Difficulty level: MD vs Phd?

[Jimsy]

Out of curiosity, which part of the md/phd curriculum would be more challenging, medical school or the phd work? If medschool is like trying to drink out of a fire hose, then what would the phd work be like?

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[dth8611]

Out of curiosity, which part of the md/phd curriculum would be more challenging, medical school or the phd work? If medschool is like trying to drink out of a fire hose, then what would the phd work be like?

Like getting dropped into a black hole. Or perhaps a dense jungle, with no map and only a machete, and being told to hack your way out.

 

[NonTraditional3]

It's like jumanji. You're stuck in a game but don't know the rules until you're losing badly.

 

[K31]

For the MD, the hard part is getting in. For the PhD, the hard part is getting out.

 

[PTPoeny]

You won't find one single answer to this. The students in my program are pretty evenly divided on which they find easier. It depends on your personality, individual learning style and how interested you are in material you are learning in each.

One final thing is that you also have to contend with switching back and forth. Medical school is hard, but by the end of second year the vast majority of people have figured out what they personally need to do to learn that much material that quickly. Then you switch to something completely different. At my school it was frustrating to go from a system (MD) that was structured to the point of being annoying to a system (PhD) with so little structure that I had to visit four different peoples office 3 times to figure out which classes I was required to take and which classes I wasn't as both the medical school and grad school curriculums had been updated since the handbook was written.

 

[gutonc]

For the MD, the hard part is getting in. For the PhD, the hard part is getting out.

This. For med school, the rules are pretty well laid out and straightforward. Put your head down, study hard, do well on the steps, kiss ass on the wards, learn a lot (but don't think too hard) and in 4 years you're on your way.

For grad school, once the first year is over, all bets are off and it's pretty much all on you (with a small amount of direction/assistance from your thesis adviser, thesis committee, Dept. chair or grad school dean).

Which is "harder" is going to be different for everyone.

 

[Neuronix]

It also depends what you want to do with your life. It's all relative. There are different levels of competition even within MD and PhD programs.

If you're trying to match plastic surgery, medical school is going to be a lot harder than someone who doesn't really care and will take any reasonable program in a non-competitive specialty. Heck, if you're trying to match top tier rad onc, it's probably better that you not only do very well in med school, but you spend a year or more out of med school doing solid research as well.

If you're trying to become a tenure track professor at a major research institution, graduate school is going to be a lot harder than someone who is there screwing around because they couldn't figure out what they wanted to do with their life otherwise.

 

[QofQuimica]

For the MD, the hard part is getting in. For the PhD, the hard part is getting out.

So true.

OP, they're both hard, but in very different ways. Personally I'd say it was the PhD that was harder. Took me three tries before I finally got mine, but only one try for the MD. 😉