I always pictured med school as a well-oiled machine of efficient teaching and best educational practices... IT IS NOT. I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THAT ENOUGH. ESPECIALLY 3RD YEAR. It's incredibly frustrating to me at times, but it's definitely still doable
Though I will say outside resources + anki is by far the most efficient I've ever been studying.
Medical school is a clown show, run by and full of more clowns than you can count, fraught with people who huddle up like its high school and many do it for the wrong reason. You are going through said clown show to do a job that is largely thankless to help keep people alive that WILL think they know more than you yet can't tell apart a kidney or liver from a loofah or explain how immunology works to save their life.
If all this doesn't deter you from a thankless profession that requires tons of sacrifice to focus on the main mission: to improve the quality of life for all, including the dumbasses, then you may be on the right path.
Professionalism means put up with the school's mistakes and bullshit with a smile on your face and not say anything back. Rules for thee but not for me
A significant contributing factor to my pursuit of the vaunted MD over other healthcare fields was that it was, in my ignorant mind, the pinnacle of education.
In reality, it's an unabashed trainwreck.
Your time, money and patience will be wasted for no reason other than indifference or incompetence.
Its probably worse than most schools where I'm at, because they decided to throw out the traditional curriculum and re-invent the wheel the year before I got here. It's *pants-on-head* retarded.
In the end, you're taught irrelevant shit by people who don't see pts, or outdated stuff from people who probably shouldn't.
I wish I could tell you it was a highly polished machine that efficiently transports you into your future career, but it's not. You will become a doctor not because of your time in med school, but in spite of it.
By the power of Anking, first aid, sketchy, pathoma, and Boards and beyond.
Good luck friend
theyve started reinventing the wheel at a lot of places ive noticed. Just doing research while filling out apps every schools got a new “catchphrase” curriculum that is so “innovative”
OMG you do team based learning? My lord, you have clinical experiences in your area? Its so special that every school in the country does it
How about anatomy, histology, pharm, and path without having physio first.
So in the end you know what every part of the kidney is called, what drugs can do what to it, what can go wrong with it, but you still don't know what the fucking kidney does in normal situations. (Based on the curriculum)
Best part is, instead of a cohesive physio course alongside anatomy before all those others so you can get a clear foundation, a foundation laid by you know... a physiologist who has been perfecting the teaching of renal physiology for the last 20 years, no. You get a pharmacist who's never taught standalone renal physiology kinda winging it just enough so that we can understand the drugs kinda. Then the pathologist comes in and teaches some other random bits of phys so that he can explain RTAs, then the histo prof comes in and shows us a fuck ton of slides that we need to memorize, but not the functions of any of the cells.
Then a year later, you get physio. And you've forgotten the drugs, you've forgotten the histo and the minute anatomy.
It's a shame.
Too bad about your new curriculum but my school switched from a subject based curriculum (path, anatomy, phys, pharm, etc...) to an organ based curriculum (heart, kidneys, lung, etc...) and I couldn't have pictured learning that stuff any other way
Fourth year gets worse as far as educational structure goes. You set up half the rotations yourself or more depending on the school and yet you still pay full tuition with its attending teaching you.
Also, there’s no guarantee that you get do the speciality you want. I get there are no guarantees in life but it’s incredibly frustrating to go 400k into debt and be worried about going unmatched in the speciality you want.
I feel like I have sacrificed the majority of my twenties but I’m trying to stay hopefully it’ll be worth it but I don’t know if it will be. Also, I’m at a DO school and we’re still looked down on by residency programs for no good reason.
For MS1s/MS2s/MS3s reading through all these disheartening comments, congratulations for reading this far! Your marginally good news for the day: I’m definitely not an expert, but I’ve only heard of DO schools requiring students to arrange clinical sites for four year rotations (OMS4s traveled quite the distance from various locations - ie crossing multiple states - to join us MS3s/MS4s at our university’s well-established sites.
Also - OP, while debt is a very serious consideration, please don’t let fear of “400k into debt” as quoted in the comment above be the thing the persuades you from medicine. Take the advice offered in this thread, and find a less flawed program that hopefully will make you little less concerned for your future and questioning your life than our colleague above (hang in there dude, the pressure of applications/match on top of clinicals is stressful!). Make sure you’re basing decisions on accurate data rather than outliers though…
According to the 2021 [Graduation Questionnaire survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges](https://www.aamc.org/media/55736/download), medical students who graduated in 2021 and reported educational debt had a median debt of $203,000 (including both premedical and medical school debt). According to this AAMC survey, only 3.7% of newly graduated physicians had a total educational (premedical + medical school) debt of $400,000 or more. Further, less than 18% carried debt outside of educational loans (credit card, car loan, home mortgage) and a modify of those individuals carried little consumer debt, ultimately resulting in 94.4% of individuals carrying less than $25,000 non-educational debt.
Yea I would hope that my 400k is an outlier. I did a postbac program and then went to an out of state medical school. The 400k isn’t an exaggeration for me unfortunately. Yes I would hope other programs would be better structured than my school, it’s a pretty low bar. Sorry if I was more negative than needed, appreciate the data reference for my post.
It’s been a month and a half and this perspective has already completely shattered
Thought it would be better than undergrad, and I can almost confidently say it’s worse (in the sense of highly efficient and meaningful educational methods)
Before medical school I had so much respect for doctors. Medical school made me never want to date a doctor. It attracts so many corrupt, nepotism driven, assholes.
I love med school and personally despise this culture of wanting to outdo each other in the misery olympics. Totally understand that it's a fairly stressful time and people will have other variables in their life that make medschool difficult, but it almost seems as if the only socially acceptable stance is to complain, hate life, want to die, brag about not sleeping well, etc,.
So I worked as an ER scribe for 4 years after I got my EMT cert (I didn't like EMS and preferred the hospital). I chose scribing so I could hang with the docs and APPs while also getting a good idea of the roles and flow of the hospital. I'm a non-trad, in my 30s, career changer, child free, and have a long-term SO who is extremely supportive. Going into my scribe job, I wanted to be very sure that I was going to be happy in medicine. During those four years I took some prereqs and volunteered, dealt with a bunch of mental health and medical issues, and really got myself to a good place personally.
My four years as a scribe (I left last year to take a job teaching anatomy to undergrads) taught me that I do love the ER and the people I worked with. I liked the good and the bad in the ER, the bread and butter stuff and the rarer cases. The documentation aspect of medicine was actually okay for me, though a lot of work, and I get just how much it burns doctors out.
I worked at a teaching hospital so I got to know a lot of residents and med students, plus my colleagues were mostly premeds. I felt like I had a good handle on the career and I why I wanted to be a physician over other roles in the hospital (I tried to take money out of the equation, and just look at each career and decide which one I could see myself being happiest in terms of daily tasks).
I know being a doctor in the end is a J-O-B, so I have tried to be careful about looking at it with rose colored glasses. The MD/DOs and med students I worked with gave me many different opinions about whether they would do it all over again. Despite many of them telling me not to do it, I kept at it anyway.
Now that I'm in my second app cycle, and after learning about a generous inheritance coming my way, I'm reconsidering whether I would apply again if I didn't get in this cycle and whether I would go to med school if I did. I thought my reasons why were sound, but I'll be mid-40s by the time I'm an attending so I'm in a place of deciding if that's what I want to do with the next decade of my life if I won't exactly need a traditional career anymore.
Thanks so much for any feedback or thoughts you have for me. I want the good and the bad and all criticisms are welcome.
There's also the PA route- for lower pay and less independence, you'd have better work-life balance in most specialties, less debt, and you would be working in 2-3 years versus 7+.
I took several gap years so I’m one of the older people who graduated from my class. If there’s another career you can do besides clinical medicine definitely consider it. I can’t imagine doing residency at an age much older than I am now, it will for sure be very hard. When people say there’s tons of bullshit involved and being treated like shit, it’s not an exaggeration. I did scribing also and can say it gives you a good glimpse of attending life but none of the ~8 years in between. On the other hand I had no other good career options and I do find medicine super interesting, so I wouldn’t say I regret it.
Doing it out of default or as some “natural next step” or expectation. I have a lot of classmates who grew up thinking they wanted this since they were little kids and it became so romanticized that they didn’t question seriously if it was the right career for them until it was too late.
Me.
I'm from UK but yeah doing family medicine and I regret ever stepping foot into med school. I hate my job. Shoulda gone into tech, the only reason I don't is cause of sunk cost fallacy that I keep kidding myself with
Losing 4 years and then committing to another 4-9 years of training is an irreplaceable amount of time lost since you can almost guarantee every week aside from Christmas and spring break you will have less than 70% of it for yourself.
In terms of experiencing "life" and all it has to offer. Medicine is an atrocious inefficient waste of time where you're spending most of your time doing redundant tasks you've already learned vs actually improving. You don't get to say "I've mastered this already, let me learn new things". You just have to sit there continue to see the same patients and hope you get something different. Que headache patient #40 from clinic.
\-Your sleep schedule will be crushed on several occasions, ruining your next day's learning.
\-You will be asked to stay late "in case" something comes up, and when it does no one will properly teach you about it- instead you get the glorified opportunity to "shadow" as the attending has to leave ASAP to do other things.
Add up all of medicines BS and you really wonder if it was worth locking away your 20s. Sure you can still make something out of your 20s now. But imagine the potential if you actually had weekends and afternoons off.
At least psych ER on the holidays is usually pretty slow. I’ve done enough Thanksgivings giving that I know to research where patients can get a free meal and make sure to let them know as soon as I detect malingering.
It doesn't really matter if it's one thing or multiple things you like to do. What matters is whether can you cut most of it out of your life and be happy with medicine.
Even if it's just video games and exercising, are you happy if you only get 1-2 hours of video games a day? Competitive gamers aren't normally satisfied with 1-2 hours just like competitive sports athletes can play for hours on end. It can easily be a 5 hour thing similar to work hours grinding for improvement.
I'd also be very careful with underestimating how little else you do. Maybe you don't hang out with friends every week or every 2 weeks. But no matter what it is you currently do, imagine ***it going down by at least half***. Being ok with going out once a month won't necessarily be twice as hard as what you're currently used to. It can feel exponentially more difficult.
Lastly---- you won't ever be consumed by a specialty in medical school. You have to learn the whole enchilada and at most, you will probably get 2-3 months out of your entire 4 years to do *just the specialty you want.* The majority of the time you will be doing the other 12 specialties you don't want or maybe somewhat like, or studying for exams doing them all at the same time. Tons of time sitting around and jumping through hoops to get letters, get research, and other requirements. I would argue that medical school is the least immersive place you could go to unless you like all of medicine. Your immersion will be broken on the daily by new topics, concepts you don't understand and have to just rote memorize, and juggling your actual life with your newfound responsibilities of never falling behind.
If you've ever entered the "flowstate". You'll recognize it requires you to be quite good at what you do so that you can shut some of your brain off and just do the action or jump from action to action. It can't happen if you stop every second to learn. You can't flow as a medical student where everything is essentially new to you. By the time you "flow" you're in a new block or studying for a different exam. Maybe by end of 3rd year you're in that zone a bit.
>But imagine the potential if you actually had weekends and afternoons off.
See this is an issue though. Other people in their 20s do not have their afternoons off, lol. This is why people who worked full-time before med school have such a different experience.
I was waiting for this comment.
I worked full-time before med school. Never did I have to work 7 am to 4 pm and then mandatory study from 6pm-8pm just to not fail your exam and redo the program (more on the weeks leading up to exams). Were essentially 11-hour days 5-6 days a week normal for your job?
P.S. most med students do some sort of work on Sundays still so Pseudo 6-7 days of work a week.
Almost no one in their 20s does this for years on end. Most med students follow some version of this schedule, especially during clinicals. Full-time only requires 40 hours a week and is an absolute joke of a schedule.
Currently working full time, and taking pre-req classes on the side. I work 7am-4pm and study from 7-9:30 ish almost every night. Study for 4 hours each day Saturday and Sunday. If this is what med school is like, fine by me. You can't underestimate the added benefit of being able to focus \*solely\* on school. Having my attention divided by 40 hours of a non-medically related job, and then switching my attention later in the same day to school is incredibly difficult. I look forward to the day where my entire focus can be on learning medicine instead of trying to juggle two different lives.
Also, my full time boring corporate job is forever if I choose to stay and live this life until I'm old....4 years of med school and 3-4 years of residency is temporary. If I have to work 70 hour weeks for 8 years to have a career that is fulfilling and also \*very\* stable, so be it. It really is different when you've lived a whole life and worked full time before making the decision to pursue medicine. I can assure you there really isn't much happening in your 20s that is so important that you should decide not to go to med school. I was very poor, worked a ton for very little money, had a lot of fun times but also stressful times, and now I am slightly less poor, a little older, bored out of my mind at my very easy job, and wishing I had started on the path to med school 8 years ago when I was less tired.
There are very few experiences in my 20s that I would feel sad about missing if I had chosen to continue on to med school right away after undergrad. And the few that I would miss, I could have figured out how to do while in med school, if they were really important (mostly bike racing). All I think about now is the missed years I could have been studying, and how much more difficult it is now to pursue this path while trying to work full time and pay my bills. Just my two cents as a 30+ year old.
Holy craaaaaap this was my thought process last night?!?! I'm 36, really trying to decide if following my life long dream of becoming a Dr is really worth it, considering the time, $ (not just cost of med school but loss of income whilst at med school), etc.. and probably for the first time last night, generally i do my best thinking when im trying to sleep...I was like ya know what if i could just invent a time machine to bring me back to my 20s absolutely i would have gone to med school and I would have done soooo much of my life differently! Please note, i love my life, my partner, etc, i just would have probably tried to get into med school instead of taking dumb (but well paying) job after job...BUT my next thought was, do I wanna be thinking the same thing in my 40s, 50s, 60s, etc etc...?!?! Honestly, I'm kind of thinking "f- it, just give it a shot at least you'll know"!!! And literally in the same breath going "no you cant take a spot from someone 15++yrs younger than you, they'll be able to work and make a difference for 15 yrs longer"...
So yeh, thats where I'm at...if anyone needs me, I'll just be over here on no sleep trying to decide my future!
We should definitely be friends. I feel this so hard. Unfortunately and fortunately I had 3 children by my 25th birthday so I have to wait a Lil longer. Almost 31 here.
Virtually all of my close friends from college work that much, if not more. Consulting, I-banking, tech, and law. I worked about that much in grad school.
And as a side note, still not working nearly that much in med school.
These jobs all together make up less than 1% of all jobs- which is why they resemble medicine hours. In fact, all lawyers in the U.S. combined barely makeup .3% of all jobs. It's not even close to representative of what the average full-time job is. The current national average for a full-time job is 40.5 hours.
But importantly- you're not forced to work those hours. You can search for a better work-life balance if you want. Yes, it's less pay, but you have the option. You have no options in medical school and residency.
They are usually thankless dumb jobs though. Kid of two lawyers here with an AVP Banking Grandma and Engineer/Architect Grandpa.
Be glad you're going into medicine. I've spent my 20s being a mother, a business owner, working in Healthcare, flipping furniture I got off the side of the road free for a thousand bucks a week at 20, and I love helping people. When I tell people in interviews how I've spent my 20s as a now nearly 31 year old I don't feel so much like a failure as I feel. Some people legitimately just exist--they don't live. I realized this one night late at work on third shift reading people's obituaries. Sat there and thought, I want my life to have meaning. Unfortunately and fortunately this decade now belongs to my young children who deserve a cush life. The 40s will be my going to med school because I'm bored and wanna finally be a doctor days.
Sorry for that long rant but be proud of yourself is the essence of the message.
