Is it worth it?

[KZU]

So I'm an undergraduate and I've been pondering what I want to do for a career obviously. I know that I want to do medical research so I am pondering the MSTP program, but is it worth it? What exactly are the benefits of getting an MD in addition to a PhD? As someone who will most likely want to become a professor, how will an MD help me in my research and will universities allow me to use both the MD and PhD degrees?

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[CrossCurrent]

http://www.med.upenn.edu/mstp/applicantfaq.pdf

 

[debateg]

If you want to primarily become a scientist, I believe that you should definitely either do MD-only or MD-PhD. Getting a PhD only is going to be a very rough course.

When you have a just a PhD, you generally are not hired in a clinical department, e.g. you are hired into molecular oncology instead of clinical oncology. There are several consequences of that:

1) You cannot generate revenue outside of grants. With an MD, you can always practice medicine and generate quite a bit of money for the department
2) Your department probably cannot siphon off clinical revenues to help fund the department. This is an issue when you start up your lab or if you fall upon hard times

As a consequence, if you were a department chair looking to hire someone, why would you hire a PhD only? First of all, there are too many of them (and thus their value is much less) and secondly, they are 100% beholden to fickle grants.

Also, consider when you do your training. As an MD, you do your postdoc as part of a fellowship and then get promoted into a clinical instructor. You are probably going to be one of maybe 3-10 fellows in that program. What happens if you run into trouble? Your fellowship director will have your back. As a PhD, you have no fellowship director. If you run into trouble, you are up a creek without a paddle. It happens. You also get paid a lot more as a clinical fellow in the lab as opposed to a postdoc.

If you absolutely despise clinical medicine and cannot fathom doing pathology, then get a PhD. It is do-able but is rough, and you only have about a 25% chance of getting a tenure track position. Otherwise, stay far, far away.

 

[solitude]

see the stickies, do a search, etc. You should spend hours reading the collected wisdom on here first.

 

[gbwillner]

If you want to primarily become a scientist, I believe that you should definitely either do MD-only or MD-PhD. Getting a PhD only is going to be a very rough course.

When you have a just a PhD, you generally are not hired in a clinical department, e.g. you are hired into molecular oncology instead of clinical oncology. There are several consequences of that:

1) You cannot generate revenue outside of grants. With an MD, you can always practice medicine and generate quite a bit of money for the department
2) Your department probably cannot siphon off clinical revenues to help fund the department. This is an issue when you start up your lab or if you fall upon hard times

As a consequence, if you were a department chair looking to hire someone, why would you hire a PhD only? First of all, there are too many of them (and thus their value is much less) and secondly, they are 100% beholden to fickle grants.

Also, consider when you do your training. As an MD, you do your postdoc as part of a fellowship and then get promoted into a clinical instructor. You are probably going to be one of maybe 3-10 fellows in that program. What happens if you run into trouble? Your fellowship director will have your back. As a PhD, you have no fellowship director. If you run into trouble, you are up a creek without a paddle. It happens. You also get paid a lot more as a clinical fellow in the lab as opposed to a postdoc.

If you absolutely despise clinical medicine and cannot fathom doing pathology, then get a PhD. It is do-able but is rough, and you only have about a 25% chance of getting a tenure track position. Otherwise, stay far, far away.

Not sure where you are getting your info from... With a PhD you most certainly can get hired into a Clinical oncology department- to do research of course. Or run a clinical laboratory.

Of course your career options are more limited, since you don't see patients (duh), but if you ONLY want to do research there is nothing wrong with PhD-only. The only real issue is the current state of the funding situation, and the ever-increasing number of people going into the field. But if you are awesome you will be successful.

 

[debateg]

At most of the institutions I've been at, there are two tiers of research. There are the clinical departments which hires mostly physician scientists, either MD/PhDs or MDs who do research and also generate clinical revenue by practicing medicine. Then there are the basic science departments which primarily hire PhDs. It is true that clinical departments do hire PhDs to do basic science research, but they do so at a very low rate, maybe 10 - 25% of the research faculty. Meanwhile departments like developmental biology, biochemistry, or molecular oncology are usually 50%+ PhDs. If you don't believe me, pick your favorite institution and clinical department and see who the research faculty are.

 

[Neuronix]

So I'm an undergraduate and I've been pondering what I want to do for a career obviously. I know that I want to do medical research so I am pondering the MSTP program, but is it worth it? What exactly are the benefits of getting an MD in addition to a PhD? As someone who will most likely want to become a professor, how will an MD help me in my research and will universities allow me to use both the MD and PhD degrees?

These are very basic questions that require reading.

See: https://www.aamc.org/students/research/mdphd/ (official perspective)
http://www.mdphds.org/ (unofficial perspective)