I am unhappy with my choice of career

[athenastasia]

Hello everyone, I am new to this forum because I have been interested in a career in medicine my entire life but never had the confidence to pursue it. I hope to gain lots of information from these boards!

Before I entered college, I had an interest in becoming a doctor (especially a dermatologist, but I toyed with the idea of becoming a gynecologist because so many women I knew complained that their doctors were all men). My father told me that I was setting myself up for failure and that I should pursue a liberal arts degree. I assumed he was right, I had no science background, so I majored in International Studies. I didn't love my major, I worked full-time during most of college, scheduling work during class hours, and graduated a year early just to "get it over with". My GPA was a 3.1, good enough for graduate school.

So now I am pursuing a master of Library Science with a concentration in Medical Informatics. I am 21 years old and under a lot of pressure--I'm getting married, which means our families expect us to get full-time jobs and settle down soon. Yesterday we both broke down and admitted to one another that we hate our career paths, and I told my fiance about my long-time interest in dermatology.

I am only afraid that I will not be able to get into medical school. Even though I will likely have a 4.0 graduate GPA, my undergrad is still only a 3.1. I plan on taking pre-med classes after I get my master's (and work simultaneously), so would making all A's in those help my chances? I live in Texas and have looked at two medical schools, both with a mean GPA of 3.5.

Sorry to give you all my life story. I would just like any information you can give me about entering medicine after already having completed unrelated degrees? Any information at all would be helpful, I don't even know basic terminology or procedures for applying.

Thank you.

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[ForrestG]

... my undergrad is still only a 3.1. I plan on taking pre-med classes after I get my master's (and work simultaneously), so would making all A's in those help my chances?

For someone with ~125 u/g hours @ 3.1 who still needs all the prereq science classes (~38 hours), you could conceivably go from a 3.1 to a 3.3 with all A's. Your BCPM GPA of 4.0 and an upward trend would help, meaning it makes a difference having As in post-bacc science with Cs freshman English Lit. vs. the opposite, even the the cGPA could be the same.

You would need to do great on the MCAT and have good ECs and clinical experience to be competitive in general. I'm sure there are others here who can chime in on TX competitiveness.

FWIW, it is a little presumptuous to assume you will get all As in your post-bacc sciences if you have not taken science courses before. O-chem has killed many GPAs, and physics can be tough, too.

Also, don't pursue the dream based solely on being a derm. It's a very competitive specialty and you don't want to be unhappy (again) with your career choice if you end up in something else that you weren't interested in.

 

[EricH]

For someone with ~125 u/g hours @ 3.1 who still needs all the prereq science classes (~38 hours), you could conceivably go from a 3.1 to a 3.3 with all A's. Your BCPM GPA of 4.0 and an upward trend would help, meaning it makes a difference having As in post-bacc science with Cs freshman English Lit. vs. the opposite, even the the cGPA could be the same.

You would need to do great on the MCAT and have good ECs and clinical experience to be competitive in general. I'm sure there are others here who can chime in on TX competitiveness.

FWIW, it is a little presumptuous to assume you will get all As in your post-bacc sciences if you have not taken science courses before. O-chem has killed many GPAs, and physics can be tough, too.

Also, don't pursue the dream based solely on being a derm. It's a very competitive specialty and you don't want to be unhappy (again) with your career choice if you end up in something else that you weren't interested in.

Yep....all that stuff.

Start shadowing docs and volunteering in the hospital now so that you have a good idea about what you're getting into. Derm is hyper competitive so you not only have to get into med school, but then be toward the top of your class and kill on the boards (which sounds MUCH MUCH easier than it is).

Good luck

 

[demayette]

Hello everyone, I am new to this forum because I have been interested in a career in medicine my entire life but never had the confidence to pursue it. I hope to gain lots of information from these boards!

Before I entered college, I had an interest in becoming a doctor (especially a dermatologist, but I toyed with the idea of becoming a gynecologist because so many women I knew complained that their doctors were all men). My father told me that I was setting myself up for failure and that I should pursue a liberal arts degree. I assumed he was right, I had no science background, so I majored in International Studies. I didn't love my major, I worked full-time during most of college, scheduling work during class hours, and graduated a year early just to "get it over with". My GPA was a 3.1, good enough for graduate school.

So now I am pursuing a master of Library Science with a concentration in Medical Informatics. I am 21 years old and under a lot of pressure--I'm getting married, which means our families expect us to get full-time jobs and settle down soon. Yesterday we both broke down and admitted to one another that we hate our career paths, and I told my fiance about my long-time interest in dermatology.

I am only afraid that I will not be able to get into medical school. Even though I will likely have a 4.0 graduate GPA, my undergrad is still only a 3.1. I plan on taking pre-med classes after I get my master's (and work simultaneously), so would making all A's in those help my chances? I live in Texas and have looked at two medical schools, both with a mean GPA of 3.5.

