PhD after med school

[calimero]

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If you are interested in academic medicine, but did not do a PhD during med school, when is the best time to do research?

Do people go to grad school between residency and fellowship? If so, what funding is available for this period?

I know that some people do a PhD during fellowship, but am unsure how long this usually takes. 5+ years as for grad school, or do you skip the first two years of coursework and get straight into your chosen lab?

Sorry - lots of questions, but I would appreciate any advice!

 

[gutonc]

If you are interested in academic medicine, but did not do a PhD during med school, when is the best time to do research?

Do people go to grad school between residency and fellowship? If so, what funding is available for this period?

I know that some people do a PhD during fellowship, but am unsure how long this usually takes. 5+ years as for grad school, or do you skip the first two years of coursework and get straight into your chosen lab?

You will do research (minimal) during residency in order to help secure a fellowship spot (not strictly necessary but extremely helpful).

In fellowship, you have 2 options, if you know you want a primarily research career, you can go the Research Pathway route. This requires applying in your intern year which (I can attest) is a royal PITA but do-able. This gives you a year less of IM w/ an extra year of research as a fellow. If you don't already have a PhD, many research pathway programs will allow you to do one as part of your fellowship (minimal coursework, mostly lab time and the fun that is a thesis proposal and defense).

The standard route (fellowship after 3y of IM) will also work if you want to do academic medicine and you can do 1-2 yrs of research as part of that, depending on your chosen field. If you're really lucky or good, you can get a good project going in that time and be ready to write a K-award at the time of graduation and be on your way to an academic research career. The more likely scenario is that you'll take an extra year or two in the lab (as an instructor or clinical asst prof part-time in the clinic/wards) to get your work to the point where you can realistically get funding for an independent lab.

All of this assumes that you want to do research in the end which is the academic assumption (although not necessarily the reality).

 

[calimero]

Thanks a lot, gutonc! You didn't mention going to grad school between residency and fellowship, so I guess that's pretty uncommon (possibly because of all that extra debt?).

 

[gutonc]

Thanks a lot, gutonc! You didn't mention going to grad school between residency and fellowship, so I guess that's pretty uncommon (possibly because of all that extra debt?).

I'm sure there are people who have done it but I don't know any of them. You certainly don't need a PhD to do research. Will it help in getting a fellowship? Probably. Will it help enough to spend an extra 4 years b/w residency and fellowship? Absolutely not.

 

[calimero]

Thanks for your input.