From PhD type work as a premed to MD classes

[pathdr2b]

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I was wondering how many of you are going to have "difficulty" changing gears from the research you're doing now to full-time courses in medical school.

Having recenty decided to extend my fellowship by a year (and turned down a 68K job offer in the process),I've been thinking about how difficult it's going to be for me to put it aside for a few years for medical school. Don't get me wrong, I'm committed to completing the combined program but I'm going to seriously miss the research and patients I've met. I'd also be a little upset if I got "scooped" during the waiting period. How many of you have similar feelings?

 

[Adcadet]

I do NOT want to leave my research, and I'm a little bit apprehensive about leaving the grad school world where most everything is open to question and debate and multiple choice questions are rare.

I plan on working 10 hours/week in my current lab during my first two years of medical school (regardless of MD/PhD admissions) to keep in touch and to keep stuff running. Luckily we have a tech who I'm training in on the experiments I'm running. Hopefully he'll keep them going with a little help from me during my first two years of medical school. Regardless about my level of involvement, I should get at least co-authorship on this stuff as I developed most of the methodology from scratch. And with my 10 hours/week to keep things going, I will be very disappointed if my two major experiments don't result in a first authorship for me.

In short, I guess I'm not planning on becoming only a medical student until at least my third year of medical school. My biggest concern is keeping up with the coursework if I'm spending so much time in the lab.

 

[pathdr2b]

Adcadet:

I know an MD/PhD student at GW that did exactly what you mention about working 10-20 hours/week during the first year of medical school. She also did her first year in 2 years which helped and since I don't have a heavy lab component, this should't be too hard for me to assuming I get accepted to a local(dc) area school. There is some reciprocity between the pathology PhD and the first 2 years of medical school at most schools so I've got my fingers crossed I can some how do both. I'm REALLY starting to get things going on the research side and as I've said before I just don't want to give it up completely! Thanks for the response!

PS- What do you plan to get the PhD in?

 

[Adcadet]

Path - sorry for the delay. I sortof lost this thread in the little breather SDN took. Anyway, I plan on doing a PhD in pharmacology. My lab is a pharm/tox lab, and I definitely want to stay in this academic and geographical area. The nice thing about pharm, at least at Minnesota, is that you only have to do 7 credits (two semesters of advanced pharm and a seminar class) beyond what you normally do in the first two years of med school (ya skip intro to pharm to go right into a year of med pharm, and all the micro, neuro, and biochem counts as electives) to get the coursework done for the PhD in pharm.

 

[Adcadet]

oh, I plan on limiting myself to 10 hours/week the first two years, and hopefully more like 5 if a co-worker can keep things going for me without much help. I want to be done with the first two years of med school in only two years. My fiance wants kids sooner rather than later (as do I).

 

[pathdr2b]

Originally posted by Adcadet
Path - sorry for the delay. Anyway, I plan on doing a PhD in pharmacology.

I love Pharm too! I did my master's research in the pharm dept at Carolina and considered doing a PhD at Hopkins in Pharm. It's actually still on my "list" of programs althogh now that I'm heavy into Epdemiology, I may reconsider again. I guess I could do Pharmacoepidemiology and go into industry if the spirit moved me😉

 

[Adcadet]

Originally posted by pathdr2b
I love Pharm too! I did my master's research in the pharm dept at Carolina and considered doing a PhD at Hopkins in Pharm. It's actually still on my "list" of programs althogh now that I'm heavy into Epdemiology, I may reconsider again. I guess I could do Pharmacoepidemiology and go into industry if the spirit moved me😉

if I were to do epi in a different area (not that I do a lot of epi anyway), I think I would definitely go into pharmacoepi. Although I'm already sortof in pharmacoepi.