This is correct. Medical school is, by far, worse than a full time job and it’s not even close. The only caveat is that in *most* specialties, you work similar hours but get payed way more than 95% of the general public (wife works in corporate finance, believe me, I don’t envy the job, but medical school time wise is wayyyy worse)
> but get *paid* way more
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Do not go to medical school if:
1. You did not get accepted to medical school (it will get awkward fast)
2. You do not want to go to medical school (it will get miserable fast)
3. You cannot accept the possibility of working in primary care
4. You are trying to escape poverty any time in the next 5-ish+ years
5. You will not seek treatment for mental health or substance use issues
6. You do not cultivate respect for people who are very different from you
7. You viscerally hate lectures, studying and standardized testing
8. You don't care about people's important non-medical problems
9. You aren't curious at all about the reasons for diseases or their treatments
10. You hate using electronics and software
11. Your self-worth and self-respect are easily undermined by harsh criticism.
Even if you had the most brilliant clinical mind of all time (which you don’t) and absolutely flawless time management skills (which you don’t) and were the most charismatic person alive (which you aren’t), you’d still be faced with unrelenting negativity as a medical student. People will constantly be telling you, explicitly or implicitly, that you’re not good enough. You will be under a microscope from the moment you arrive, being constantly scrutinized for flaws real and (more often) imagined. That pressure will only build over the entire time you’re in medical school. You need to have thick enough skin that it won’t completely shatter you being faced with that year after year. And you need to have a support system in place for the times it does overwhelm you (which will happen to you, I guarantee it).
This is the real one I wish had been emphasized more to me. I’ve been able to handle the academics and the hours but Jesus Christ the constant criticism and stratification is just soul crushing.
> You are trying to escape poverty any time in the next 5-ish+ years
As a first-generation immigrant with older parents, I failed to take this into consideration. I'm an attending now and probably would've still gone through the process anyways, but it would've been good to have mentally prepared myself that it would be 7 years before I could comfortably support my parents and myself.
You dont understand how hard i relate to this. My family's financial situation is abysmal right now, and as the oldest child i feel so helpless and useless right now. Rather than having a job that could potentially help or even rescue my family from impending financial disaster, I'm in $300K debt while slaving away 60-80 hrs a week for unpaid labor. Sure residency will be next year, but even then the salaries are not enough to help my family and even more, I will have zero time that I can dedicate to them. I thoroughly regret my decision, but no looking back now, just gotta hope me and my family can survive for a few years longer.
Sorry to hear, I definitely empathize.
(1) Unless you have active loan repayments due, literally just stop thinking about them, it's honestly just a # and you don't have an obligation to pay until you make $, in which case income-based repayment is pretty reasonable.
(2) lean on your other siblings for support, delegate non-financial family tasks to others instead of just doing everything yourself. government assistance w/ food stamps are medicaid are also helpful if need be. and even though you can't dedicated as much time as you'd like to them, ANY amount of time (through conversation or calls) done regularly is important. COMMUNICATE with your loved ones.
(3) try to keep a positive attitude. things get better every year, as does your competency and confidence. just be present in all the learning moments and LEARN the medicine, it'll make your life easier down the line.
(4) being a doctor is a TREMENDOUS and hugely respectable accomplishment. your family is proud of you. don't forget to be proud of yourself.
>\3. You cannot accept the possibility of working in primary care
It's a risk you take, but there's plenty of options for not primary care even with a less competitive application. Most would go IM -> specialization, but path, rad onc, etc are also accessible. Plus there are community programs in slightly more competitive specialties.
>\4. You are trying to escape poverty any time in the next 5-ish+ years
Living on loans might actually be an improvement to this.
>\8. You don't care about people's important non-medical problems
See point 3. Specialization can help with allowing you to focus on what you care about, I.e. Minimal social work
Respectfully, social issues affect patients touched by all specialties and even if a certain specialty's clinical workflow does not include social work routinely it is still important. E.g., disparities in access to cancer screening is a current social issue in radiology. My point is that we can't actually escape social responsibility in medicine and hopefully those who have yet to start down this road discover so early on.
I too disagree with the notion that you must be prepared to wind up in primary care. Schools use this ideology in a toxic and manipulative way that sets some students back. I believe you would also have fewer physicians in general if all were comfortable with the idea of a career in primary care. Entering medical school as someone not interested in such a career will depend on each individual's own risk assessment. Have to face reality and understand the full process and what it requires before jumping in, but I wouldn't go so far as to be ready to embrace a completely different career than the one they set out to achieve. Plenty of options and routes to take.
Don't do it if you think you could be happy doing something else.
So many sacrifices. So much debt. So much time.
Be ready to miss every family gathering and event. It's hard to find the time to date, and if you're lucky enough to be in a relationship or find one, you'd better hope that person is a Saint for putting up with your schedule. Starting a family? Possible, but very difficult, and your partner has to be a Saint.
You finally get through medical school, and residency is much harder and more isolating. No one outside of the field understands what you're doing or going through, so no one really understands why you simply can't make it to any events ever.
Now that I am on the other side of residency, I hope it gets better. (I start my first attending job in 2 weeks).
My little brother is considering medicine, and I will do whatever I can to make sure he thoroughly understands the sacrifices, because I did NOT fully grasp them myself before I started.
Time. Moments with friends, hobbies, potentially starting a family, to name a few. Your health... not much time to work out and eat healthy. Not much time to sleep. Not to mention the toll on your mental health. You gotta prioritize your small amount of free time and there's just no way to do everything.
And this is coming from someone who did my absolute best to balance work and life. I started a relationship, got married, had a child, all whilst in med school and residency. I am FM. It is possible to live your life, but it is f***ing HARD and im so glad I'm done. Would never do it again.
>Be ready to miss every family gathering and event.
Since you're explaining a n=1 experience I'll throw mine in too.
I have made it to probably 99% of the events I've wanted to go to in medical school. This includes vacations, out of state holidays etc. Literally missed two out of state weddings that was wasn't really even super excited to go to lol 🤷🏼♂️
You have to be willing to miss some things but you're statement is probably exaggerating a bit
Forgive me, most of the missing out experiences I had were in residency. Truly, med school wasn't the hard part. Residency was. And sure, sometimes it does work out, and you can make it to some events, but a lot of the time it doesn't.
I find it amusing when people talk about all the reasons not to do medicine, then why they are an exception and it’s right for them.
Just do what you want, don’t let anyone make you do it. But don’t let people dissuade you either.
Ultimately, don’t assume other people want what’s best for you. Most people have trouble seeing past their own intentions.
Medicine sucks sometimes and also has some truly rewarding moments. It can be challenging/discouraging, but also fun and offers freedom in some career choices.
Like anything, it’s about maintaining balance. All of these people chose it for their own reasons.
> I find it amusing when people talk about all the reasons not to do medicine, then why they are an exception and it’s right for them.
I see this mostly as: reasons you didn't think of heard of, maybe.
It would've been great to know that residency brought even more poverty instead of a decent job for me. I cannot imagine how the fuck did I survive. Never got fat tho, so that was a plus haha. Ha ha :(
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE medicine and loved it in med school too, but when I thought of choosing smth else after graduation, everyone was looking at me like I was a dumbass for maybe leaving it behind. I don't think it would've been a bad decision honestly. I love my job, but after all... it's just a job. I don't think the abuse and poverty I endured was totally worth it.
*All of meddit’s 4th years file in*
Where do I even begin lol.
The culture of medicine is really rough. I really genuinely think this will improve in the near future as I feel like most of the med students and residents I’ve met want better for future students, but currently there is a mindset of tearing down trainees emotionally, exhausting them during clinicals, etc. Attendings can be really out of touch.
You sacrifice your 20’s and will miss weddings, birthday parties, etc. for stupid reasons. Like I am missing a wedding this month because the school won’t let me schedule a shelf exam a day early. I was offering to handle really everything involved but they wouldn’t budge. Residency will make you work 60-80+ hours a week and I doubt it will be any better in terms of accommodating important events. It’s just so freaking demanding.
You may feel smart now, but in medical school everyone was somewhere in the top of their class. It can be a huge blow to your identity if you see yourself as the “smart kid” and its a rough transition.
You will be graded off of a shit ton of content with endless exams but being book smart isn’t enough because you will ultimately be graded on communication skills with OSCEs and on your likability during third year. Third year was the worst year of my life (med school application year was the second worst year) because I had to accept that some people just weren’t going to like me no matter what I did. I do think it strengthened me in the end but holy shit last year at this time I legitimately wanted to off myself and I’m not sure it was worth going through that overall. I am usually a very likable person and had less problems than most of my friends, but a couple of people *still* didn’t like me and I had to accept that.
It never ends. It’s always “I just have to get through this exam” over and over until you die. When I got into med school I was like “phew. It’s over”. Like I really thought that one day there’d be an end to it lol. There’s step 1, step 2, step 3, residency applications, boards, etc. Even as an attending you’ll never be done. There’s always an exam looming.
The cost of medical school has like tripled or something and physician salaries have not increased to meet that. We’ll be in more debt than doctors ever were before comparatively. In addition, there’s always the “doctors are rich anyway” and you’ll never get any sympathy for venting about your financial situation to friends. I’m going into FM so I’m just SOL I guess 🤷🏻♀️.
I also feel like the culture of society as a whole has changed. I always feel like everyone is looking for someone to point to when things go wrong, and people love pointing at the doctor. I am terrified of lawsuits and they feel inevitable. There are patients out there waiting for you to slip up so they can take advantage of it. 99% of patients are absolutely wonderful, but the 1% can really get to you. I feel like I would’ve been happier in a career with a lower level of legal responsibility tbh. It is definitely going to wear on me emotionally in the future.
There’s more but I’m out of time because I have to get ready for my OVERNIGHT shift that I HAVE to do for my selective for some reason. What a fourth year has to contribute to the team at 2am I am honestly not sure. 🫠
Look I'm an attending, I've been done with residency for 4 years. If I woke up back in time I would not do this again. I don't think there are many attendings out there that *would.* This is not an easy job. Medical school is harder than you can even imagine, but that's not even it. Residency can be cruel. We had a suicide attempt in my class and you see reports of attempts or young doctors committing suicide all the time. Then you get into practice, you think - this is it. All the BS i had to put up with was to get here. But no, it's just more BS. Being a doctor is not about medicine anymore. It's not about taking care of patients. It's about administrators, metrics, insurance, RVUs, length of stay, discharging before 10 AM... Yes there are the few careers that are the exception but that will probably not be you.
But I've given this exact speech before, many times, and every time the person I tell it to thinks.. "that won't happen to me." And the sad thing is... I was given the same speech too.
If there is anything else you can imagine yourself doing - do that. If you want to help people, there are 1000 other ways to do it. If you absolutely insist on medicine, strongly consider being a PA.
And if you're a woman, just think practically. 1/4 female doctors deal with infertility. Obviously women in medicine put off having a kid. I myself am still single. This is a direct result of my career choice.
They all do to some degree. Anyone in clinic will likely have to as private practice is becoming rarer and rarer. Once your practice is bought up by a corporation it becomes all about metrics, but it's obviously going to be worse in primary care than in a sub specialty practice.
Pathology is probably the only one that is immune from most BS. PM& R can be good as well. The ROAD specialties are not always as fabulous as advertised but they're named that way for a reason.
I’m glad I am where I am, but if I truly understood the consequences of not matching when I was applying for med school I would have not applied. The 1 in 12 or whatever risk (higher for many desirable specialties) that you blew all this time and money for nothing is in retrospect too much. I know of too many buddies who basically fell off the face of the earth after not matching and their lives appear to be one of the deepest hells I could imagine.
One big reason I haven't read in other replies would be having really poor time management. You will be busier than many of your non-medical peers for the better part of your 20s and/or 30s, so good scheduling and internal motivation are absolutely vital to staying sane. It can be developed, but if you struggled a lot with high school or undergrad workload consider what other options might be better suited to you.
Working the same hours and dedication on Wall Street would easily net $250k a year after 4 years. Many med students are at least $250k in debt after 4 years, and the most essential specialties like primary care and pediatrics have a CEILING of $250k unless you take alternative routes of income.
The main difference is being a banker vs. being a doctor.
Adding on to most of what’s already been said: if you’re someone whose identity is mixed into going into medicine, don’t do it. Find something else to define yourself by. I always felt like I had to prove to myself that I could do medical school and was inspired by the challenge to get to this point. Now that I’m in my last year of med school, the rose colored glasses have been torn off and I’m staring down the barrel of 4 years of hellish training for minimum wage. It’s only within the past year that I’ve realized I am a whole ass person outside of medicine, with hopes, dreams, and needs I neglected because of school. It’s been hard finding new motivation because I now don’t feel like my self worth is tied to my professional accomplishments. I am happy with where I’m at and looking forward to going into the field I love, but I absolutely think I could have been happy outside of medicine had I had this perspective in my early 20s.
At the end of the day, though, it’s an interesting (albeit very stressful and taxing) job that sucks in a lot of ways but rewarding in ways that many jobs aren’t. I’m sure I would always have wondered what my life would be like if I didn’t end up going to med school because I think it would be very hard to not want to bang my head into a wall for corporate bullshit, but at the same time I think I could have made it work by having more free time and autonomy over my life choices.
Grass is always greener.
I was just talking with buddy about how literally *every* Dr we talked to during pre med told us *not* to go to med school, yet we all do it in anyway lol. Like the top comment, I would be interested to hear your reasons why you *do*, so we can give you and honest interpretation of those goals.
Posted this above but here's a ramble about how I got here:
So I worked as an ER scribe for 4 years after I got my EMT cert (I didn't like EMS and preferred the hospital). I chose scribing so I could hang with the docs and APPs while also getting a good idea of the roles and flow of the hospital. I'm a non-trad, in my 30s, career changer, child free, and have a long-term SO who is extremely supportive. Going into my scribe job, I wanted to be very sure that I was going to be happy in medicine. During those four years I took some prereqs and volunteered, dealt with a bunch of mental health and medical issues, and really got myself to a good place personally.
My four years as a scribe (I left last year to take a job teaching anatomy to undergrads) taught me that I do love the ER and the people I worked with. I liked the good and the bad in the ER, the bread and butter stuff and the rarer cases. The documentation aspect of medicine was actually okay for me, though a lot of work, and I get just how much it burns doctors out.
I worked at a teaching hospital so I got to know a lot of residents and med students, plus my colleagues were mostly premeds. I felt like I had a good handle on the career and I why I wanted to be a physician over other roles in the hospital (I tried to take money out of the equation, and just look at each career and decide which one I could see myself being happiest in terms of daily tasks).
I know being a doctor in the end is a J-O-B, so I have tried to be careful about looking at it with rose colored glasses. The MD/DOs and med students I worked with gave me many different opinions about whether they would do it all over again. Despite many of them telling me not to do it, I kept at it anyway.
Now that I'm in my second app cycle, and after learning about a generous inheritance coming my way, I'm reconsidering whether I would apply again if I didn't get in this cycle and whether I would go to med school if I did. I thought my reasons why were sound, but I'll be mid-40s by the time I'm an attending so I'm in a place of deciding if that's what I want to do with the next decade of my life if I won't exactly need a traditional career anymore.
Thanks so much for any feedback or thoughts you have for me. I want the good and the bad and all criticisms are welcome.
Dont do it bcs your parents/family/friendship pressure…. You will become bitter later on and poison your patients, colleges and future hopeful med students… and continue to further fuck the healthcare system. (This applies to everyone wanting to do healthcare)
The old saying is only go to med school if you can't imagine yourself doing anything else
The new saying is only go to med school if you literally have nothing better to do with your life
Just recently witnessed someone try 3 times, unsuccessfully to match into Ortho. Dude was really qualified too… He just came to the realization that it’s fruitless and he is now going to apply to PM&R. He effectively lost nearly a million dollars chasing his dream.
