Five months to decide--MD only or MD/PhD? Help!

[franniemeow07]

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I'm sort of stuck between MD and MD/PhD right now. I'm not sure how justified I would be in choosing the MD/PhD route if I didn't want to get the PhD by itself, but for a lot of reasons that have already been discussed in this thread, I feel like MD would allow me a lot more flexibility in what I wanted to do, research or no research.

One of my LOR writers, a developmental bio prof, is really pushing me towards MD/PhD, his reasoning that if i "love doing research at all", it would be worth it to get a PhD, and that it would allow me to choose "later" if I wanted to do research or clinic. My boyfriend says that he only advises this because he is a PhD himself, and I made sure to tell the prof that I had considered it, but am leaning away from it because 1.) the enormous time commitment, i.e. the inevitable residency/post-doc that follows completing the Md/Phd and 2.) I didn't really want to do just a PhD anyway. Plus, I'm not sure if I have that "genius" component that a lot of mud phuds seems to have. My numbers are average for MD/PhD (3.59, 35 MCAT), but I hesitate to talk about whether I am competitive even before I've decided on whether I really want to do it. I really like doing research and I am enjoying my time off as a research scientist, because I am finally getting to do some cool experiments that have the potential to be published in the future. I'm just not sure if I want to be one of those split 80 lab/20 clinic people, because it seems like spreading yourself thin and being the "jack of all trades, master of none." Any advice?

 

[GeoLeoX]

I'll drop my 2 cents here....

I am a MD/PhD in residency. I took the hard route - PhD, postdoc, med school, residency, to a staff position to start this summer.

I would not recommend a PhD unless you are self-directed and interested in research. At my medical school of the 5 MD/PhD students in my class all but 2 dropped out after the first year of graduate school. Granted our school did not have a MSTP program at the time, but it did pay for the whole thing. While medical school and graduate school are different beasts I found graduate school to be more difficult. There were some tough rotations in medical school, but I knew that if I just put my head down that I would make it through. Not so in graduate school. Unlike medical school, in graduate school there are often no set objectives except those that you make yourself for a substantial portion of the experience. This was a harsh wakeup to many of the MD/PhD folks after making it through the first two years of medical school to be stuck in the limbo of lab research. Don't get me wrong, I love research and I wouldn't trade my years of graduate school and my post-doc fellowship for anything. There is something addictive in being the first person to see a new discovery.

When I was in medical school I had a good friend who was a surgeon. He gave me some great advice when I was toying with the idea of being a surgeon. He said that if you could imagine yourself doing something other than surgery that you should be doing that instead of surgery. I think the concept holds for MD/PhD. You will have lots of opportunities for research as a MD.

Hope it helps.

 

[greg12345]

My advice would be not to do it, although you should really sit down and think whether you think the focus of your career is going to be as a basic scientist, in which case an MD/PhD might be justified because you will get more thorough research training at an earlier stage. You can still do research as an MD of course, with the bulk of your research training coming in during your fellowship. If you are not sure what you want to do with your life and could conceivably see yourself as mostly a clinician, do MD only. You can always get research training in the future if you still want it. I don't think you will miss much, you will probably be just as miserable training as a straight MD as you would be training as an MD/PhD, you just get out sooner but with more debt!