PhD at Cambridge + MD at HST?

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Farmerboy

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I say do it, so long as it's paid for and you can defer your Harvard admission for 2 years.

Doesn't matter that your PhD is in a non translational topic. Most aren't anyway, and it won't specifically limit your options. Cambridge PhD will be equivalent to the best programs in the US.

Good luck.
 
Well buddy, your post isn't helping British stereotypes. I mean, salutations? This ain't Star Trek, this is 'merica! There's only one answer to your inquiries son, and that's freedom! Yeehaw!

Just kidding, congrats on your acceptances. You must have one heck of a resume! I'm no expert, but I can answer some of your questions:
1. It is not uncommon for the PhD and MD to be done separately. There are many programs, like Columbia's 3 year PhD to MD and the NIH MD/PhD partnership program that allows PhD graduates to enroll in medical school. You're already accepted to medical school, so you're golden!
2. I don't see any reason to believe you'll be at a disadvantage for residency applications. I mean, it's Harvard.
3. Most MD/PhD students I've seen don't do clinically-oriented research, at least during graduate school.
4. If you're sure you want a research-based career, it doesn't get better than Cambridge. If you're not sure, you should just enroll in med school immediately.

Before you do anything, make sure Harvard will allow a 2-year deferment. People would literally kill for that spot, so don't lose it!
 
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You are asking a complicated question and to advise you appropriately would probably require knowing a lot of other personal details. One other option to consider is asking Cambridge to defer their PhD program until you finish 2 years of MD, and make it into some kind of MD/PhD program. If you are really jedi, you can massage the situation such that you find a lab in Boston to collaborate with the lab you would probably get your PhD at Cambridge, and just do your PhD in Boston as a regular MSTP. This is especially workable if your bosses/collaborators are famous (George Church, Eric Lander, etc.)

Remember MSTP students are minions and MSTP/PhD training grants are small peanuts for large institutions such as Harvard and Cambridge. MSTP and medical/graduate school administrators usually defer to the judgement of heads of institutes in matters of admission and transfer for individual students.

You do not need a PhD to have a lab in cancer biology, especially if you have HST on your CV, especially if you want to go back to Europe. On the other hand, if your eventual goal is to go back to Europe, it's unclear how far you should go in medical education in the US. Remember once you are on track at HST, it's a 11+ year commitment before you are eligible to apply for your first career development grant in the US, some of which you may not even be eligible for because of your non-citizen status. It may be advantageous to finish HST and go for residency in Europe instead.
 
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If my long term aspiration is to have a lab working on translation problems, particularly in a cancer related sphere, would you say that my proposed route (2 more years at Cambridge + 4 years of HST) would be a good preparation for that?

We can quibble about whether a 3 year European PhD is really the same thing as a 4-5 year US PhD earned through a MSTP. At the end of that quibbling, I'm not sure we'll find a significant difference.

Do you feel that I would be at a disadvantage compared to American MSTP's when applying for residency or at some point further down the road?

No.

Is it an issue if my current research isn't directly related to therapeutics or clinical problems, or that my PhD wouldn't be integrated within an MD?

No.

Would anyone argue to just do an MD-only path?

Sure. You'll just be loading a lot of research time on the back end of fellowship instead of doing it now. I think either is reasonable. You're probably not going to have another chance to get a PhD in England once you start an MD in the USA. Though, I wrote that, and we have a resident in our program who took 3 years off to do a PhD at Oxford. So I guess anything is possible. There is no one right answer to what is the best way to prepare yourself for a career in translational research. At some point you just have to take a leap of faith.


The real issues here are balancing debt, i.e. which paths are most expensive and is it worth whatever cost, and making sure the Harvard HST is going to be flexible for you to defer that acceptance.
 
HST is a very lonely place for anyone who is the slightest bit different, and if you enter HST with a PhD, you will not fit the HST mold. Just a week or two ago, an HST MD student died by suicide. She entered HST with a PhD from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes scholar.
 
HST is a very lonely place for anyone who is the slightest bit different, and if you enter HST with a PhD, you will not fit the HST mold. Just a week or two ago, an HST MD student died by suicide. She entered HST with a PhD from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes scholar.

This is tragic. I'm sorry to hear it. I would just point out that loneliness (especially among us geeks) and suicide among medical students is not limited to HST...
 
HST is a very lonely place for anyone who is the slightest bit different, and if you enter HST with a PhD, you will not fit the HST mold. Just a week or two ago, an HST MD student died by suicide. She entered HST with a PhD from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes scholar.
Without knowing a person or their situation, choosing one facet of a complex individual as the "cause" for suicide (if that is what it was) is very presumptuous!
 
Without knowing a person or their situation, choosing one facet of a complex individual as the "cause" for suicide (if that is what it was) is very presumptuous!

I knew this person quite well.

I don't know her classmates or professors at HST, but I do know that she had a very hard, sad family issue throughout the earlier half of this school year. From our conversations, it seemed that she got very little support from HST and that HST used some of its policies to make a tough situation even harder (apparently, she had a disagreement with a professor or an administrator and then they didn't make any special accommodations for her even though they could have chosen to by HMS policy, something like that....I don't recall the details.). Her classmates did not seem to rally around her like you would expect either. In fact, she talked about sitting alone in class and at lunch, even when others knew she was hurting.

My statement about HST above is based on what she told me, but I did ask another MD PhD who went through HST if her situation was plausible, and the other person said it was, especially since she was a not the cookie-cutter HST student and that in HST, "if you're in, you're in and if you are not, you're on your own." That is what I was warning about in the post above.

I am so sad about losing my friend. She had tremendous potential and so much to offer the world. Beyond that, I am angry and heartbroken that she felt so isolated and seemed to receive so little support during a family crisis. We cannot ever say precisely why someone would take their own life and people are too complex for one event to trigger this kind of tragedy. That said, in communities, especially in close-knit medical school communities, we all have a responsibility to build one another when life circumstances get tough and it seemed that HST did the exact opposite.
 
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