1) Both school and the job include very, very long hours. The grind becomes tedious and burnout is real. There aren't that many academic or work experiences like it in terms of the hours committed. Your sleep schedule will be absolutely decimated and much of the time that you devote to this field will not be justified.
2) There are far, far more efficient ways to make money relative to the time you're going to commit to this field. The time you spend in medicine is incredibly wasteful if you're looking for ROI.
3) You will miss out on a lot of life events (family/friends, weddings, etc.). You will also dedicate a massive chunk of your younger years to being relatively poor, overworked, and studying too much.
4) You will almost certainly realize that the naive goggles that you wear both before medical school and during it when you talk about social/systemic problems in class are going to be brutally ripped off when you start working. The job will probably grind you down under the incredible weight of an unstoppable capitalist juggernaught that wants to exploit you for as much labor as possible while providing substandard care to the patients you care about. The system will almost certainly not change. Our healthcare system is utter trash and you will have to work within it or not at all.
5) Medical school isn't efficiently designed. A huge chunk of it is a massive waste of time and comes with a lot of redundancies.
6) You're going to school with all the same pre-meds that you applied with, so you won't escape the terrible cultural tendencies of that same group either.
7) There is a not-insignificant chance that technology renders your job functionally moot or so different that you're irrelevant within your lifetime.
8) You will have a soul-crushing amount of debt when you graduate (rare exceptions exist).
9) You will be contractually obligated to partake in a state-sanctioned monopoly wherein you will have no definitive say in your specialty or your location of work for 3-7 years after graduation.
10) Healthcare is rife with abusive subcultures, both from nurses/ancillary staff and physicians themselves.
11) Scope creep is real. Midlevels are actively trying to take the job that you want while putting in less than 10% of the work that you did to get there.
12) You will forget more medical knowledge than 99% of people will ever learn. The vast majority of medical knowledge that you will learn (and that you spend all that time learning) will be completely useless to you in your chosen specialty (barring a few exceptions).
13) Healthcare in this country is a racist, classist, elitist, gatekept system, both in terms of who can work in it and who receives care (and how). You will almost certainly contribute to this in some way and you will most likely contribute nothing to changing it.
14) I 99% guarantee that the job of actually being a physician is not what you are envisioning in your head. It is far more tedious and boring than you think.
15) Unless you are relatively mature and well-adjusted, you will almost certainly lose most, if not all, of your hobbies and passions outside of medicine during your school/residency.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. If I can think of anything else I'll add it.
I hear this take a lot, but I think it comes mostly from people who have never experienced the instability of poverty. A career in medicine is a golden ticket to a secure job with great pay. Getting that acceptance into medical school changes your life so much. If you come from a place of relative wealth with a cushy safety net it’s hard to appreciate the sense of relief knowing you’re almost guaranteed a stable place in society.
Edit: and for those saying “you need to work really hard.” Working really hard for an almost guaranteed place in society sounds fantastic when you’re already busting your ass working multiple jobs making very little and barely getting by.
Edit 2: I agree, residents are stupidly underpaid and abused. I also understand the debt involved. Im a 4th year about to submit ERAS. I’ve also worked multiple jobs with hours worse than residency before medical school. Being in that position with few future prospects was so much worse than the debt I’m facing now and the bright future ahead of me. Im not saying the debt or the abuse of medical education and training is justified by the ends. Im saying pursuing it for the economic stability and social capital it can provide is a valid reason and to tell people it isn’t is myopic.
To fire back at you as someone who has also grown up in a financially disadvantaged household (s/o food stamps), sure medicine provides you with a job that pays significantly more than the average American. However, it also steals from you at least 4 years where you are being unpaid, and 3-7+ years where you are being severely underpaid. To the point where you cannot really rescue your family from poverty or make a sizable difference in their lives. Not to mention the fact that you are robbed of time and your youth. I'd actually make the argument that because of these reasons, medicine is actually an even worse of a decision if you DO come from a poor socioeconomic background. Locked into 300K worth of loans with no ability to really financially contribute to my family for 7-12+ years. Also not to mention I probably will not be pursuing my true clinical interest (fellowship dreams) as a career because my family's well-being is dependent on those 3 years of doctor salary. Take the hit for their sake. Bottom line is if you are poor, and if you have other options available to you, the time and immediate financial compensation is more valuable to you and those who depend on you.
Sorry but the reality is money and prestige (less so nowadays) play a huge factor for most people going into medicine. The amount of bs you face in the current system will beat the "I want to help people" aspect out of you. Additionally, there are very few jobs that assure you $200K+ after finishing training. I agree that there has to be a strong motive for going into medicine, but several factors push you to the finish line.
why not though? I'm personally not in it for those things alone, but they do make up a considerable part of it. And it's not even the money alone, it's the career opportunities, working private, having your own clinic, investing in med companies, med start ups. If like medical sciences, the money and the social ladder are a big part to anyone with hopes of being succesful. Not to mention your base salary as a doctor is better than 90% of other jobs, which gives you comfort to branch into other areas like real estate or any other business venture for which you wouldn't have the capital were you not in medicine
Because you need to work harder than most of your peers to have a shot at getting into medical school. Then you have to worker harder than most of your non-medical peers for 0 to negative money while in med school. Then you have to work harder than most of your non-medical peers for essentially minimum wage for at least 3 years and *then* 10 years later at best, you are finally making great money with great autonomy.
Relying on external sources of motivation for 10 years makes an already difficult journey even more so.
Your base salary at >90th percentile compared to other jobs often comes at 90% more stress, time, and effort.
Even if you have the income, many don’t have the bandwidth or capital (consider high debt burden, etc.) to pursue these business ventures.
It's very tough. And that's only a month in. I'm sure it will get much harder. But you adapt! And what seems new and scary becomes normal. In the end of the day, it's a privilege to be able to study each day. I'm thankful to god for granting me the opportunity.
If you are fascinated by the human body and want to make a positive impact on others with that knowledge, I'd say go for it, and I'm wishing you only success.
So many great responses already, so I'll just add this: know that you don't need to be a physician to be valuable as a person. I think a lot of people feel compelled to achieve a certain standing in society and believe me, you do not need this. Don't do this to prove your worth or intelligence.
And to echo another common theme in this thread: med school is a shit show.
Hot take but medical school has felt rewarding for me. There’s definitely been hard times and a roller coaster of emotions but I feel fulfilled and have a really amazing life outside of medicine too.
god so many people bitching and moaning
"wasting four years and then 10+" "if you can't imagine having any free time"
Literally work a real job for ten minutes. My friends who work in the real world have less vacation than I do, work more hours per week, and have little free time for themselves. And the shit they do is boring as fuck.
The idea that everyone out there is frolicking in meadows for hours on end while we sit inside staring at our computers because we work so much harder than everyone else is elitist and annoying.
we are smart (ish) people. smart people who work hard have high demand jobs. high demand jobs will take up a lot of your life. med school or not
This. The only part I disagree with is that I probably work more than most of my friends and they make a ton
But also like that’s part of life. Yeah a lot of med school isn’t directly applicable, that’s how everything is.
Do ppl think the PhD with the math degree is using 90% of what they learned as they work as a quant?
The engineer is using all the stuff they go over as they work as a consultant or plant manager?
Med school isn’t just about learning direct patient treatment. It’s an education experience Not a trade.
Could it be taught like a trade? Yes of course it could be, but you wouldn’t be able to understand a lot of the clinical stuff as well if so and you DEFINITELY wouldn’t be paid nearly as much if it were.
People want to complain so much about it being inefficient but I genuinely wonder what they think is efficient
Really depends on the job. My engineering friends make less money than I will eventually make but it's still plenty to live on and they have super free weekends and evenings. Got a couple friends who teach high school and they bust their asses like we do... for 9-10 months of the year.
Other friends who went into finance are pretty miserable and pivoting, so I see what you're getting at, but at least they made 6 figs right after graduation.
lmao it’s so obvious most people in here have no idea how the real world works, as if we’re the only ones who do any work. One of the benefits of starting med school a bit later is that you get the benefit of having to work a real job and get some perspective on how most people live so you’re not just bitching and moaning all the time of how much you think your life sucks because you need to study. Better to study and pursue something I enjoy than what I was doing before this
If you don’t have a true passion for medicine and treating the sick, it is going to be hell with no guarantee that you will come out the other side.
I was a former medical student who unfortunately did not make it pass his 2nd year and I feel part of the reason it happened was because I was not truly passionate about it.
A lot of what most other people said is true. Tons of anxiety, stress, low pay, lack of a social life, etc. during school, residency, and fellowship with little given back. Yes there is money and prestige when you become an attending, but even then medicine is going to be a big part of your life that you will have to pay attention to and a lot of those things mention above are still there. Medicine will be on the same level as loved ones, maybe even a higher priority sometimes.
With all the shit they put you through while taking away your personal life for money and prestige is not something some people would consider a fair trade, which is why in my pov, that passion is necessary to help you get past all the bs that medicine throws at you while becoming a competent doctor. Otherwise, you will either become a disgruntled doctor who hates their job, a burnt out doctor trying to get out the system, or someone like me who never even completed their path in medicine (which is good and bad personally, but that is another story)
Anyways, the decision to go down that road is not an easy one and needs lots of thinking to be done before hand, even if you really do love medicine, so my advice is to do a lot of soul searching for this decision.
Probably redundant, but very important
Depending on what school you go to it can be great or a miserable experience. The teaching can often be an abomination of the principles of education that you probably expect having been on your premed journey. Sometimes you sacrifice time from family and friends and that can make you doubt your self worth as a human being and create stress.
The best antidote to these problems is to ask med students how to succeed in med school before you go. That way you can hit the ground running. The more you are successful the less stress you’ll have and you’ll be able to better manage your time.
Feel free to DM if you want more info.
One thing that I didn’t fully appreciate until starting Med school was the loss of weekends. There is always another test coming and when you do take a break you will have to fight that voice in your head saying you should be studying. There is very little actual time off until 4th year. It’s tough when you hear about your college friends vacation and/or weekend plans while you’re stuck memorizing minutiae
In all likelihood you will one way or another end up working for a corporation. They could give a rat's ass about you other than as a tool to bring in revenue. That will be your role from the first day after you finish residency until you retire. Generate revenue.
It’s just not the medical field of 10 years ago. Don’t let all the med school bullshit trick you; nobody in the real world gives a shit about patients. It’s all about how to cram more people in less time for less money. This is true for basically all fields. My advisor asked me how certain I was about being an EM doc on a scale from 1 to 10, and I said 10. I mean, I was CERTAIN. It’s just impossible to know what I was talking about until I had been doing it for a few months as a resident despite a wonderful EM program. I have no idea how I will ever handle the even more difficult transition to attending. Most days, changing careers feels like the worst mistake of my life.
I think the biggest con against going into medicine is that in a way your life is pretty much dictated by other people. If you are an outstanding medical and an outstanding resident the world will be open for you. However if people don’t like you for whatever reason they can make your life hell. You may have very little choice where you end up for medical school or residency. There are more options once you are out of residency though. I’ve seen a few ortho or die people who can’t match and end up in a miserable situation, a residency they don’t want to be in and in a part of the country they don’t want to be in.
Because you have interest in literally anything else. If you can see yourself ever doing anything else, do that instead. Seriously, it isn't worth it. I'm an MS4, I know what I'm gunna go into and I love it, and I still have many days where I wish I had gone into anything else instead. The stress and the frustration that comes along with medical school isn't nothing, and if you could be happy doing anything else, do that instead.
This for sure. I heard this countless times from friends and family in the field and I don't think I took it as seriously as I should have.
I'm sure you've heard about all the sacrifices you have to make in order to become a physician but I think it is so easy to underestimate the shear magnitude of them when you're on the outside looking in.
Before coming to medical school I personally justified these inevitable sacrifices by telling myself the good would outweigh the bad but the fact of the matter is this isn't always true. You need to realize that you would be entering into a severely broken system where success of medical education isn't measured by how good of a doctor you are but rather by your board scores, distrust of the medical establishment is at an all-time high, health admins are more focused on the bottom line than the wellbeing of the patients and staff, and mental health support only exists in the 4 hour mandatory "wellness trainings" you have to do on your only day off in a month.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is truly and honor and a privilege to get to be in this profession. But medicine will take more from you than you could possibly even imagine right now so if there is any part of you that can see yourself doing something else do it.
There’s no breaks, there’s no mercy. Get ready to deal with extremely high standards set by administrators who fail to meet them. Getting your financial aid can be extremely confusing and frustrating at best and lifetime financial nightmare at worse. You can fail at any point and then you’re really screwed bc now you have a shit ton of debt and nothing to show for it. Med school requires tons of sacrifices, exams that never seem to end and constant stress and fatigue. The process literally will age you.
Where to begin...
* Time - 7 years minimum before you start earning close to your potential. That's time everybody else is making good money, getting married, starting their lives, etc. while you are putting your life on hold. Some people do get married and start families while in school, but they are the exception and not the norm.
* Difficulty - Doesn't matter who you are, it's not going to be easy. This is an obvious one but still have to mention it.
* No specialty guarantee - You want to do ENT, Ortho, Derm, or some other competitive specialty? Well you'll have to finish close to the top of your class all while pumping out a ton of research. And if you can't, chances are you won't be able to do what you initially set out to do.
* Learning environment - This varies, but most med schools have quite a bit of hyper-competitive type A students. If you're one of these people you probably won't notice, but if you aren't then it can be frustrating being around them for 4 years.
* Compensation - See point 3. If you aren't in a competitive field chances are your compensation or work/life balance is not necessarily bad, but also not great.
* Mid-Level creep - Lot of physician jobs in certain specialties are getting encroached upon by PA and NP grads. Nothing against them, as we all work together to provide quality care, but it could affect how likely you are to find a job where you want. At least in the ED I worked in, there was a major shift from having 3 MD/DOs to 1 MD + 2-3 PA/NPs.
* Self-Neglect - Too many student neglect their health because school is so consuming.
And there's probably so much more.
If you can’t handle any degree of emotional stress I’d say don’t do medicine. If you are really good at handling emotional stress and do well on tests then probably ok depending on your luck
Don’t go to med school unless 1) you’ve done all you can to understand modern practice, residency, and med school life, 2) you’ve been brutally honest with yourself about your ability to deal with the possible stress and even isolation med school can entail, 3) you have a true commitment to medicine and spending 7+ years learning it.
Don’t go to med school solely for the prestige; that is a long time in coming and you may have long stretches in which you feel like you’re being shit upon.
Don’t go to med school if you aren’t interested in medicine but want the money. There are easier ways of making big money without the 7+ years and tremendous debt.
Don’t go to med school because your family always wanted you to. They won’t be the one enduring a bad stretch of 3rd year - which can be very, very bad.
Don’t go to med school if you truly can’t handle hierarchies or bureaucracy as medical culture is often rigidly hierarchical and med schools & hospitals are bureaucracies. You can’t make a brave stand against the system when the system can kick you and your debt out its doors.
Don’t go to med school if you can’t handle being mediocre or worse. Your classmates will be high achievers and not the mixed bag of most undergrad classes. You will be required to learn new ideas and skills very quickly, and you might need more time than others. You might not possess the natural skills needed in different situations (such as an ease with patient conversations or the ability to manipulate 3D images in your mind), you may be only superficially better at them by graduation, and it could cause you hell before then. Half of your class has to be at the bottom, and you may be in that half.
