Hey crazypremed,
I'll give you my story. I graduated for Cornell in 2000 with a degree in biochemistry, but my g.p.a. stunk. I decided after that to get some real world experience doing what I had a lot of experience with...research..so I worked at a research technician in a lab at Sloan-Kettering studying muscle development in fruitflies (lot's of PCR, Westerns, subcloning, gel mobility shift assays....usual lab tech fare). I figured this would give me some good experience and help me decide whether I wanted to do the grad school versus med school route. After doing that for a couple years, I decided I would apply to medical school despite my grades....needless to say that didn't work out and it was sort of frustrating. So I decided to enroll in a Master's degree program in my home state of Wisconsin in Clinical Lab sciences (basically this program was the closest I could find in my area that basically offered a number of courses that I would see in medical school...i.e. pharmacology, microbiology, immunology...etc.) I was pretty frustrated and reluctant to do it because I wasn't sure it would get me into medical school and I was pretty sure I didn't want to go the med tech route either, but at least it left open the options of going to medical school later or getting into a great pHD program. In any casea hard two years have passed since then, I worked a few odd jobs before getting a great job as a Clinical Research Coordinator (prostate cancer prevention). last week I had my last exam for the MS program. For the past year I have also been involved in some pretty fruitfull research that has landed me two publications and we are sending out a third manuscript for publication by the end of this week. Unfortunately, I have yet to begin my thesis project because my advisor had two students before me and he believes in moving students through in the order to which they came to his lab so I was last on the totem pole. My project is supposed to be the next one we start, but this past February I was admitted to medical school so I won't be getting my MS just yet. I hope to somehow do a thesis project with a new advisor during medical school to satisfy the requirement. I really wished there was a way for me to have completed it prior to medical school because my incomplete status makes me ineligible to participate in the med school's MD/pHD program even though I was told that I would have been a 'shoe-in'. So I still hope to complete the degree and then seriously consider the MD/pHD program later. In any case, crazypremed if you need to go to grad school I'd say go for it cause it will only help you in the long run whether you go to medical school or not and I don't know how old you are but I am 25 and will be 26 in September. I don't feel that I will be too old or anything and as a matter of fact I feel that my experiences so far have matured me to the degree that I am confident in my research and academic abilities even though I struggled as an undergrad (mainly because I wasn't all that focused)...I have a different perspective now....basically as I see it I can do whatever I want as long as I am determined and focused on it. The past four years out of college really allowed me to get somethings out of my system, pursue some of my other interests outside of medicine (working out, traveling, hanging out, brewing beer, hanging out, and traveling more) so now I can poise myself to face the task at hand. Well there's my story...think long and hard about what you want crazypremed....because I was crazypremed as well for some time but soon I'll be crazymedstudent and one day crazydoctor (maybe mad scientist...heheh 🙄 )
Good luck with everything,
PUZZLEBOX
