medical school

Daaaaang I look away from this thread for a lecture on neuroleptics and then it blows up.

I would add on the debt question, that there are (at least) three things you can do to limit/eliminate your debt profile:

1) Get into an in-state public medical school. (I was not able to do this! Hi 250k of loans!)

2) Apply for a military scholarship, which pays your tuition plus a stipend, but requires you serve the military for some extended period of time following your residency. You can also apply to USUHS, although weirdly I think the service commitment at USUHS is longer than it is than taking a military scholarship. I am not sure what the application-to-award ratio is with these, but I know many people here who are doing this.

3) Do the National Health Service Corps, which is like the military scholarships except your service commitment is in primary care in an underserved region of the country. If you KNOW you want to do this, do it. If you are not sure, you can sign up later if need be, or be like the rest of us and end up going to a residency program in some specialty in a big city with a million other specialty doctors, and then feel like part of the problem.

Or you can be like me, and just be completely unable to conceive of the size of your debt as a real amount of money, and assume that since it will all be electronically paid from a paycheck direct deposited into your account, you will basically just be moving numbers on a computer at it for 20 or 30 years until it goes away. (I realize this is poor fiscal strategy, but what can you do?)

The percentage of students who matriculate at a medical school but do not go on to become a doctor (for at least some period of time) is in the low single digits.

And yes I will echo gbx and say that the application year is just awful. You work way too hard in July/August knocking out secondaries, spend a ton of money sending those secondaries in, go through a fall that is usually long stretches of silence punctuated by interviews (which are fun, although also very expensive), followed by more silence, followed by decisions that frequently seem deflating and unfair. Honestly it was more stressful than the 1st year of medical school for me, and I was lucky enough to get in in January 2008 to start in August. I know people who were in waitlist hell until mid-July. I would not wish that on anyone. (The second year of medical school is much more difficult than your app year or 1st year. It is best you hear that now, and hear that often.)

Having said that, even with the debt and the stress and the workload and everything, going to med school is the best decision I ever made. But it is def not for everybody.

4) work for the Indian Health Service (which is what i'm planning on doing). the loan repayment isn't nearly as generous as the other options, but the commitment is shorter, and there are openings for specialists, not just primary care.

basically i think it works out to something like ~$20k/year IN ADDITION to your salary, which (at least according to the website) looks commensurate with nat'l averages. so, yr making say 150k/yr as a GP in Juneau AND getting 20k in loan payments on top. if you put yourself on an aggressive loan repayment scheme of yr own design, and hitch it to the IHS LRP, then paying it all off within 5-10 years seems v doable.

addendum: just did some hasty figuring and it looks like a 3-year IHS contract w/full loan benefits, coupled with full physician salary and a "normal" (2k/mo) loan payment schedule, and my in-state debt (ball-parking 160k) = PAID in four years

Daaaaaaang, that is not a bad gig at all.

i know, right? kinda amazed, tbh. plus while the rez can be a hard place or w/e, the prospect of doing doctoring in ALASKA or N. NEW MEXICO sounds prettttttttttttty nice for someone with my extracurricular interests.

haha i thought u meant new new mexico for a minute

i did, but it's still in beta

β mexico

btw in my notes tonight i wrote the ~perfect~ β symbol - i just stared at it for a minute, v proud of myself

haha i used to do that exact thing when i was learning to ß

oops that's not the right one

harßl

thanks dudes! you've all been a *big help*

something else to consider: law SCHOOL seems pretty clearly more "fun"/stimulating than med SCHOOL. i flirted briefly with looking into a MD/JD (ie - heard a good med mal lecture, bought an LSAT book on sale, didn't open it, story of my life, etc), but was talked out of it by my sister (a lawyer). basically, i was like "but law school is intellectually stimulating and you argue all the time! med school is just FACTS" and she was like "yes you are correct, but the PRACTICE of law is/can be stultifying while the PRACTICE of medicine is life-long learning/problem-solving etc"

not actually true, imo ("boring" is what you make of it), but worth thinking about it. do you want another round of stimulating academic life, or do you want what results from it? i'm over simplifying (and sorta making a stereotypical lawyer v. doctor joek), but it might be helpful to frame things that way. law=cheap, quick, "disposable" (u can always do something else) med=pricey, loooooong, u can never leave

yeah this gets close at some of the reasons I'm thinking about med school - I am sort of in love with wikipedia, love learning random shit/accumulating stuff, learning about biological mechanisms and w/e. I've read the law school thread too so I hope my glasses aren't too rose-tinted anymore (will go back and read this thread in its entirety too) and lol it seems that none of these career paths will ever match what I really want ~but that's life~ do realize that I could end up doing tax law or something equally dreadful for the rest of my life if I go down the lawyer path too so whatevs. I guess the biggest difference is that if I go to med school I could actually spend my life helpin other people out instead of tryna bill them for more hours (though I guess I would be just tryna bill insurance companies for more procedures lol)

i also spent a lot of time working on volunteer and research xp and studying for the mcats.

yeah I guess I'll look into doin soem volunteer work and seeing if it's really right. gonna be spinning my wheels for another year no matter what so I guess it's best to explore my options. lol reminds me that maybe my best internship experience was working as a lab tech during 1 summer, maybe I should just aim to be a lab tech instead (and never hope to be comfortably well off)

u have a pretty narrow definition of lawyers! also lolling @ lawyer vs. dr choice

i hate how you have to pick a career and your life is not 400 years long, because i would be a doctor too

yeah it shows that I am lazy in life and don't want to strike out on my own :( (and also cannot excape my stereotype)

you're obviously not lazy
but i help ppl, i think.