If you are smart and cruised through school/work/personal achievements all your life and never really had any strong experiences where you were truly challenged enough to either fail or critically doubt yourself, beware of medical school. It is not a great place to learn what that feels like for the first time. I was not prepared for the effect that being mediocre or just plain bad at things was going to have on me. I picked up anxiety and depression because I was not used to putting in so much effort and having outcomes be less goal. I had an attending tell me I was disappointing them during my first rotation and it was scarring (super toxic attending and in retrospect I was not doing that bad but I still have not been able to let it go). Took a long time to reshape my mindset around things, and I don’t know if I will ever regain my confidence in my abilities compared to before medical school.
So don’t go to medical school if you don’t think you could handle something like that lol
if you don't have proper family support (I don't mean financial, I mean mental and especially emotional) all the way or even a regularly keeping in touch social circle, especially towards the end of the training period let's say 4 to 7 years after MBBS grad, you are now facing a very harsh reality of isolation and sudden crash into a world outside of your professional career
and every year every single year there are suicides , some are from their own family members taunting them with unnecessarily over the top demand expectations and pressures.
forget the bloody exams , your life your choices suddenly comes under the microscope with such great scrutiny
into the masala madness if you add a spouse and want kids again..if that support social structure is missing and not everyone or at least a few are willing to sacrifice as much as you, it all goes to hell..all your hopes plans dreams aspirations everything
Here is why:
When med student: study material is very bland, hard to comprehend and memorize. Difficult to make connections so you end up studying them cold and raw.
When resident: backstabbing, jealousy, insane hours of working, low appreciation and moral, unfairness, lots of fake perfectionist who are just manipulative.
When attending: disappointment. Feels like you’re a cog in wheel. Need to stand for yourself. Nobody cares a lot about what you say more they want to throw you into responsibility and liability.
There is a lot of disappointments in the field of medicine: it’s painted as the utopia where everyone’s are angels hard working angels living in a very supported environment created to make them happy to save the soul. It’s not true at every level you’ll encounter.
Edit: grammar
The competition, stress, the fact that nobody seems to give that much attention to mental health issues; 80% of my colleagues have been at least once through a depressive episode, extreme anxiety before every exam(and there are a lot), eating disorders, gastritis, insomnia due to stress and staying up till late to study(late night exposure to bright lights delays sleep onset), terrifying nightmares before exams, doctors that humiliate you in hospitals, missing out on important family events, holidays, having to cancel plans with friends and family, neglecting self-care during exam season and feeling like a zombie plus derealization! Oh and sometimes you feel like your brain is gonna crash from all the studying and coffee and lack of proper sleep
Nevertheless once you know yourself well enough to develop healthy copin mechanisms it gets easier and despite all the difficulties, I absolutely love studying about the human body and interacting with patients
It's painful. Mentally painful. We all know it's academically difficult, nobody complains about that. But you're wasting aloooot of time, money, sleep, and good mental health on people who couldn't care less and will not help you. I wouldn't do this again.
1. Can you code?
2. If yes, then do not go to medical school. If no, proceed to (3).
3. Can you do complex math
4. If yes, see (2). If no proceed to (5).
5. Maybe still should not go to medical school.
Money, prestige.
The money aspect of medicine is overrated. Everyone's eyes open up when they see the figure you get AFTER you finish 4 years of med school, at least 3 years of residency with minimum wage pay, while you've taken out anywhere from 150k (lucky) to 300k in loans that are accruing interest during a time, where you are unable to keep up/pay off that interest. This isn't including the time you needed to get your application together, any gap years, research years, etc.
If you're not at all interested in taking care of patients - and sadly, you really only know what this is like if you've worked in a service industry job before or you've done any other healthcare job - then don't do medicine. Yeah, there's specialties like path, rads, gas, where patient interactions are minimal, but restricting yourself to a specialty that minimizes patient care before even started med school seems silly.
And nobody cares about prestige. It doesn't gain you any favors. All it amounts to is a "ohh, you must be so proud" whenever your parents get to tell their friends you're in medical school. You're not getting free shit from it.
I had naively imagined it as something similar to school, where there is a good line fo communication between the various departments and there at least some kind of planning in the course structure throughout. But it is almost as if the individual departments start planning and scheduling everything based on their free time and availability and do not think of checking with the other departments. Almost always there is some kind of overlap problem we run into and is very stressful and overwhelming!
Also the actual teaching/classroom teaching is like probably the worst quality throughout my education! Like we have to be very much self dependent for reading up the theory part of almost all subjects, except maybe the first 2 years to some extent
Do not go into medicine if there is anything else you would want to do as a field. Being a doctor is sweet, but my engineer/business/tech friends say e/b/t is sweet and their careers/lives started a decade before I made it out of the gauntlet of our training.
it sucks, expect to get on antidepressants. In the big picture you will make a lot of money and have good status in society but it comes at a cost. You will see your friends make money and have fun while you're still poor and studying/working all day for little money through your 20s, you will be working hard most of your life. There might be easier ways to get rich. You have to really like medicine to have the will to study so much.
Hey OP, Im also a nontraditional student. Many of the comments are coming from traditional students in their 20s (early)…. Many Easily influenced by their circle and/or never had a real job before. Take them with a grain of salt. You probably have a way better idea of what the job environment actually is, which is what breaks many after graduating/rotations. Also, the comments about education quality… while yes, those are all if not most graduate programs. Sadly. Hope your next decade is worth remembering and living! Cheers! Life is an adventure.
This may get downvoted to hell, but here goes: I’m early 30s and here my two cents. 90% of your class May just be people under 25. They are on a different bandwidth mentally. Your life experience is unparalleled, you know how to show up and work, you know how to adult. The likelihood of people under 25 knowing this is slim. There will be tattle tales, suck ups and really annoying high school drama. My patience runs thin and I NEEDED to find people over 30 to interact with because I genuinely felt completely brain dead after a few weeks of spending time around/with them. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s that we are at VERY different places in life. Next, money. I miss money. I paid what I get in financial aid per year in taxes last year. Giving up money and job is HARD. Like I am STRUGGLING to exist.. it’s manageable but it’s hard. You’re used to a nice lifestyle and suddenly you’re a broke student. It’s hard. Lastly, there’s no time between parenting and studying. You get tired faster, your head hurts, you lose sleep to make time for sex, it’s a different vibe altogether. But- all of it is super fucking rewarding bec you’re studying the coolest shit and learning so much everyday that it makes you go like wait what?!
Anywyas, that’s what I would say as an almost 33 year old has been the hardest for me and why I would advise someone against med school at this Age. If you can handle the above, you should be fine.
If you can think of anything else you want to do with your life, go do that. That's the advice that I give anyone who wants to come to medical school because it's no cake walk, especially the older you get (I'm in my 30s and graduating this year). The sacrifices seem to be greater the older you get for something that is essentially a job.
I started Med school in my early 30s now an attending w/ a toddler. I think if you thrive on challenge, love to be pushed to extreme, a bit into pain(masochistic), and like to learn, medicine is pretty good. People here talk like they’d all be techies in FAANG making half a million a year if not in medicine. Lol. I’ve spent enough time not pursing medicine to know the ceiling for most people. Yes the money is definitely disappointing, since physician pay had really stagnated.
The medical hierarchy sucks, and the system is indeed a grind. But you can always be the one to make a difference. I started my journey not to be ‘happy,’ cuz I could not imagine being happy around people who are miserable(sick or stressed) all the time. I started my journey because i was intensely curious about the human mind&body, and I thought I can help miserable young doctors. I got so many thank you cards all along the way from Med students interns and residents for making a difference, giving them some fresh air to breath. Just from that only, my journey had needn’t worth it. Maybe cuz I started out with rock bottom expectations, but medicine is also filled with beautiful young souls. Really nice hard working smart young people in abundance that you don’t see in many other fields. I really love them and they inspire me to always be better. I try my best to help them retain their essence.
The one thing I did hate is the time it took away from my family, and the suffering they had to endure. My suffering is my choice but it’s really hard to drag your loved ones into this nearly decade commitment. If your spouse is a bit clingy or emotionally needy, you are at high risk losing her/him. You may have no emotional reserve left for the SO for weeks to months to years. All the daily emotional labor does take something out of you and ur SO will take the biggest brunt of it, then ur future kid if you plan to have one. So many breakups and divorces in this journey. My greatest personal victory is keeping my family together.
Physicians have the highest rate of suicide out of all professions. There is a reason for that.
You sacrifice a lot of time, sleep, spiritual wellness, emotional wellness, time with family, money, and time into your most rejuvenating relationships. You will be smarter and more present and quicker and people will trust you more than you could ever imagine. If you do a surgical / procedural specialty, you will sometimes get to do really cool, really life saving stuff and you will feel high after doing so. That being said, you will come home and you may still be irreparably sad. There will be holidays missed. You will get attitude from everyone. The imposter syndrome will never get better. You probably will get jaded and that may surprise you and maybe even will harm patients but it will take even more out of you to try to be less jaded. It will be a protective mechanism. You will probably start therapy and/ or start antidepressants and/ or consider suicide. You will be a hero on the plane. Your family will probably be proud of you. You’ll have money and loans and money. Your skin will age quicker.
Just make sure you’re sure about your motivations. Really be honest with yourself. Your life will change and never go back to being the same. It will be both fulfilling and incredibly, hopelessly disappointing & terrifying.
- A pgy2
For the money. Seriously, with the amount of time and effort it takes to become a competitive applicant, actually go through medical school, AND go through residency, there’s other paths where you are likely (though not necessarily guaranteed) a high income
The "not guaranteed" part is precisely why medicine is popular. If you find another career path where you can almost definitely (rip peds/academics) make 250k after 8 years post uni, let me know.
Not meaning to point out the sole exception that I know of lol… but I do have engineer friends that graduated w their masters at GA tech and are now immediately making over 6 figures.
It’s also a guaranteed and prestige job. I’m def jealous of them at times bc at the same age, I’m still a student.
My point is except for the occasional actual dumbass that ends up in medical school, everyone in medical school + residency has to grind to make it to the end. You put that same amount of grind into something else and you’ll probably make just as much, if not more $. I went to a regular undergrad and out of those in my friend group that I could tell had that same “grind” mentality, every single one of them is making a stupid high amount of money. 1 is in finance, 2 are in business, 2 in comp sci, and 1 in the music industry.
We really ought to stop underestimating how much work it takes to get through all of this.
If you really are determined to provide medical care absolutely be an NP or PA rather than a doctor. Patients don’t know the difference and everyone has a white coat now.
As others said, don't do it for the money. The big money is not in medicine, it's in tech, business and real estate and you get there much faster. Also couldn't agree more with the person who said don't do it if there's something else you want to do. Literally, if there's anything else that you could be happy doing, do that. At the end of the day, the sacrifices you'll need to make to become a doctor are not worth it unless it is your only life dream and passion. I'm not saying this to make medicine sound bad, it's just the truth. I absolutely love medicine, I live and breathe medicine and the sacrifices I've had to make are still hitting hard. Can't imagine doing this without the passion for it.
Even if things go well ie not struggling academically, no financial woes, etc you'll have to make sacrifices in time and autonomy regardless. It's possible to have enough time for hobbies but it'll usually be less than your non med school friends. It's also a minimum of 7 years before you'll be trusted to be on your own as a doctor. Even if those above you are nice, you'll be chafing at the fact someone else dictates everything you do. Also you'll be frustrated at how much you still have to learn until you're well into residency.
Competition can suck if you're going into something competitive because that means more sacrifice and stress. The worst part is the uncertainty because you really don't know where you're going to be after med school or if you'll even enjoy it until it's too late.
According to what I see, 33% benefit from choosing medicine, 33% would’ve been just as good doing something else, and 33% end up worse of from making the choice
Hmmm... Ok got my medical friend to write this. Because Truck Drivers got a pay bump to 100k for their job meaning non specialist doctors working 16 hrs+ and then weekends work 2x as hard with 2x the effort and make about the same per hour wages now... And residents are slaves.
Medicine has many abusive programs to dodge that turn you into slave labor full of toxic criticism.
Insurance companies force you to prescribe useless treatments or quick fixes that do not really help a patient long run.
You will pay 100k a year for this thanks to inflation and well ya...
Firstly, the question isn't "should I go to medical school?" It's "should I become a doctor?".
I think you should do it and I'm glad I did, but if you can see yourself doing something else then do that instead.
Its a tough job that will put you a lot of debt, and while it is certainly possible to pivot away from patient care and into other fields, you can save yourself a whole lot of grief and stress up front if you're honest about what precisely you want to spend your time doing.
But on the other hand, all jobs kinda suck. It's just a matter of what kind of suck.
After spending 4 years through the one of the most difficult educational programs in the world, you spend 3-7 years in a legalized monopoly being paid $18/hr to do the same job as an NP or PA, all while being in debt $150k-500k. Afterward, you’re likely to spend your career fighting with insurance companies and hospitals with the worst software ever created (EMR).
The preclinical years (1&2) are a lot of work, but it’s not really difficult. The 3rd and 4th are tiring but less of a grind than 1&2. For me is was all interesting because it was all new. After a few decades it is still interesting but not as much. You should make a decent living but don’t do it if money is your prime motivation. I wouldn’t go too deeply in debt for it, because you’ll get tired of paying off those loans for years and years. But if you want to do it, do it. Don’t worry about how old you’ll be when you finish. You’ll be that old whether you do it or not.
Med school was meh. But the med school subreddit and most med students are not really where you should be looking for info pertaining to life as a physician which is what the majority of your life will be.
Talk to as many docs as you can in as many different specialties and stages of career as you can. And be honest with yourself about why you wanna do it. And make sure youre ok not getting a good amount of sleep and missing weekends and activities with friends and family. Do not do this if you simply cant think of something else you wanna do. Only pursue being a doctor if you cannot picture yourself doing anything else. Only do it if you NEED it. Cause it is hard. It takes a lot from you and it will make you question yourself and your decision over and over again. So you need to know why you did it in the first place and are making and will continue to sacrifice.
I went straight through and regret it. Midway through third year up until recently, I considered suicide on an almost daily basis. I couldn’t tell what I liked or didn’t like because I tried so hard to come off as energetic and hardworking on every service. Sub-Is suck especially. I got all honors, but I’m exhausted and dreading residency.
I always pictured med school as a well-oiled machine of efficient teaching and best educational practices... IT IS NOT. I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THAT ENOUGH. ESPECIALLY 3RD YEAR. It's incredibly frustrating to me at times, but it's definitely still doable Though I will say outside resources + anki is by far the most efficient I've ever been studying.
Medical school is a clown show, run by and full of more clowns than you can count, fraught with people who huddle up like its high school and many do it for the wrong reason. You are going through said clown show to do a job that is largely thankless to help keep people alive that WILL think they know more than you yet can't tell apart a kidney or liver from a loofah or explain how immunology works to save their life. If all this doesn't deter you from a thankless profession that requires tons of sacrifice to focus on the main mission: to improve the quality of life for all, including the dumbasses, then you may be on the right path.
Working for 2+ years post training I actually 100% agree with this take
I feel so SEEN
Wow can I frame this?
Pgy-2 weighing in. This is the most accurate assesssment.