Sorry to give you all my life story. I would just like any information you can give me about entering medicine after already having completed unrelated degrees? Any information at all would be helpful, I don't even know basic terminology or procedures for applying.

Thank you.

Do good on your prereqs and then take the MCAT. You might also consider DO school which is not strickly stats oriented a 3.3 cGPA/sGPA and 28+ MCAT with good ECs, shadowing etc will give you a decent chance at DO school... you are still in the running. Dont get discourage because I know people that were in worse situation than you and still made it to medical school...

 

[medicinesux]

Working in a library would seem like an oasis from the chaos I face everyday working in medicine....very pleasant calm atmosphere, relatively low stress, great hours, and your patrons aren't going to sue you for lending them a book that they didn't like. With your masters in library science, you could get a really chill cush job in some rich suburb somewhere and have a really sweet life. I think it is one of the best kept secrets out there. I've often joked to myself how our hospital's librarian has the best job in the whole complex. But if being a librarian is "too boring" and you think medicine will be more exciting than you better watch out what you wish for. Medicine in America nowadays will EXCITE your senses to the point where you wish you couldn't feel anymore.
Just be forewarned, dermatology is exceedingly competitive as others have already pointed out. It is very possible you may find yourself coming out of medical school with MASSIVE student loans and being trapped in a specialty you are not even thinking about right now. One that you will not be able to leave since you will have no choice but to service those loans. You don't want to wind up in a situation where a decade from now you are on call in some miserable inner city hospital working in the ICU and 2 patients decide to crash on you simultaneously and you find yourself cursing how you wish you could've been sleeping comfortably in your bed at home and not having to get up for another five hours to go to your awesome cush library job.

 

[Perrotfish]

If you have not taken any of the undergraduates prerequisites to apply, there are formal programs to help you get through them. Some of the programs have very high success rates of getting their students into medical school: Harvard extention, Gaucher (sp?), and Hopkins are the names I'm familiar with though there are many more than that. The programs are discussed extensively on SDN's postbac forum. You have plenty of time to apply and start one this upcoming fall.

Right now, your first priority should be to shadow physicians: a few different types for a significant number of hours each. I recommend someone in general practice, someone in the ER, and a dermatologist. Medicine might bear very little resembalance to what you imagine it to be, so you're going to want to learn whether this is something you really want to do before you start spending your time and savings on post-bac programs and MCAT prep. Also you're going to need a letter of recommendation.

Another way to learn what you're getting into is to try reading about what you're getting into (I'm telling a librarian, I know). For books: Intern and Hot Lights Cold Steel are pretty good intros to the abuse you're going to be subjecting yourself to if you do this. Also www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd is a good read if you ignore his political posts and instead search through the archives for his posts on medical school and residency. If you like what you see then start reading through SDN to understand the process and the average stats of matriculants.

I would agree with the above posters that you shouldn't go into medicine if you're assuming you're going to need the reasonable hours and huge paychecks of dermatology to be happy. The default for medical school graduates is family practice, everything else requires you to be various degrees of competitive vs. your classmates. Derm is one of the most difficult to get. Also, if you need to "get a job and settle down soon" this is not the career for you. You are at least 6.5 years away from residency, which is itself 3-10 years away from a job that actually pays anything. This is a LONG training pipeline. You can't even stay in one place. You'll probably have to move for a postbac and almost definitely at the start of medical school and residency.

 

[WNT Signaling]

If you only see yourself entering medicine to become a dermatologist, don't do it. Honestly, if you cannot say that you would be happy doing family practice or pediatrics or psychiatry, do not enter medicine. There is no guarantee you'll get into derm: you literally half to be at the top of your class with great board scores and research. If you search in the derm forum, you'll hear stories about how many programs will only interview AOA candidates (it's a medical honor society analogous to phi beta kappa).

 

[GoodmanBrown]

You don't want to wind up in a situation where a decade from now you are on call in some miserable inner city hospital working in the ICU and 2 patients decide to crash on you simultaneously and you find yourself cursing how you wish you could've been sleeping comfortably in your bed at home and not having to get up for another five hours to go to your awesome cush library job.

Your advice here is predicated on the assumption that she doesn't hate being a librarian as much as you hate being a doctor. Besides, being a doctor doesn't mean you have to be up at 2AM coding ICU patients. Maybe in residency, yes, but I doubt many family practice docs are in the hospital at 2AM on a given night.

That being said, all the above advice is quite wise, and you would do well to heed it.

 

[Perrotfish]

Your advice here is predicated on the assumption that she doesn't hate being a librarian as much as you hate being a doctor. Besides, being a doctor doesn't mean you have to be up at 2AM coding ICU patients. Maybe in residency, yes, but I doubt many family practice docs are in the hospital at 2AM on a given night.

Well, the opportunity cost of becoming a doctor is most of her free time for about a decade of her life (which she will spend in poverty) along with an extraordinary amount of abuse along the way, so she would need to like being a doctor way, way more than being a librarian to make the change worthwhile.