), and it was strong. I networked through family friends and friends of family friends and came across interesting opportunities. I talked to people at big pharma, biotech engineering graduate school, someone in securities law, a few in strategy consulting, a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund, really a ton of people. I noticed two things, how excited most of them were about what they did, and the flexibility so many had exercised to move to a different area if they werent happy originally.
One example that I thought was especially interesting (to me, and I hope to you also) opportunity I learned about during that summer was an MD who was working for a biotech-specialized venture capital firm. What they did was work very closely with fledgling biotech companies with a promising product, give them money in exchange for a stake in the company, and help them (with the new flow of cash) develop, market, sell their product, as well as fit together a working business infrastructure. The end result is hopefully either an IPO (initial public offering where they sell shares of the company to the public) or being acquired by a bigger biotech company. It sounded fascinating to me, the MD got to take part in the evaluation of new medical devices as well as the business side of it. He was nice enough to talk to me about his experience. I had been tossing around the idea of going to medical school and then if I didn't like it, I still had all the MD knowledge if I wanted to do something else. One of my first questions to him was if, knowing what he knows now, he still would have gone to medical school i.e. is the knowledge he gained worth the investment (time and money). He laughed and said emphatically, "No, absolutely not." He explained that medical school was not a PhD program, it was a preprofessional school. He told me that there are opportunities for MDs who don't want to practice, but if you know you don't want to practice, you are better off (for mental health and financial reasons) to skip the ordeal.
I don't remember at what point it was exactly, but the sum of my experience over the summer led me to the conclusion that I was not ready to commit to med school. I did not conclude that I never wanted to go to med school, just that I needed to explore before I put myself on that road. I felt that it would be difficult for me to dedicate myself completely to med school if I doubted it was the right choice. If I got out in the job world for a couple years and decided that medicine was definitely what I wanted, I would be better off with those few years of experience. I knew that if I went through the application process and got accepted, it would be difficult for me to explore other options during the process, and especially difficult to turn down an acceptance if I got one. I really felt that I would inadvertently mentally railroad myself into medical school, if I went through the process. I was also confident that I would able to find something to do for the next year, or two, or twenty that I would enjoy amidst the now seemingly vast set of possibilities be it close to medicine, or far away. After exploring and coming to these conclusions, I decided I would not be applying to medical school this round.
If there is interest in hearing about my job search process Id be happy to share via another post or PM. I focused on strategy consulting and finance stuff (from quant to trading to m&a), so it really isnt premed related. My story has a happy ending, next year Ill be on the trading floor for a large international bank, working with derivatives it looks challenging and interesting.
This is not intended to dissuade anyone from going to med school, I just wanted to share my experience. I feel like a lot of people might have had similar thoughts and experiences or maybe someone might find my experience helpful. I would like to end on an optimistic note, because I feel like this has been too negative on medicine as a whole. While talking to doctors I found people that were not thrilled about the profession, but I also found people that absolutely glowed talking about their jobs. For example, an OB/GYN who gets physically excited when describing what she does at work, she says shed work for free and I believe her. She works way more than she needs to because she loves her patients and she loves helping them. Another example is a heart surgeon who has paid for children from third world countries to fly over to the US, and performs the operation on them, out of his own pocket. For all of you in the process or soon to be in the process, I wish you incredible luck, and hope you find the profession as rewarding as those two do. My advice is only to genuinely explore other options. If you decide medicine is for you, I am very glad we have smart and motivated people going into the field.