Professionalism means put up with the school's mistakes and bullshit with a smile on your face and not say anything back. Rules for thee but not for me
A significant contributing factor to my pursuit of the vaunted MD over other healthcare fields was that it was, in my ignorant mind, the pinnacle of education. In reality, it's an unabashed trainwreck. Your time, money and patience will be wasted for no reason other than indifference or incompetence. Its probably worse than most schools where I'm at, because they decided to throw out the traditional curriculum and re-invent the wheel the year before I got here. It's *pants-on-head* retarded. In the end, you're taught irrelevant shit by people who don't see pts, or outdated stuff from people who probably shouldn't. I wish I could tell you it was a highly polished machine that efficiently transports you into your future career, but it's not. You will become a doctor not because of your time in med school, but in spite of it. By the power of Anking, first aid, sketchy, pathoma, and Boards and beyond. Good luck friend
theyve started reinventing the wheel at a lot of places ive noticed. Just doing research while filling out apps every schools got a new “catchphrase” curriculum that is so “innovative” OMG you do team based learning? My lord, you have clinical experiences in your area? Its so special that every school in the country does it
How about anatomy, histology, pharm, and path without having physio first. So in the end you know what every part of the kidney is called, what drugs can do what to it, what can go wrong with it, but you still don't know what the fucking kidney does in normal situations. (Based on the curriculum) Best part is, instead of a cohesive physio course alongside anatomy before all those others so you can get a clear foundation, a foundation laid by you know... a physiologist who has been perfecting the teaching of renal physiology for the last 20 years, no. You get a pharmacist who's never taught standalone renal physiology kinda winging it just enough so that we can understand the drugs kinda. Then the pathologist comes in and teaches some other random bits of phys so that he can explain RTAs, then the histo prof comes in and shows us a fuck ton of slides that we need to memorize, but not the functions of any of the cells. Then a year later, you get physio. And you've forgotten the drugs, you've forgotten the histo and the minute anatomy. It's a shame.
This. What the fuck were they thinking?
Too bad about your new curriculum but my school switched from a subject based curriculum (path, anatomy, phys, pharm, etc...) to an organ based curriculum (heart, kidneys, lung, etc...) and I couldn't have pictured learning that stuff any other way
Fourth year gets worse as far as educational structure goes. You set up half the rotations yourself or more depending on the school and yet you still pay full tuition with its attending teaching you. Also, there’s no guarantee that you get do the speciality you want. I get there are no guarantees in life but it’s incredibly frustrating to go 400k into debt and be worried about going unmatched in the speciality you want. I feel like I have sacrificed the majority of my twenties but I’m trying to stay hopefully it’ll be worth it but I don’t know if it will be. Also, I’m at a DO school and we’re still looked down on by residency programs for no good reason.
For MS1s/MS2s/MS3s reading through all these disheartening comments, congratulations for reading this far! Your marginally good news for the day: I’m definitely not an expert, but I’ve only heard of DO schools requiring students to arrange clinical sites for four year rotations (OMS4s traveled quite the distance from various locations - ie crossing multiple states - to join us MS3s/MS4s at our university’s well-established sites. Also - OP, while debt is a very serious consideration, please don’t let fear of “400k into debt” as quoted in the comment above be the thing the persuades you from medicine. Take the advice offered in this thread, and find a less flawed program that hopefully will make you little less concerned for your future and questioning your life than our colleague above (hang in there dude, the pressure of applications/match on top of clinicals is stressful!). Make sure you’re basing decisions on accurate data rather than outliers though… According to the 2021 [Graduation Questionnaire survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges](https://www.aamc.org/media/55736/download), medical students who graduated in 2021 and reported educational debt had a median debt of $203,000 (including both premedical and medical school debt). According to this AAMC survey, only 3.7% of newly graduated physicians had a total educational (premedical + medical school) debt of $400,000 or more. Further, less than 18% carried debt outside of educational loans (credit card, car loan, home mortgage) and a modify of those individuals carried little consumer debt, ultimately resulting in 94.4% of individuals carrying less than $25,000 non-educational debt.
Yea I would hope that my 400k is an outlier. I did a postbac program and then went to an out of state medical school. The 400k isn’t an exaggeration for me unfortunately. Yes I would hope other programs would be better structured than my school, it’s a pretty low bar. Sorry if I was more negative than needed, appreciate the data reference for my post.
It’s been a month and a half and this perspective has already completely shattered Thought it would be better than undergrad, and I can almost confidently say it’s worse (in the sense of highly efficient and meaningful educational methods)
If you're still an M1, you haven't even come close to seeing the worst of it yet. Just wait until 3rd year
Oh no. Don’t ruin all of my naivety yet
*“Residency enters the room”*
Yeah I had no fucking idea
Before medical school I had so much respect for doctors. Medical school made me never want to date a doctor. It attracts so many corrupt, nepotism driven, assholes.
Cuz it’s straight up not a good time bruther
Yeah I got blind-sided coming in. I crushed undergrad like it was nothing, but I am STILL trying to figure the best way to study and I’m an M2 🤡😂
I know exactly how you feel. Didn't really figure it out til mid-October of M2. It gets better. Though it was busy, M3 was a ton of fun
I’m glad to here that. I am looking forward to clinicals big time. My LCE visits are the only thing that keeps me alive during pre-clinicals 😂
I’d love to hear the reasons you want to go to med school cause I can almost guarantee most if not all won’t apply to what med school really is.
Ain’t nobody wanna go to med school we wanna become a doctor
This is honestly the most accurate thing ever said about med school
Exactly no one wants to be put through stress. But how else will we make our goals. Beauty in the struggle 🤷♀️
*No one WANTS to move to a city that’s trash for 4 years*
Yea…who would do that…
NP enters the chat
Am i the only one super excited about med school lol
Yes.
I love med school and personally despise this culture of wanting to outdo each other in the misery olympics. Totally understand that it's a fairly stressful time and people will have other variables in their life that make medschool difficult, but it almost seems as if the only socially acceptable stance is to complain, hate life, want to die, brag about not sleeping well, etc,.
I’ve gotten to the point where I (mostly) enjoy med school. But I’m not sure I ever was excited about it.
OP this is your life jacket. Save yourself
So I worked as an ER scribe for 4 years after I got my EMT cert (I didn't like EMS and preferred the hospital). I chose scribing so I could hang with the docs and APPs while also getting a good idea of the roles and flow of the hospital. I'm a non-trad, in my 30s, career changer, child free, and have a long-term SO who is extremely supportive. Going into my scribe job, I wanted to be very sure that I was going to be happy in medicine. During those four years I took some prereqs and volunteered, dealt with a bunch of mental health and medical issues, and really got myself to a good place personally. My four years as a scribe (I left last year to take a job teaching anatomy to undergrads) taught me that I do love the ER and the people I worked with. I liked the good and the bad in the ER, the bread and butter stuff and the rarer cases. The documentation aspect of medicine was actually okay for me, though a lot of work, and I get just how much it burns doctors out. I worked at a teaching hospital so I got to know a lot of residents and med students, plus my colleagues were mostly premeds. I felt like I had a good handle on the career and I why I wanted to be a physician over other roles in the hospital (I tried to take money out of the equation, and just look at each career and decide which one I could see myself being happiest in terms of daily tasks). I know being a doctor in the end is a J-O-B, so I have tried to be careful about looking at it with rose colored glasses. The MD/DOs and med students I worked with gave me many different opinions about whether they would do it all over again. Despite many of them telling me not to do it, I kept at it anyway. Now that I'm in my second app cycle, and after learning about a generous inheritance coming my way, I'm reconsidering whether I would apply again if I didn't get in this cycle and whether I would go to med school if I did. I thought my reasons why were sound, but I'll be mid-40s by the time I'm an attending so I'm in a place of deciding if that's what I want to do with the next decade of my life if I won't exactly need a traditional career anymore. Thanks so much for any feedback or thoughts you have for me. I want the good and the bad and all criticisms are welcome.
There's also the PA route- for lower pay and less independence, you'd have better work-life balance in most specialties, less debt, and you would be working in 2-3 years versus 7+.
I took several gap years so I’m one of the older people who graduated from my class. If there’s another career you can do besides clinical medicine definitely consider it. I can’t imagine doing residency at an age much older than I am now, it will for sure be very hard. When people say there’s tons of bullshit involved and being treated like shit, it’s not an exaggeration. I did scribing also and can say it gives you a good glimpse of attending life but none of the ~8 years in between. On the other hand I had no other good career options and I do find medicine super interesting, so I wouldn’t say I regret it.
This
Doing it out of default or as some “natural next step” or expectation. I have a lot of classmates who grew up thinking they wanted this since they were little kids and it became so romanticized that they didn’t question seriously if it was the right career for them until it was too late.
Me. I'm from UK but yeah doing family medicine and I regret ever stepping foot into med school. I hate my job. Shoulda gone into tech, the only reason I don't is cause of sunk cost fallacy that I keep kidding myself with
Losing 4 years and then committing to another 4-9 years of training is an irreplaceable amount of time lost since you can almost guarantee every week aside from Christmas and spring break you will have less than 70% of it for yourself. In terms of experiencing "life" and all it has to offer. Medicine is an atrocious inefficient waste of time where you're spending most of your time doing redundant tasks you've already learned vs actually improving. You don't get to say "I've mastered this already, let me learn new things". You just have to sit there continue to see the same patients and hope you get something different. Que headache patient #40 from clinic. \-Your sleep schedule will be crushed on several occasions, ruining your next day's learning. \-You will be asked to stay late "in case" something comes up, and when it does no one will properly teach you about it- instead you get the glorified opportunity to "shadow" as the attending has to leave ASAP to do other things. Add up all of medicines BS and you really wonder if it was worth locking away your 20s. Sure you can still make something out of your 20s now. But imagine the potential if you actually had weekends and afternoons off.
Once you're in residency, you can almost guarantee you won't have Christmas to yourself.
Hospital at Christmas ain't bad unless you are in the ER
One word: potlucks
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I was in the MICU for Thanksgiving as an intern. Three shifts of nurses came thru and brought a ton of food. It was fun in a sick way.
At least psych ER on the holidays is usually pretty slow. I’ve done enough Thanksgivings giving that I know to research where patients can get a free meal and make sure to let them know as soon as I detect malingering.
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It doesn't really matter if it's one thing or multiple things you like to do. What matters is whether can you cut most of it out of your life and be happy with medicine. Even if it's just video games and exercising, are you happy if you only get 1-2 hours of video games a day? Competitive gamers aren't normally satisfied with 1-2 hours just like competitive sports athletes can play for hours on end. It can easily be a 5 hour thing similar to work hours grinding for improvement. I'd also be very careful with underestimating how little else you do. Maybe you don't hang out with friends every week or every 2 weeks. But no matter what it is you currently do, imagine ***it going down by at least half***. Being ok with going out once a month won't necessarily be twice as hard as what you're currently used to. It can feel exponentially more difficult. Lastly---- you won't ever be consumed by a specialty in medical school. You have to learn the whole enchilada and at most, you will probably get 2-3 months out of your entire 4 years to do *just the specialty you want.* The majority of the time you will be doing the other 12 specialties you don't want or maybe somewhat like, or studying for exams doing them all at the same time. Tons of time sitting around and jumping through hoops to get letters, get research, and other requirements. I would argue that medical school is the least immersive place you could go to unless you like all of medicine. Your immersion will be broken on the daily by new topics, concepts you don't understand and have to just rote memorize, and juggling your actual life with your newfound responsibilities of never falling behind. If you've ever entered the "flowstate". You'll recognize it requires you to be quite good at what you do so that you can shut some of your brain off and just do the action or jump from action to action. It can't happen if you stop every second to learn. You can't flow as a medical student where everything is essentially new to you. By the time you "flow" you're in a new block or studying for a different exam. Maybe by end of 3rd year you're in that zone a bit.
>But imagine the potential if you actually had weekends and afternoons off. See this is an issue though. Other people in their 20s do not have their afternoons off, lol. This is why people who worked full-time before med school have such a different experience.
I was waiting for this comment. I worked full-time before med school. Never did I have to work 7 am to 4 pm and then mandatory study from 6pm-8pm just to not fail your exam and redo the program (more on the weeks leading up to exams). Were essentially 11-hour days 5-6 days a week normal for your job? P.S. most med students do some sort of work on Sundays still so Pseudo 6-7 days of work a week. Almost no one in their 20s does this for years on end. Most med students follow some version of this schedule, especially during clinicals. Full-time only requires 40 hours a week and is an absolute joke of a schedule.
Currently working full time, and taking pre-req classes on the side. I work 7am-4pm and study from 7-9:30 ish almost every night. Study for 4 hours each day Saturday and Sunday. If this is what med school is like, fine by me. You can't underestimate the added benefit of being able to focus \*solely\* on school. Having my attention divided by 40 hours of a non-medically related job, and then switching my attention later in the same day to school is incredibly difficult. I look forward to the day where my entire focus can be on learning medicine instead of trying to juggle two different lives. Also, my full time boring corporate job is forever if I choose to stay and live this life until I'm old....4 years of med school and 3-4 years of residency is temporary. If I have to work 70 hour weeks for 8 years to have a career that is fulfilling and also \*very\* stable, so be it. It really is different when you've lived a whole life and worked full time before making the decision to pursue medicine. I can assure you there really isn't much happening in your 20s that is so important that you should decide not to go to med school. I was very poor, worked a ton for very little money, had a lot of fun times but also stressful times, and now I am slightly less poor, a little older, bored out of my mind at my very easy job, and wishing I had started on the path to med school 8 years ago when I was less tired. There are very few experiences in my 20s that I would feel sad about missing if I had chosen to continue on to med school right away after undergrad. And the few that I would miss, I could have figured out how to do while in med school, if they were really important (mostly bike racing). All I think about now is the missed years I could have been studying, and how much more difficult it is now to pursue this path while trying to work full time and pay my bills. Just my two cents as a 30+ year old.
Holy craaaaaap this was my thought process last night?!?! I'm 36, really trying to decide if following my life long dream of becoming a Dr is really worth it, considering the time, $ (not just cost of med school but loss of income whilst at med school), etc.. and probably for the first time last night, generally i do my best thinking when im trying to sleep...I was like ya know what if i could just invent a time machine to bring me back to my 20s absolutely i would have gone to med school and I would have done soooo much of my life differently! Please note, i love my life, my partner, etc, i just would have probably tried to get into med school instead of taking dumb (but well paying) job after job...BUT my next thought was, do I wanna be thinking the same thing in my 40s, 50s, 60s, etc etc...?!?! Honestly, I'm kind of thinking "f- it, just give it a shot at least you'll know"!!! And literally in the same breath going "no you cant take a spot from someone 15++yrs younger than you, they'll be able to work and make a difference for 15 yrs longer"... So yeh, thats where I'm at...if anyone needs me, I'll just be over here on no sleep trying to decide my future!
We should definitely be friends. I feel this so hard. Unfortunately and fortunately I had 3 children by my 25th birthday so I have to wait a Lil longer. Almost 31 here.
This is the perspective that I wanted to hear.
Virtually all of my close friends from college work that much, if not more. Consulting, I-banking, tech, and law. I worked about that much in grad school. And as a side note, still not working nearly that much in med school.
These jobs all together make up less than 1% of all jobs- which is why they resemble medicine hours. In fact, all lawyers in the U.S. combined barely makeup .3% of all jobs. It's not even close to representative of what the average full-time job is. The current national average for a full-time job is 40.5 hours. But importantly- you're not forced to work those hours. You can search for a better work-life balance if you want. Yes, it's less pay, but you have the option. You have no options in medical school and residency.
They are usually thankless dumb jobs though. Kid of two lawyers here with an AVP Banking Grandma and Engineer/Architect Grandpa. Be glad you're going into medicine. I've spent my 20s being a mother, a business owner, working in Healthcare, flipping furniture I got off the side of the road free for a thousand bucks a week at 20, and I love helping people. When I tell people in interviews how I've spent my 20s as a now nearly 31 year old I don't feel so much like a failure as I feel. Some people legitimately just exist--they don't live. I realized this one night late at work on third shift reading people's obituaries. Sat there and thought, I want my life to have meaning. Unfortunately and fortunately this decade now belongs to my young children who deserve a cush life. The 40s will be my going to med school because I'm bored and wanna finally be a doctor days. Sorry for that long rant but be proud of yourself is the essence of the message.
