As has been said, "Quality of life as a resident in general is harsh!" Meaning that you can expect to be working
long hours including lots of on-call and not earning very much for all of it. PG pay has gotten better than it used to be
in "the old days," but so has the general cost of living... I did a categorical PGY-1 in IM more than 30 years ago, and my
pay was about $16K/year...and throughout that year I worked an average of 90 hours per week...and that was the time I
spent in the hospital and clinics and did not include "off time" studying. So my pay amounted to about $3.50/hour, which
was less than minimum wage (for California at the time). Of course your Internship is supposed to be a "learning experience"
and not primarily a job to make money. 4 more years of Neuro residency and fellowship paid better (up to $36K in the last
year) and were less brutal, but I still figured that the most I earned was about $10/hour...and by then I was a licensed
physician and doing only Neurology...
Today things are supposed to be better re pay and hours of work, but it's probably still harsh compared to other lines of
work (like being a plumber). I suspect that what was true 30 years ago is still true today, i.e., that IM residency workload is
quite a bit more "harsh" than Neuro residency workload. Now as then it likely also varies between programs.
Back in the day we all understood that we were basically being overworked and otherwise abused as cheap "teaching
hospital" laborers.... and our "teachers" were generally acknowledged this. There was a tacit acceptance by both them
and us that internship and residency were harsh rites of passage on the way to becoming a physician, a passage that
they had to go through and which they expected us to go through. Those of us who bitched too much about it were told
to get over it because we'd become better physicians and after we "paid our dues" things would get much better.
All that is arguable.
