Seriously?
Yes, you are. But are you really not going to go for what you want because your hill to climb might be a bit steeper?
Thanks for the reply. You have mentioned several options I had never considered. Medical school acceptance is likely not going to be an issue today for anyone who can pull off a reasonable MCAT score. Being accepted to one of the MSTP programs or a fully funded MD/PhD program is a very different story. Being nearly 30 and considering medical school by taking out total cost of attendance loans for four years however, should make any sane individual question whether or not medical school is a good financial fit. Yes, time is money and whether straight MD or long MD/PhD, it's time or money. I understand that fully. But I'm the type of person who much prefers to owe time, not money. The below analysis is a no frills realistic assessment of the two scenarios for myself. Perhaps there is a way to pay down the $427,929 debt during the four years an MD grad has to work while the MD/PhD grad is still in training. But I doubt that. Even if with the ridiculous number of hours it would take it were possible, the MD will still not have a PhD at 44.
All true. However, do institutions and funding agencies account for your age when questioning the scientific merit of your proposal? Would there not be legal implications for such behavior?
Thanks, I was just curious about applying MD in general at this age.
To me, reasonable >= 510 MCAT + GPA >= 3.5. Data translates this to > 50% chance of acceptance to at least one MD school.
Those offers would be much more meaningful to me if a reasonable estimate on hourly wage were available. I fully understand 'that's not how it works, you're responsible for people's lives, you will work long hours'. I also suspect such lucrative offers are not without substantially increased burnout rates due to the number of accompanying hours. Not every doc works 60+ hours/wk, that's a guarantee. Many simply choose to do so for one reason (debt) or another (early retirement, etc).
Thanks for your reply. I agree with you that the odds are unlikely if I apply with stats that are not at par or better than traditional applicants. I would not waste my money applying with sub-par stats. The measurables for MD/PhD matriculants in the most recent cycle are MCAT >= 515.6 and GPA >= 3.79.
Thank you for your reply. Proven research skills with low MCAT/GPA, not happening. High MCAT/GPA with no proven research skills, not happening. This shouldn't surprise anyone. MD/PhD, especially a full blown MSTP, represents a major cost to the funding institution. The resume of an accepted student should be expected to be exactly what the funding institution deems acceptable for the associated cost of training.
Didn't realize there was such a forum...thanks!
DO NOT apply MD/PhD for the supposed financial benefit. The 4 years of additional physician salary make up for the increased debt load and it's not worth it.
Thank you for your reply. You bring up many good points but you did gloss over one of the main reasons for pursuing MD/PhD instead of simply MD + research--the money. Annual interest alone on $428k at 7% is $34k. I agree this can all be paid down in the 4 years differential between paths, but not without a) taking a job you otherwise wouldn't and/or b) working a metric ton of hours to pay down those differential years of debt and c) further delaying investing in the abysmal retirement account.
B1 And if you don't get in? Not getting accepted cost me another $40k just in student loans for my masters, plus the cost of another app cycle and all other expenses for the 2 years until I did get accepted to med school.
B1 need not apply for me, I work fulltime. I spent a great deal of time trying to balance the spreadsheet of debt with the income one receives as a physician. On the low end, you could be making less than $200k starting out. On the high end, well there really isn't much to be concerned with on the high end aside from the hourly rate. The fact is that starting that rat race at nearly 40 is quite different from the typical physician, who starts at around 30. $430k debt at 40 is vastly different from $430k debt at 30...
Your numbers here are pretty accurate and DrMidlife's breakdown of the repayment options is really good.
Some of them are, but also all the other varieties. I've talked to a lot of physicians - trad, non-trad, workaholics, part-timers, good financial managers and bad. None of them have really struggled with repaying their loans, though what they have left over after that does vary person to person. But it's sufficient for their needs, if not all their desires, even the ones bringing in 200k or less. Some of that is the smaller loans/lower interest rates that the older generation of docs had, but there are more repayment/forgiveness options now than there were then as well.
All of this comes back to the main point though... if you're doing this for the money, then you need to do something else. Knowing you're debt free won't get you through the hard times that exist throughout medical training and practice. You have to want to be there more than you want the money. Yes, it is a job, but it's one that you need some passion for or you'll just walk away when it gets too much - I know those docs too.
Definitely. I wouldn't know what to do with the amount of money a typical doc makes. Unless I had the loans to go with it.
One of my points from the very beginning was freedom. You have so much more freedom without loans (exception HPSP). You can work as few hours as you need or take a job focusing on exactly what drives you. Add in progressively more loans and you are all but guaranteed to focus more on the salary in said job than the work when examining an offer. Or perhaps you don't and still choose the work over the salary. You would eventually work more hours than you want in order to hit the income you dictate sufficient to pay off your loans at the rate you're comfortable with.
I couldn't agree more, no one should get into medicine for the money. Like you mentioned, I'm more than happy with what we'll call my current, 50k. What I'm talking about is being able to make ends meet with 500k+ loans at 40 yrs old and not working so many hours that I burn out. Or dramatically increase my risk of failing the work/life/family balance.
You actually sound financially a lot like the me of the future, if I stay the MD course. Call it what you like but MD/PhD would be a way to circumvent the financial headache.
For the docs I've talked to, the underlying reasons for stress/burn out that I've heard mentioned are never about loans. Yes, they exist, yes, they're paying them - but you bring this up and it's usually a hand-flap kinda dismissal. What they did get tied in knots about is most often the administrative BS they have to navigate, and financial issues/overwork they mention is usually secondary to say, a spouse with a serious shopping habit, or kids in fancy schools, or wanting to get a new house/car/whatever that is just outside the budget. Never student loans.