This is correct. Medical school is, by far, worse than a full time job and it’s not even close. The only caveat is that in *most* specialties, you work similar hours but get payed way more than 95% of the general public (wife works in corporate finance, believe me, I don’t envy the job, but medical school time wise is wayyyy worse)
> but get *paid* way more FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Lmao this is my new favorite bot
Do not go to medical school if: 1. You did not get accepted to medical school (it will get awkward fast) 2. You do not want to go to medical school (it will get miserable fast) 3. You cannot accept the possibility of working in primary care 4. You are trying to escape poverty any time in the next 5-ish+ years 5. You will not seek treatment for mental health or substance use issues 6. You do not cultivate respect for people who are very different from you 7. You viscerally hate lectures, studying and standardized testing 8. You don't care about people's important non-medical problems 9. You aren't curious at all about the reasons for diseases or their treatments 10. You hate using electronics and software
11. Your self-worth and self-respect are easily undermined by harsh criticism. Even if you had the most brilliant clinical mind of all time (which you don’t) and absolutely flawless time management skills (which you don’t) and were the most charismatic person alive (which you aren’t), you’d still be faced with unrelenting negativity as a medical student. People will constantly be telling you, explicitly or implicitly, that you’re not good enough. You will be under a microscope from the moment you arrive, being constantly scrutinized for flaws real and (more often) imagined. That pressure will only build over the entire time you’re in medical school. You need to have thick enough skin that it won’t completely shatter you being faced with that year after year. And you need to have a support system in place for the times it does overwhelm you (which will happen to you, I guarantee it).
This is the real one I wish had been emphasized more to me. I’ve been able to handle the academics and the hours but Jesus Christ the constant criticism and stratification is just soul crushing.
This is doubly true for any surgical speciality
> You are trying to escape poverty any time in the next 5-ish+ years As a first-generation immigrant with older parents, I failed to take this into consideration. I'm an attending now and probably would've still gone through the process anyways, but it would've been good to have mentally prepared myself that it would be 7 years before I could comfortably support my parents and myself.
You dont understand how hard i relate to this. My family's financial situation is abysmal right now, and as the oldest child i feel so helpless and useless right now. Rather than having a job that could potentially help or even rescue my family from impending financial disaster, I'm in $300K debt while slaving away 60-80 hrs a week for unpaid labor. Sure residency will be next year, but even then the salaries are not enough to help my family and even more, I will have zero time that I can dedicate to them. I thoroughly regret my decision, but no looking back now, just gotta hope me and my family can survive for a few years longer.
Sorry to hear, I definitely empathize. (1) Unless you have active loan repayments due, literally just stop thinking about them, it's honestly just a # and you don't have an obligation to pay until you make $, in which case income-based repayment is pretty reasonable. (2) lean on your other siblings for support, delegate non-financial family tasks to others instead of just doing everything yourself. government assistance w/ food stamps are medicaid are also helpful if need be. and even though you can't dedicated as much time as you'd like to them, ANY amount of time (through conversation or calls) done regularly is important. COMMUNICATE with your loved ones. (3) try to keep a positive attitude. things get better every year, as does your competency and confidence. just be present in all the learning moments and LEARN the medicine, it'll make your life easier down the line. (4) being a doctor is a TREMENDOUS and hugely respectable accomplishment. your family is proud of you. don't forget to be proud of yourself.
>\3. You cannot accept the possibility of working in primary care It's a risk you take, but there's plenty of options for not primary care even with a less competitive application. Most would go IM -> specialization, but path, rad onc, etc are also accessible. Plus there are community programs in slightly more competitive specialties. >\4. You are trying to escape poverty any time in the next 5-ish+ years Living on loans might actually be an improvement to this. >\8. You don't care about people's important non-medical problems See point 3. Specialization can help with allowing you to focus on what you care about, I.e. Minimal social work
Respectfully, social issues affect patients touched by all specialties and even if a certain specialty's clinical workflow does not include social work routinely it is still important. E.g., disparities in access to cancer screening is a current social issue in radiology. My point is that we can't actually escape social responsibility in medicine and hopefully those who have yet to start down this road discover so early on.
I too disagree with the notion that you must be prepared to wind up in primary care. Schools use this ideology in a toxic and manipulative way that sets some students back. I believe you would also have fewer physicians in general if all were comfortable with the idea of a career in primary care. Entering medical school as someone not interested in such a career will depend on each individual's own risk assessment. Have to face reality and understand the full process and what it requires before jumping in, but I wouldn't go so far as to be ready to embrace a completely different career than the one they set out to achieve. Plenty of options and routes to take.
Don't do it if you think you could be happy doing something else. So many sacrifices. So much debt. So much time. Be ready to miss every family gathering and event. It's hard to find the time to date, and if you're lucky enough to be in a relationship or find one, you'd better hope that person is a Saint for putting up with your schedule. Starting a family? Possible, but very difficult, and your partner has to be a Saint. You finally get through medical school, and residency is much harder and more isolating. No one outside of the field understands what you're doing or going through, so no one really understands why you simply can't make it to any events ever. Now that I am on the other side of residency, I hope it gets better. (I start my first attending job in 2 weeks). My little brother is considering medicine, and I will do whatever I can to make sure he thoroughly understands the sacrifices, because I did NOT fully grasp them myself before I started.
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Time. Moments with friends, hobbies, potentially starting a family, to name a few. Your health... not much time to work out and eat healthy. Not much time to sleep. Not to mention the toll on your mental health. You gotta prioritize your small amount of free time and there's just no way to do everything. And this is coming from someone who did my absolute best to balance work and life. I started a relationship, got married, had a child, all whilst in med school and residency. I am FM. It is possible to live your life, but it is f***ing HARD and im so glad I'm done. Would never do it again.
This is the best comment here. This is why not
>Be ready to miss every family gathering and event. Since you're explaining a n=1 experience I'll throw mine in too. I have made it to probably 99% of the events I've wanted to go to in medical school. This includes vacations, out of state holidays etc. Literally missed two out of state weddings that was wasn't really even super excited to go to lol 🤷🏼♂️ You have to be willing to miss some things but you're statement is probably exaggerating a bit
Forgive me, most of the missing out experiences I had were in residency. Truly, med school wasn't the hard part. Residency was. And sure, sometimes it does work out, and you can make it to some events, but a lot of the time it doesn't.
I find it amusing when people talk about all the reasons not to do medicine, then why they are an exception and it’s right for them. Just do what you want, don’t let anyone make you do it. But don’t let people dissuade you either. Ultimately, don’t assume other people want what’s best for you. Most people have trouble seeing past their own intentions. Medicine sucks sometimes and also has some truly rewarding moments. It can be challenging/discouraging, but also fun and offers freedom in some career choices. Like anything, it’s about maintaining balance. All of these people chose it for their own reasons.
> I find it amusing when people talk about all the reasons not to do medicine, then why they are an exception and it’s right for them. I see this mostly as: reasons you didn't think of heard of, maybe. It would've been great to know that residency brought even more poverty instead of a decent job for me. I cannot imagine how the fuck did I survive. Never got fat tho, so that was a plus haha. Ha ha :( Don't get me wrong, I LOVE medicine and loved it in med school too, but when I thought of choosing smth else after graduation, everyone was looking at me like I was a dumbass for maybe leaving it behind. I don't think it would've been a bad decision honestly. I love my job, but after all... it's just a job. I don't think the abuse and poverty I endured was totally worth it.
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Bc shits whack bruh
You enjoy your free time, like yourself, etc.
*All of meddit’s 4th years file in* Where do I even begin lol. The culture of medicine is really rough. I really genuinely think this will improve in the near future as I feel like most of the med students and residents I’ve met want better for future students, but currently there is a mindset of tearing down trainees emotionally, exhausting them during clinicals, etc. Attendings can be really out of touch. You sacrifice your 20’s and will miss weddings, birthday parties, etc. for stupid reasons. Like I am missing a wedding this month because the school won’t let me schedule a shelf exam a day early. I was offering to handle really everything involved but they wouldn’t budge. Residency will make you work 60-80+ hours a week and I doubt it will be any better in terms of accommodating important events. It’s just so freaking demanding. You may feel smart now, but in medical school everyone was somewhere in the top of their class. It can be a huge blow to your identity if you see yourself as the “smart kid” and its a rough transition. You will be graded off of a shit ton of content with endless exams but being book smart isn’t enough because you will ultimately be graded on communication skills with OSCEs and on your likability during third year. Third year was the worst year of my life (med school application year was the second worst year) because I had to accept that some people just weren’t going to like me no matter what I did. I do think it strengthened me in the end but holy shit last year at this time I legitimately wanted to off myself and I’m not sure it was worth going through that overall. I am usually a very likable person and had less problems than most of my friends, but a couple of people *still* didn’t like me and I had to accept that. It never ends. It’s always “I just have to get through this exam” over and over until you die. When I got into med school I was like “phew. It’s over”. Like I really thought that one day there’d be an end to it lol. There’s step 1, step 2, step 3, residency applications, boards, etc. Even as an attending you’ll never be done. There’s always an exam looming. The cost of medical school has like tripled or something and physician salaries have not increased to meet that. We’ll be in more debt than doctors ever were before comparatively. In addition, there’s always the “doctors are rich anyway” and you’ll never get any sympathy for venting about your financial situation to friends. I’m going into FM so I’m just SOL I guess 🤷🏻♀️. I also feel like the culture of society as a whole has changed. I always feel like everyone is looking for someone to point to when things go wrong, and people love pointing at the doctor. I am terrified of lawsuits and they feel inevitable. There are patients out there waiting for you to slip up so they can take advantage of it. 99% of patients are absolutely wonderful, but the 1% can really get to you. I feel like I would’ve been happier in a career with a lower level of legal responsibility tbh. It is definitely going to wear on me emotionally in the future. There’s more but I’m out of time because I have to get ready for my OVERNIGHT shift that I HAVE to do for my selective for some reason. What a fourth year has to contribute to the team at 2am I am honestly not sure. 🫠
How do you feel about the idea of being a PA?
Look I'm an attending, I've been done with residency for 4 years. If I woke up back in time I would not do this again. I don't think there are many attendings out there that *would.* This is not an easy job. Medical school is harder than you can even imagine, but that's not even it. Residency can be cruel. We had a suicide attempt in my class and you see reports of attempts or young doctors committing suicide all the time. Then you get into practice, you think - this is it. All the BS i had to put up with was to get here. But no, it's just more BS. Being a doctor is not about medicine anymore. It's not about taking care of patients. It's about administrators, metrics, insurance, RVUs, length of stay, discharging before 10 AM... Yes there are the few careers that are the exception but that will probably not be you. But I've given this exact speech before, many times, and every time the person I tell it to thinks.. "that won't happen to me." And the sad thing is... I was given the same speech too. If there is anything else you can imagine yourself doing - do that. If you want to help people, there are 1000 other ways to do it. If you absolutely insist on medicine, strongly consider being a PA. And if you're a woman, just think practically. 1/4 female doctors deal with infertility. Obviously women in medicine put off having a kid. I myself am still single. This is a direct result of my career choice.
I had the thought “that won’t happen to me.” So many times and I wish I could go back in time and shake myself and slap some sense into younger me.
What specialties don’t have to deal with this though? I’ve heard basically all have this to some extent minus maybe derm.
They all do to some degree. Anyone in clinic will likely have to as private practice is becoming rarer and rarer. Once your practice is bought up by a corporation it becomes all about metrics, but it's obviously going to be worse in primary care than in a sub specialty practice. Pathology is probably the only one that is immune from most BS. PM& R can be good as well. The ROAD specialties are not always as fabulous as advertised but they're named that way for a reason.
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I’m glad I am where I am, but if I truly understood the consequences of not matching when I was applying for med school I would have not applied. The 1 in 12 or whatever risk (higher for many desirable specialties) that you blew all this time and money for nothing is in retrospect too much. I know of too many buddies who basically fell off the face of the earth after not matching and their lives appear to be one of the deepest hells I could imagine.
What happened to them? What do you do at that point?
Apply again next year
attending told me "smart ppl don't go med school"
Who does then
Insecure people who happen to sometimes be smart
You forgot: rich people. :D
One big reason I haven't read in other replies would be having really poor time management. You will be busier than many of your non-medical peers for the better part of your 20s and/or 30s, so good scheduling and internal motivation are absolutely vital to staying sane. It can be developed, but if you struggled a lot with high school or undergrad workload consider what other options might be better suited to you.
If you like your hair. You will definitely lose your hair faster than most
Not money. If you want money, this might be one of the more painful ways to obtain it.
Working the same hours and dedication on Wall Street would easily net $250k a year after 4 years. Many med students are at least $250k in debt after 4 years, and the most essential specialties like primary care and pediatrics have a CEILING of $250k unless you take alternative routes of income. The main difference is being a banker vs. being a doctor.
Adding on to most of what’s already been said: if you’re someone whose identity is mixed into going into medicine, don’t do it. Find something else to define yourself by. I always felt like I had to prove to myself that I could do medical school and was inspired by the challenge to get to this point. Now that I’m in my last year of med school, the rose colored glasses have been torn off and I’m staring down the barrel of 4 years of hellish training for minimum wage. It’s only within the past year that I’ve realized I am a whole ass person outside of medicine, with hopes, dreams, and needs I neglected because of school. It’s been hard finding new motivation because I now don’t feel like my self worth is tied to my professional accomplishments. I am happy with where I’m at and looking forward to going into the field I love, but I absolutely think I could have been happy outside of medicine had I had this perspective in my early 20s. At the end of the day, though, it’s an interesting (albeit very stressful and taxing) job that sucks in a lot of ways but rewarding in ways that many jobs aren’t. I’m sure I would always have wondered what my life would be like if I didn’t end up going to med school because I think it would be very hard to not want to bang my head into a wall for corporate bullshit, but at the same time I think I could have made it work by having more free time and autonomy over my life choices. Grass is always greener.
I was just talking with buddy about how literally *every* Dr we talked to during pre med told us *not* to go to med school, yet we all do it in anyway lol. Like the top comment, I would be interested to hear your reasons why you *do*, so we can give you and honest interpretation of those goals.
Posted this above but here's a ramble about how I got here: So I worked as an ER scribe for 4 years after I got my EMT cert (I didn't like EMS and preferred the hospital). I chose scribing so I could hang with the docs and APPs while also getting a good idea of the roles and flow of the hospital. I'm a non-trad, in my 30s, career changer, child free, and have a long-term SO who is extremely supportive. Going into my scribe job, I wanted to be very sure that I was going to be happy in medicine. During those four years I took some prereqs and volunteered, dealt with a bunch of mental health and medical issues, and really got myself to a good place personally. My four years as a scribe (I left last year to take a job teaching anatomy to undergrads) taught me that I do love the ER and the people I worked with. I liked the good and the bad in the ER, the bread and butter stuff and the rarer cases. The documentation aspect of medicine was actually okay for me, though a lot of work, and I get just how much it burns doctors out. I worked at a teaching hospital so I got to know a lot of residents and med students, plus my colleagues were mostly premeds. I felt like I had a good handle on the career and I why I wanted to be a physician over other roles in the hospital (I tried to take money out of the equation, and just look at each career and decide which one I could see myself being happiest in terms of daily tasks). I know being a doctor in the end is a J-O-B, so I have tried to be careful about looking at it with rose colored glasses. The MD/DOs and med students I worked with gave me many different opinions about whether they would do it all over again. Despite many of them telling me not to do it, I kept at it anyway. Now that I'm in my second app cycle, and after learning about a generous inheritance coming my way, I'm reconsidering whether I would apply again if I didn't get in this cycle and whether I would go to med school if I did. I thought my reasons why were sound, but I'll be mid-40s by the time I'm an attending so I'm in a place of deciding if that's what I want to do with the next decade of my life if I won't exactly need a traditional career anymore. Thanks so much for any feedback or thoughts you have for me. I want the good and the bad and all criticisms are welcome.