i feel like most jobs help other people in some way

lol u shld try working in corp pr :/

i mean i guess multinational corporations are "people" sorta

i said most

how about "there are many jobs where your job is to help people"

guys maybe I should just go to filmyoutube school

maybe wait a while and find something u truly like

yeah I should go ~find myself~ or something. brb gonna go live in a yurt cyaaaaa

ok that was pretty cool did you know yaks can be milked

i'm kinda serious, i just want you to be happy

lol it seems that none of these career paths will ever match what I really want ~but that's life~

ha its ~funny~ part of the reason i started working towards med school was bcuz it seemed like an 'easy' or at least certain way of having a career that was both engaging and meaningful but - and this is def p corny - i think this kind of fulfillment comes from how u engage w/your work more than anything. like the ppl that i knew who were docs growing up legit loved their work & so i had that expectation of medicine but there are plenty of docs that dont - who find it limiting or routine or uninspiring.

like idk what you want out of work - this is ime a p difficult & personal & impt qn to answer in a lot of ways - but thats been my ime so far

altho srsly working in pr suuuuuuuuuuuucked

i think this kind of fulfillment comes from how u engage w/your work more than anything.

this is otm

aw thanks harbl. yeah I guess what I really want from a job is just something that is intellectually stimulating and will keep my mind busy. like my job right now is alright, it pays pretty well and not too demanding and I like teachin g but I feel like I'm on autopilot and withering on the vine while I"m doing this. Iono maybe I should go learn computer science or a hard science or something.

i think i understand in that i really like every subject, including science, was confused and could have done anything so law school was like a natural choice. i also didn't take biology in undergrad. but i can tell you i did not have fun in school. i engage with my work independently (learning information for fun, how to lawyer, so-called "boring" stuff) and in practice a lot more & happier than i did in school. so it's kinda hard to make decisions based on people's accounts of their school experience. imo you should go back and take some science. i miss it and am thinking about MPH, tbh.

but not until i'm 30

lol yeah I guess this is just part of being a 20s something in the 21st century. maybe I can have a lucrative career by transmuting my experiences into the genre of film known as mumblecore

If it's worth anything, I graduated from college totally unaware of what I actually wanted to do. The big realization I came to in my last year of undergrad was that I didn't want to be physician. So I panicked and went to grad school for something else, and realized almost immediately that wasn't what I wanted to do. I had the ridiculous good fortune of being able to interact with med students and docs when I was in grad school (even though I was a historian), and basically just felt like I wanted to be doing what they did.

The shadowing a doc thing, and the volunteering in hospitals and all that clinical experience (or lab experience, if that's what you want to do) is probably mostly to make sure you know what you're getting into, but there's probably some desire to make people see if you react by going "I can see myself doing this every day" or "God this sucks, this is not what I thought it would be". I actually didn't get a whole lot more out of volunteering in an ER other than the realization that I am poorly suited for emergency medicine. But I've had a handful of "I could do that every day, all day, forever" moments around medical school and I've never gotten anything like that from anything else.

Which sounds kind of kool-aidy I know, but hey I have to psych myself up to keep on doing this. I have exams again next week BOOOOO

yay me too >:(

aaaaaaand I have spent the last two hours fixing my bike

I'm happy to be in medical school, but then I also had some solid reasons as to why I wanted to go into a health related field and why medical school was the most appropriate path to take for my own personal interests and goals. I agree for the most part with what many people have already said here, but I guess my 2 cents would be that you make sure that you are interested in medical school and not just health/science. There have been a number (not many, but a sizable few) of my fellow classmates whose are hating medical school at the moment and are realizing that their interests and strengths are better suited for a PhD (not even MSTP, just straight Phd), or health administration, or public health, or health policy, etc. etc. etc. If you are interested in making an impact on health in general, then there are many paths that you can take beyond medical school.

*i have achieved a complete understanding of the male and female endocrine systems*

~_~

Cool!

http://www.imbruglia-inside.com/smiley_headbang.gif

pharm, renal, and endo finals today

TIME OUT, kevin otm

now u know why we are so moody ; )

it's true, my condolences u_u

I took my renal exam today too, weirdly. (And reproductive, with all the male and female endocrine components thereof, is on Tuesday.) Normally if a lecture seems like a barrage of information without any coherence, I figure that staring at for long enough will eventually make it all sink in. And then I had to try to learn the various causes of Nephritic and/or Nephrotic Syndrome, and yeah, I dunno, that just never happened. It all just faded into a blur of "This disease is associated with this kind of IgG/IgA/IgM/C3 deposit and occurs in this kind of patient and presents with this set of symptoms" and it was just a wall of stuff to memorize. It was kinda disappointing. I think it is mostly that so much about most of the diseases is unknown, so all anybody can really tell you is that somehow the alternative complement pathway gets activated or whatever, and next thing you know you're peeing blood.

Still, one more week of exams, then one more quarter, then boards, then 3rd year! This will all be worth it when I can finally tell someone "Yeah, second year sucks, but third year makes up for it" like I have heard 1000000 times.

sweet jaysus it is the ~3/4 LOTTERY~ all week, ppl are just going bananas

Is that for clerkship scheduling?

yup

I got the front end of year 3 sorted which is most important for me

What are you doing first?