Yes, and the point of my first response as well. It's hard to get in to a fully funded program anyway (as I explained to somebody else here 50 YO PhD working in Biotech/Pharma wants to go to Med School) and any whiff in your app of you wanting to to it for the money rather than the pure love of medicine/science is swift rejection. When compounding that with the exceedingly high level stats needed for MD-PhD and the very real age discrimination that exists in that pool, your odds of getting into one of those programs drop from very low to infinitesimal.
Understood. It's a shame we need to designate either MD/PhD or straight MD/DO for an application year.
Do you? For the whole cycle? When I did it, you had to designate each school as either MD or MD/PhD, but not the whole app.
Yeah, you and a bunch of bright-eyed, fresh faced 22 yo's with perfect scores, publications, and enough naivete to last them through 8+ years of slog before they start to think of quitting. Or equally fresh faced, but more well rounded 24 yo's finishing their master's with better qualifications than you.
I had a 32 on the old MCAT (which is apparently something like a 512 now), avg accepted for MD was a 31 and the avg accepted for MD-PhD was a 34 (515?) at that time. So being a couple points above rather than below certainly wouldn't have hurt anything. I don't know that that alone would have made the difference though.
MCAT+GPA>research>>>>anything else
I hear you being exactly where I was 5 years ago and trying to talk yourself around the push back, because you know you can do it. And I'm sure you'd make a very capable physician-scientist. But this process doesn't work that way and, frankly, doesn't care to acknowledge that somebody slightly outside their usual parameters could do this. They live and die by the numbers, and the numbers say that people starting a MD-PhD program after 26 (28? I forget exactly, but around there)...as non trads... are 3x more likely to drop out and only complete one of the degrees. So they deem that too risky and find any other excuse (grades, MCAT, no pubs) to reject you.
I would hope all the folks who apply to medical school, and especially MD/PhD programs, believe in their ability to perform. I know what you would say--'belief is meaningless, the app (specifically MCAT+GPA>research>>>>anything else ) is everything'.
I don't regret the path I took and have certainly learned a lot about myself along the way, but one of those things is never to take for granted how you will be perceived by others. In my old job, for whatever reason they thought I was hot ****, and I got a lot of positive reinforcement. In med school, not so much, but still I'm grateful for the learning opportunities and enjoy the company of my mostly younger classmates.
I used to get annoyed with the candor in replies on SDN when I first started out on this path. But I soon realized it's necessary and really appreciate it. This is a long road and it's best to have unrealistic expectations squelched as early on as possible. You're then further forced to do your homework, which is always a good thing.SDN can be kind of brutal at times, but I think the gist is that people are trying to reality-check some of the misguided assumptions that those who aren't deeply familiar with this process (aka, most of us before we went through it) make. We don't mean to deprecate the value of your skills, but just to point out that there is the potential that they will be underappreciated by the med school application process, which is ultimately run by humans who only have so much bandwidth/time to spend on reviewing any given applicant. Think of the classic "one-liners" that are out bread and butter in medicine ("68yo man with a past medical history of COPD presents with subacute productive cough") and then think of what your one-liner as an applicant might look like ("28yo with past work history of X, volunteer experiences Y, and GPA/MCAT Z applies to MSTP with these research interests in medicine"). Maybe, as you say, someone in the room really relates to your background/ interests and serves as your advocate, but you can't bank on that. It's great to believe in yourself (necessary even!), but try not to tie up too much of your self-worth in what can be a difficult, arbitrary process and try to approach it with as much humility as possible.
As others have said, you will be miserable if you do an MD-PhD just for the money. I agree that there's tons of brilliant people outside academia, but also that being brilliant is no guarantee in academia given where current NIH funding lines are, etc. Sometimes part of being brilliant is knowing when to walk away from academia... Also, I agree 100% with the comment above about PIs often preferring people who may be inexperienced but smart and teachable, rather than someone experienced but set in their ways.
I was a more-or-less traditional, run of the mill MD-PhD applicant myself a decade ago, and at least qualified enough to be offered an interview. That interview went well until the program director apologized that they'd already offered their last available MSTP spot the week before and there was unlikely to be much movement. I wish I'd consulted SDN before I drew up my school list (which needed to be longer and better balanced, with at least 50% of programs MD only). But I didn't so ended up doing things the hard/expensive way
I hope some of this is useful. Feel free to let me know if you have questions.
That's great, and I'm sure your skills are marketable in industry, but... if you're not seeing those techniques pop up when you search the literature, then that should say something to you - and not "oh, there's a niche to be filled" but "oh, I'm gonna have a hard time explaining why this is valuable to a bunch of folks who are unfamiliar with it"
You see being an experienced adult as a plus (and in both the real world & MD apps it is), but in terms of this kind of app it's actually a minus, because PIs want to pick up smart but malleable lumps of playdough that they can mold into their successors. They're not offering up a platform for budding new scientists to explore and change things, they're looking to further the academic pedigree by having science babies. (If that metaphor seems silly, go ask any PhD about his/her "science pedigree" and you will get a literal family tree listing... it's even a website The Academic Family Tree )
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. If yesterday had been different tomorrow might have been as well. But it wasn't, so it won't be.
You mentioned how easy it is to butter yourself up and ignore the nay-sayers. I agree. I'm also not sure there is a way around this. Aside from posting on SDN and being torn into by individuals such as yourself, which is always welcomed
Happy to shred. Not into sugar-coating anyway.
All of which is to say, similar to @kraskadva I am hoping that others can learn from my experience and apply more intelligently than I did so that they can save time, energy, money, etc. Don't do what I did in college and apply to 19/20 medical schools as an MSTP applicant with just one MD only application (at a school, I later learned from SDN is unlikely to consider OOS applicants who did not go there for undergrad).
On top of this, I have seen that some MD/PhD programs treat the PhD part like a glorified MS project, and it takes ~3 years. So one is done at the seven year mark.