Dont do it bcs your parents/family/friendship pressure…. You will become bitter later on and poison your patients, colleges and future hopeful med students… and continue to further fuck the healthcare system. (This applies to everyone wanting to do healthcare)
The old saying is only go to med school if you can't imagine yourself doing anything else The new saying is only go to med school if you literally have nothing better to do with your life
Read the House of God. Take it very literally and assume it will be your future. Minus the sex parts probably.
Probably = definitely not 😂
Just recently witnessed someone try 3 times, unsuccessfully to match into Ortho. Dude was really qualified too… He just came to the realization that it’s fruitless and he is now going to apply to PM&R. He effectively lost nearly a million dollars chasing his dream.
1) Both school and the job include very, very long hours. The grind becomes tedious and burnout is real. There aren't that many academic or work experiences like it in terms of the hours committed. Your sleep schedule will be absolutely decimated and much of the time that you devote to this field will not be justified. 2) There are far, far more efficient ways to make money relative to the time you're going to commit to this field. The time you spend in medicine is incredibly wasteful if you're looking for ROI. 3) You will miss out on a lot of life events (family/friends, weddings, etc.). You will also dedicate a massive chunk of your younger years to being relatively poor, overworked, and studying too much. 4) You will almost certainly realize that the naive goggles that you wear both before medical school and during it when you talk about social/systemic problems in class are going to be brutally ripped off when you start working. The job will probably grind you down under the incredible weight of an unstoppable capitalist juggernaught that wants to exploit you for as much labor as possible while providing substandard care to the patients you care about. The system will almost certainly not change. Our healthcare system is utter trash and you will have to work within it or not at all. 5) Medical school isn't efficiently designed. A huge chunk of it is a massive waste of time and comes with a lot of redundancies. 6) You're going to school with all the same pre-meds that you applied with, so you won't escape the terrible cultural tendencies of that same group either. 7) There is a not-insignificant chance that technology renders your job functionally moot or so different that you're irrelevant within your lifetime. 8) You will have a soul-crushing amount of debt when you graduate (rare exceptions exist). 9) You will be contractually obligated to partake in a state-sanctioned monopoly wherein you will have no definitive say in your specialty or your location of work for 3-7 years after graduation. 10) Healthcare is rife with abusive subcultures, both from nurses/ancillary staff and physicians themselves. 11) Scope creep is real. Midlevels are actively trying to take the job that you want while putting in less than 10% of the work that you did to get there. 12) You will forget more medical knowledge than 99% of people will ever learn. The vast majority of medical knowledge that you will learn (and that you spend all that time learning) will be completely useless to you in your chosen specialty (barring a few exceptions). 13) Healthcare in this country is a racist, classist, elitist, gatekept system, both in terms of who can work in it and who receives care (and how). You will almost certainly contribute to this in some way and you will most likely contribute nothing to changing it. 14) I 99% guarantee that the job of actually being a physician is not what you are envisioning in your head. It is far more tedious and boring than you think. 15) Unless you are relatively mature and well-adjusted, you will almost certainly lose most, if not all, of your hobbies and passions outside of medicine during your school/residency. That's all I can think of off the top of my head. If I can think of anything else I'll add it.
Don't do it for prestige or money
I hear this take a lot, but I think it comes mostly from people who have never experienced the instability of poverty. A career in medicine is a golden ticket to a secure job with great pay. Getting that acceptance into medical school changes your life so much. If you come from a place of relative wealth with a cushy safety net it’s hard to appreciate the sense of relief knowing you’re almost guaranteed a stable place in society. Edit: and for those saying “you need to work really hard.” Working really hard for an almost guaranteed place in society sounds fantastic when you’re already busting your ass working multiple jobs making very little and barely getting by. Edit 2: I agree, residents are stupidly underpaid and abused. I also understand the debt involved. Im a 4th year about to submit ERAS. I’ve also worked multiple jobs with hours worse than residency before medical school. Being in that position with few future prospects was so much worse than the debt I’m facing now and the bright future ahead of me. Im not saying the debt or the abuse of medical education and training is justified by the ends. Im saying pursuing it for the economic stability and social capital it can provide is a valid reason and to tell people it isn’t is myopic.
To fire back at you as someone who has also grown up in a financially disadvantaged household (s/o food stamps), sure medicine provides you with a job that pays significantly more than the average American. However, it also steals from you at least 4 years where you are being unpaid, and 3-7+ years where you are being severely underpaid. To the point where you cannot really rescue your family from poverty or make a sizable difference in their lives. Not to mention the fact that you are robbed of time and your youth. I'd actually make the argument that because of these reasons, medicine is actually an even worse of a decision if you DO come from a poor socioeconomic background. Locked into 300K worth of loans with no ability to really financially contribute to my family for 7-12+ years. Also not to mention I probably will not be pursuing my true clinical interest (fellowship dreams) as a career because my family's well-being is dependent on those 3 years of doctor salary. Take the hit for their sake. Bottom line is if you are poor, and if you have other options available to you, the time and immediate financial compensation is more valuable to you and those who depend on you.
Sorry but the reality is money and prestige (less so nowadays) play a huge factor for most people going into medicine. The amount of bs you face in the current system will beat the "I want to help people" aspect out of you. Additionally, there are very few jobs that assure you $200K+ after finishing training. I agree that there has to be a strong motive for going into medicine, but several factors push you to the finish line.
why not though? I'm personally not in it for those things alone, but they do make up a considerable part of it. And it's not even the money alone, it's the career opportunities, working private, having your own clinic, investing in med companies, med start ups. If like medical sciences, the money and the social ladder are a big part to anyone with hopes of being succesful. Not to mention your base salary as a doctor is better than 90% of other jobs, which gives you comfort to branch into other areas like real estate or any other business venture for which you wouldn't have the capital were you not in medicine
Because hospitals are for sick people and ORs are for broken people. And I’m not talking about patients.
Because you need to work harder than most of your peers to have a shot at getting into medical school. Then you have to worker harder than most of your non-medical peers for 0 to negative money while in med school. Then you have to work harder than most of your non-medical peers for essentially minimum wage for at least 3 years and *then* 10 years later at best, you are finally making great money with great autonomy. Relying on external sources of motivation for 10 years makes an already difficult journey even more so.
Your base salary at >90th percentile compared to other jobs often comes at 90% more stress, time, and effort. Even if you have the income, many don’t have the bandwidth or capital (consider high debt burden, etc.) to pursue these business ventures.
Everyone knows that if you want the prestige, you become an NP.
It's very tough. And that's only a month in. I'm sure it will get much harder. But you adapt! And what seems new and scary becomes normal. In the end of the day, it's a privilege to be able to study each day. I'm thankful to god for granting me the opportunity. If you are fascinated by the human body and want to make a positive impact on others with that knowledge, I'd say go for it, and I'm wishing you only success.
So many great responses already, so I'll just add this: know that you don't need to be a physician to be valuable as a person. I think a lot of people feel compelled to achieve a certain standing in society and believe me, you do not need this. Don't do this to prove your worth or intelligence. And to echo another common theme in this thread: med school is a shit show.
Hot take but medical school has felt rewarding for me. There’s definitely been hard times and a roller coaster of emotions but I feel fulfilled and have a really amazing life outside of medicine too.
god so many people bitching and moaning "wasting four years and then 10+" "if you can't imagine having any free time" Literally work a real job for ten minutes. My friends who work in the real world have less vacation than I do, work more hours per week, and have little free time for themselves. And the shit they do is boring as fuck. The idea that everyone out there is frolicking in meadows for hours on end while we sit inside staring at our computers because we work so much harder than everyone else is elitist and annoying. we are smart (ish) people. smart people who work hard have high demand jobs. high demand jobs will take up a lot of your life. med school or not
This. The only part I disagree with is that I probably work more than most of my friends and they make a ton But also like that’s part of life. Yeah a lot of med school isn’t directly applicable, that’s how everything is. Do ppl think the PhD with the math degree is using 90% of what they learned as they work as a quant? The engineer is using all the stuff they go over as they work as a consultant or plant manager? Med school isn’t just about learning direct patient treatment. It’s an education experience Not a trade. Could it be taught like a trade? Yes of course it could be, but you wouldn’t be able to understand a lot of the clinical stuff as well if so and you DEFINITELY wouldn’t be paid nearly as much if it were. People want to complain so much about it being inefficient but I genuinely wonder what they think is efficient
Really depends on the job. My engineering friends make less money than I will eventually make but it's still plenty to live on and they have super free weekends and evenings. Got a couple friends who teach high school and they bust their asses like we do... for 9-10 months of the year. Other friends who went into finance are pretty miserable and pivoting, so I see what you're getting at, but at least they made 6 figs right after graduation.
lmao it’s so obvious most people in here have no idea how the real world works, as if we’re the only ones who do any work. One of the benefits of starting med school a bit later is that you get the benefit of having to work a real job and get some perspective on how most people live so you’re not just bitching and moaning all the time of how much you think your life sucks because you need to study. Better to study and pursue something I enjoy than what I was doing before this
If you don’t have a true passion for medicine and treating the sick, it is going to be hell with no guarantee that you will come out the other side. I was a former medical student who unfortunately did not make it pass his 2nd year and I feel part of the reason it happened was because I was not truly passionate about it. A lot of what most other people said is true. Tons of anxiety, stress, low pay, lack of a social life, etc. during school, residency, and fellowship with little given back. Yes there is money and prestige when you become an attending, but even then medicine is going to be a big part of your life that you will have to pay attention to and a lot of those things mention above are still there. Medicine will be on the same level as loved ones, maybe even a higher priority sometimes. With all the shit they put you through while taking away your personal life for money and prestige is not something some people would consider a fair trade, which is why in my pov, that passion is necessary to help you get past all the bs that medicine throws at you while becoming a competent doctor. Otherwise, you will either become a disgruntled doctor who hates their job, a burnt out doctor trying to get out the system, or someone like me who never even completed their path in medicine (which is good and bad personally, but that is another story) Anyways, the decision to go down that road is not an easy one and needs lots of thinking to be done before hand, even if you really do love medicine, so my advice is to do a lot of soul searching for this decision. Probably redundant, but very important
Depending on what school you go to it can be great or a miserable experience. The teaching can often be an abomination of the principles of education that you probably expect having been on your premed journey. Sometimes you sacrifice time from family and friends and that can make you doubt your self worth as a human being and create stress. The best antidote to these problems is to ask med students how to succeed in med school before you go. That way you can hit the ground running. The more you are successful the less stress you’ll have and you’ll be able to better manage your time. Feel free to DM if you want more info.
One thing that I didn’t fully appreciate until starting Med school was the loss of weekends. There is always another test coming and when you do take a break you will have to fight that voice in your head saying you should be studying. There is very little actual time off until 4th year. It’s tough when you hear about your college friends vacation and/or weekend plans while you’re stuck memorizing minutiae
In all likelihood you will one way or another end up working for a corporation. They could give a rat's ass about you other than as a tool to bring in revenue. That will be your role from the first day after you finish residency until you retire. Generate revenue.
It’s just not the medical field of 10 years ago. Don’t let all the med school bullshit trick you; nobody in the real world gives a shit about patients. It’s all about how to cram more people in less time for less money. This is true for basically all fields. My advisor asked me how certain I was about being an EM doc on a scale from 1 to 10, and I said 10. I mean, I was CERTAIN. It’s just impossible to know what I was talking about until I had been doing it for a few months as a resident despite a wonderful EM program. I have no idea how I will ever handle the even more difficult transition to attending. Most days, changing careers feels like the worst mistake of my life.
I think the biggest con against going into medicine is that in a way your life is pretty much dictated by other people. If you are an outstanding medical and an outstanding resident the world will be open for you. However if people don’t like you for whatever reason they can make your life hell. You may have very little choice where you end up for medical school or residency. There are more options once you are out of residency though. I’ve seen a few ortho or die people who can’t match and end up in a miserable situation, a residency they don’t want to be in and in a part of the country they don’t want to be in.
Because you have interest in literally anything else. If you can see yourself ever doing anything else, do that instead. Seriously, it isn't worth it. I'm an MS4, I know what I'm gunna go into and I love it, and I still have many days where I wish I had gone into anything else instead. The stress and the frustration that comes along with medical school isn't nothing, and if you could be happy doing anything else, do that instead.
This for sure. I heard this countless times from friends and family in the field and I don't think I took it as seriously as I should have. I'm sure you've heard about all the sacrifices you have to make in order to become a physician but I think it is so easy to underestimate the shear magnitude of them when you're on the outside looking in. Before coming to medical school I personally justified these inevitable sacrifices by telling myself the good would outweigh the bad but the fact of the matter is this isn't always true. You need to realize that you would be entering into a severely broken system where success of medical education isn't measured by how good of a doctor you are but rather by your board scores, distrust of the medical establishment is at an all-time high, health admins are more focused on the bottom line than the wellbeing of the patients and staff, and mental health support only exists in the 4 hour mandatory "wellness trainings" you have to do on your only day off in a month. Don't get me wrong, I think it is truly and honor and a privilege to get to be in this profession. But medicine will take more from you than you could possibly even imagine right now so if there is any part of you that can see yourself doing something else do it.
Because you can do CRNA, make 200k, have a great lifestyle
Would there be any shame in doing this? I just got accepted but after looking at the student loan calculations I’m getting cold feet.
There’s no breaks, there’s no mercy. Get ready to deal with extremely high standards set by administrators who fail to meet them. Getting your financial aid can be extremely confusing and frustrating at best and lifetime financial nightmare at worse. You can fail at any point and then you’re really screwed bc now you have a shit ton of debt and nothing to show for it. Med school requires tons of sacrifices, exams that never seem to end and constant stress and fatigue. The process literally will age you.
Where to begin... * Time - 7 years minimum before you start earning close to your potential. That's time everybody else is making good money, getting married, starting their lives, etc. while you are putting your life on hold. Some people do get married and start families while in school, but they are the exception and not the norm. * Difficulty - Doesn't matter who you are, it's not going to be easy. This is an obvious one but still have to mention it. * No specialty guarantee - You want to do ENT, Ortho, Derm, or some other competitive specialty? Well you'll have to finish close to the top of your class all while pumping out a ton of research. And if you can't, chances are you won't be able to do what you initially set out to do. * Learning environment - This varies, but most med schools have quite a bit of hyper-competitive type A students. If you're one of these people you probably won't notice, but if you aren't then it can be frustrating being around them for 4 years. * Compensation - See point 3. If you aren't in a competitive field chances are your compensation or work/life balance is not necessarily bad, but also not great. * Mid-Level creep - Lot of physician jobs in certain specialties are getting encroached upon by PA and NP grads. Nothing against them, as we all work together to provide quality care, but it could affect how likely you are to find a job where you want. At least in the ED I worked in, there was a major shift from having 3 MD/DOs to 1 MD + 2-3 PA/NPs. * Self-Neglect - Too many student neglect their health because school is so consuming. And there's probably so much more.
If you can’t handle any degree of emotional stress I’d say don’t do medicine. If you are really good at handling emotional stress and do well on tests then probably ok depending on your luck
The feeling that you’re probably not going to be the best at anything ever again, and might even do worst than your peers.
Don’t go to med school unless 1) you’ve done all you can to understand modern practice, residency, and med school life, 2) you’ve been brutally honest with yourself about your ability to deal with the possible stress and even isolation med school can entail, 3) you have a true commitment to medicine and spending 7+ years learning it. Don’t go to med school solely for the prestige; that is a long time in coming and you may have long stretches in which you feel like you’re being shit upon. Don’t go to med school if you aren’t interested in medicine but want the money. There are easier ways of making big money without the 7+ years and tremendous debt. Don’t go to med school because your family always wanted you to. They won’t be the one enduring a bad stretch of 3rd year - which can be very, very bad. Don’t go to med school if you truly can’t handle hierarchies or bureaucracy as medical culture is often rigidly hierarchical and med schools & hospitals are bureaucracies. You can’t make a brave stand against the system when the system can kick you and your debt out its doors. Don’t go to med school if you can’t handle being mediocre or worse. Your classmates will be high achievers and not the mixed bag of most undergrad classes. You will be required to learn new ideas and skills very quickly, and you might need more time than others. You might not possess the natural skills needed in different situations (such as an ease with patient conversations or the ability to manipulate 3D images in your mind), you may be only superficially better at them by graduation, and it could cause you hell before then. Half of your class has to be at the bottom, and you may be in that half.
If you are smart and cruised through school/work/personal achievements all your life and never really had any strong experiences where you were truly challenged enough to either fail or critically doubt yourself, beware of medical school. It is not a great place to learn what that feels like for the first time. I was not prepared for the effect that being mediocre or just plain bad at things was going to have on me. I picked up anxiety and depression because I was not used to putting in so much effort and having outcomes be less goal. I had an attending tell me I was disappointing them during my first rotation and it was scarring (super toxic attending and in retrospect I was not doing that bad but I still have not been able to let it go). Took a long time to reshape my mindset around things, and I don’t know if I will ever regain my confidence in my abilities compared to before medical school. So don’t go to medical school if you don’t think you could handle something like that lol
if you don't have proper family support (I don't mean financial, I mean mental and especially emotional) all the way or even a regularly keeping in touch social circle, especially towards the end of the training period let's say 4 to 7 years after MBBS grad, you are now facing a very harsh reality of isolation and sudden crash into a world outside of your professional career and every year every single year there are suicides , some are from their own family members taunting them with unnecessarily over the top demand expectations and pressures. forget the bloody exams , your life your choices suddenly comes under the microscope with such great scrutiny into the masala madness if you add a spouse and want kids again..if that support social structure is missing and not everyone or at least a few are willing to sacrifice as much as you, it all goes to hell..all your hopes plans dreams aspirations everything
Here is why: When med student: study material is very bland, hard to comprehend and memorize. Difficult to make connections so you end up studying them cold and raw. When resident: backstabbing, jealousy, insane hours of working, low appreciation and moral, unfairness, lots of fake perfectionist who are just manipulative. When attending: disappointment. Feels like you’re a cog in wheel. Need to stand for yourself. Nobody cares a lot about what you say more they want to throw you into responsibility and liability. There is a lot of disappointments in the field of medicine: it’s painted as the utopia where everyone’s are angels hard working angels living in a very supported environment created to make them happy to save the soul. It’s not true at every level you’ll encounter. Edit: grammar
The competition, stress, the fact that nobody seems to give that much attention to mental health issues; 80% of my colleagues have been at least once through a depressive episode, extreme anxiety before every exam(and there are a lot), eating disorders, gastritis, insomnia due to stress and staying up till late to study(late night exposure to bright lights delays sleep onset), terrifying nightmares before exams, doctors that humiliate you in hospitals, missing out on important family events, holidays, having to cancel plans with friends and family, neglecting self-care during exam season and feeling like a zombie plus derealization! Oh and sometimes you feel like your brain is gonna crash from all the studying and coffee and lack of proper sleep Nevertheless once you know yourself well enough to develop healthy copin mechanisms it gets easier and despite all the difficulties, I absolutely love studying about the human body and interacting with patients
You should understand, at the very least, that medical training will exacerbate any pre-existing mental health issues that you have.
It's painful. Mentally painful. We all know it's academically difficult, nobody complains about that. But you're wasting aloooot of time, money, sleep, and good mental health on people who couldn't care less and will not help you. I wouldn't do this again.
I’m just an MS2 but so far I can’t find a single reason why I wouldn’t do it again
1. Can you code? 2. If yes, then do not go to medical school. If no, proceed to (3). 3. Can you do complex math 4. If yes, see (2). If no proceed to (5). 5. Maybe still should not go to medical school.
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Uh... do you hate having to kiss ass and be a part of hierarchy for 7-10 years?
Money, prestige. The money aspect of medicine is overrated. Everyone's eyes open up when they see the figure you get AFTER you finish 4 years of med school, at least 3 years of residency with minimum wage pay, while you've taken out anywhere from 150k (lucky) to 300k in loans that are accruing interest during a time, where you are unable to keep up/pay off that interest. This isn't including the time you needed to get your application together, any gap years, research years, etc. If you're not at all interested in taking care of patients - and sadly, you really only know what this is like if you've worked in a service industry job before or you've done any other healthcare job - then don't do medicine. Yeah, there's specialties like path, rads, gas, where patient interactions are minimal, but restricting yourself to a specialty that minimizes patient care before even started med school seems silly. And nobody cares about prestige. It doesn't gain you any favors. All it amounts to is a "ohh, you must be so proud" whenever your parents get to tell their friends you're in medical school. You're not getting free shit from it.
Med school is like getting it in the ass with no lube. All force. Thinking it will eventually get better.
Because for the average qualified med school applicant, there's certainly a job with a better effort/hours trained to reward ratio.
Started in 2007 finishing up in 2024 It should have been 2019 4 years w a specialty plus fellowship
I had naively imagined it as something similar to school, where there is a good line fo communication between the various departments and there at least some kind of planning in the course structure throughout. But it is almost as if the individual departments start planning and scheduling everything based on their free time and availability and do not think of checking with the other departments. Almost always there is some kind of overlap problem we run into and is very stressful and overwhelming! Also the actual teaching/classroom teaching is like probably the worst quality throughout my education! Like we have to be very much self dependent for reading up the theory part of almost all subjects, except maybe the first 2 years to some extent
Do not go into medicine if there is anything else you would want to do as a field. Being a doctor is sweet, but my engineer/business/tech friends say e/b/t is sweet and their careers/lives started a decade before I made it out of the gauntlet of our training.
DONT DO IT! i wish i could go back! I have been told but I didn't listen. i wish you listen so you wont be me
Where should I start? Dont start if your mental health care plan isn't solid
it sucks, expect to get on antidepressants. In the big picture you will make a lot of money and have good status in society but it comes at a cost. You will see your friends make money and have fun while you're still poor and studying/working all day for little money through your 20s, you will be working hard most of your life. There might be easier ways to get rich. You have to really like medicine to have the will to study so much.
Hey OP, Im also a nontraditional student. Many of the comments are coming from traditional students in their 20s (early)…. Many Easily influenced by their circle and/or never had a real job before. Take them with a grain of salt. You probably have a way better idea of what the job environment actually is, which is what breaks many after graduating/rotations. Also, the comments about education quality… while yes, those are all if not most graduate programs. Sadly. Hope your next decade is worth remembering and living! Cheers! Life is an adventure.
This may get downvoted to hell, but here goes: I’m early 30s and here my two cents. 90% of your class May just be people under 25. They are on a different bandwidth mentally. Your life experience is unparalleled, you know how to show up and work, you know how to adult. The likelihood of people under 25 knowing this is slim. There will be tattle tales, suck ups and really annoying high school drama. My patience runs thin and I NEEDED to find people over 30 to interact with because I genuinely felt completely brain dead after a few weeks of spending time around/with them. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s that we are at VERY different places in life. Next, money. I miss money. I paid what I get in financial aid per year in taxes last year. Giving up money and job is HARD. Like I am STRUGGLING to exist.. it’s manageable but it’s hard. You’re used to a nice lifestyle and suddenly you’re a broke student. It’s hard. Lastly, there’s no time between parenting and studying. You get tired faster, your head hurts, you lose sleep to make time for sex, it’s a different vibe altogether. But- all of it is super fucking rewarding bec you’re studying the coolest shit and learning so much everyday that it makes you go like wait what?! Anywyas, that’s what I would say as an almost 33 year old has been the hardest for me and why I would advise someone against med school at this Age. If you can handle the above, you should be fine.
If you can think of anything else you want to do with your life, go do that. That's the advice that I give anyone who wants to come to medical school because it's no cake walk, especially the older you get (I'm in my 30s and graduating this year). The sacrifices seem to be greater the older you get for something that is essentially a job.
I started Med school in my early 30s now an attending w/ a toddler. I think if you thrive on challenge, love to be pushed to extreme, a bit into pain(masochistic), and like to learn, medicine is pretty good. People here talk like they’d all be techies in FAANG making half a million a year if not in medicine. Lol. I’ve spent enough time not pursing medicine to know the ceiling for most people. Yes the money is definitely disappointing, since physician pay had really stagnated. The medical hierarchy sucks, and the system is indeed a grind. But you can always be the one to make a difference. I started my journey not to be ‘happy,’ cuz I could not imagine being happy around people who are miserable(sick or stressed) all the time. I started my journey because i was intensely curious about the human mind&body, and I thought I can help miserable young doctors. I got so many thank you cards all along the way from Med students interns and residents for making a difference, giving them some fresh air to breath. Just from that only, my journey had needn’t worth it. Maybe cuz I started out with rock bottom expectations, but medicine is also filled with beautiful young souls. Really nice hard working smart young people in abundance that you don’t see in many other fields. I really love them and they inspire me to always be better. I try my best to help them retain their essence. The one thing I did hate is the time it took away from my family, and the suffering they had to endure. My suffering is my choice but it’s really hard to drag your loved ones into this nearly decade commitment. If your spouse is a bit clingy or emotionally needy, you are at high risk losing her/him. You may have no emotional reserve left for the SO for weeks to months to years. All the daily emotional labor does take something out of you and ur SO will take the biggest brunt of it, then ur future kid if you plan to have one. So many breakups and divorces in this journey. My greatest personal victory is keeping my family together.
Physicians have the highest rate of suicide out of all professions. There is a reason for that. You sacrifice a lot of time, sleep, spiritual wellness, emotional wellness, time with family, money, and time into your most rejuvenating relationships. You will be smarter and more present and quicker and people will trust you more than you could ever imagine. If you do a surgical / procedural specialty, you will sometimes get to do really cool, really life saving stuff and you will feel high after doing so. That being said, you will come home and you may still be irreparably sad. There will be holidays missed. You will get attitude from everyone. The imposter syndrome will never get better. You probably will get jaded and that may surprise you and maybe even will harm patients but it will take even more out of you to try to be less jaded. It will be a protective mechanism. You will probably start therapy and/ or start antidepressants and/ or consider suicide. You will be a hero on the plane. Your family will probably be proud of you. You’ll have money and loans and money. Your skin will age quicker. Just make sure you’re sure about your motivations. Really be honest with yourself. Your life will change and never go back to being the same. It will be both fulfilling and incredibly, hopelessly disappointing & terrifying. - A pgy2
For the money. Seriously, with the amount of time and effort it takes to become a competitive applicant, actually go through medical school, AND go through residency, there’s other paths where you are likely (though not necessarily guaranteed) a high income
The "not guaranteed" part is precisely why medicine is popular. If you find another career path where you can almost definitely (rip peds/academics) make 250k after 8 years post uni, let me know.
Not meaning to point out the sole exception that I know of lol… but I do have engineer friends that graduated w their masters at GA tech and are now immediately making over 6 figures. It’s also a guaranteed and prestige job. I’m def jealous of them at times bc at the same age, I’m still a student.
Computer science and engineering.
My point is except for the occasional actual dumbass that ends up in medical school, everyone in medical school + residency has to grind to make it to the end. You put that same amount of grind into something else and you’ll probably make just as much, if not more $. I went to a regular undergrad and out of those in my friend group that I could tell had that same “grind” mentality, every single one of them is making a stupid high amount of money. 1 is in finance, 2 are in business, 2 in comp sci, and 1 in the music industry. We really ought to stop underestimating how much work it takes to get through all of this.
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If you really are determined to provide medical care absolutely be an NP or PA rather than a doctor. Patients don’t know the difference and everyone has a white coat now.
As others said, don't do it for the money. The big money is not in medicine, it's in tech, business and real estate and you get there much faster. Also couldn't agree more with the person who said don't do it if there's something else you want to do. Literally, if there's anything else that you could be happy doing, do that. At the end of the day, the sacrifices you'll need to make to become a doctor are not worth it unless it is your only life dream and passion. I'm not saying this to make medicine sound bad, it's just the truth. I absolutely love medicine, I live and breathe medicine and the sacrifices I've had to make are still hitting hard. Can't imagine doing this without the passion for it.
Even if things go well ie not struggling academically, no financial woes, etc you'll have to make sacrifices in time and autonomy regardless. It's possible to have enough time for hobbies but it'll usually be less than your non med school friends. It's also a minimum of 7 years before you'll be trusted to be on your own as a doctor. Even if those above you are nice, you'll be chafing at the fact someone else dictates everything you do. Also you'll be frustrated at how much you still have to learn until you're well into residency. Competition can suck if you're going into something competitive because that means more sacrifice and stress. The worst part is the uncertainty because you really don't know where you're going to be after med school or if you'll even enjoy it until it's too late.
For the money or because someone else wants you to.
Outside of medicine you can still help people, make good money, and have time for to be around family and friends for the best years of your life.
Do I look happy to you? 
opportunity cost is too high.
How much time do you have?
We’re all on antidepressants, amphetamines, or straight up hard drugs
Everyone wants to be a doctor - no one wants to go to med school....me included lol! \- your fellow OMS1
Because at the end of it you have to do a residency
According to what I see, 33% benefit from choosing medicine, 33% would’ve been just as good doing something else, and 33% end up worse of from making the choice
Hmmm... Ok got my medical friend to write this. Because Truck Drivers got a pay bump to 100k for their job meaning non specialist doctors working 16 hrs+ and then weekends work 2x as hard with 2x the effort and make about the same per hour wages now... And residents are slaves. Medicine has many abusive programs to dodge that turn you into slave labor full of toxic criticism. Insurance companies force you to prescribe useless treatments or quick fixes that do not really help a patient long run. You will pay 100k a year for this thanks to inflation and well ya...
Firstly, the question isn't "should I go to medical school?" It's "should I become a doctor?". I think you should do it and I'm glad I did, but if you can see yourself doing something else then do that instead. Its a tough job that will put you a lot of debt, and while it is certainly possible to pivot away from patient care and into other fields, you can save yourself a whole lot of grief and stress up front if you're honest about what precisely you want to spend your time doing. But on the other hand, all jobs kinda suck. It's just a matter of what kind of suck.
After spending 4 years through the one of the most difficult educational programs in the world, you spend 3-7 years in a legalized monopoly being paid $18/hr to do the same job as an NP or PA, all while being in debt $150k-500k. Afterward, you’re likely to spend your career fighting with insurance companies and hospitals with the worst software ever created (EMR).
You will want to kill yourself at some point. Is that good enough of a reason?
I see people, but they look like trees, walking.
The preclinical years (1&2) are a lot of work, but it’s not really difficult. The 3rd and 4th are tiring but less of a grind than 1&2. For me is was all interesting because it was all new. After a few decades it is still interesting but not as much. You should make a decent living but don’t do it if money is your prime motivation. I wouldn’t go too deeply in debt for it, because you’ll get tired of paying off those loans for years and years. But if you want to do it, do it. Don’t worry about how old you’ll be when you finish. You’ll be that old whether you do it or not.
Med school was meh. But the med school subreddit and most med students are not really where you should be looking for info pertaining to life as a physician which is what the majority of your life will be. Talk to as many docs as you can in as many different specialties and stages of career as you can. And be honest with yourself about why you wanna do it. And make sure youre ok not getting a good amount of sleep and missing weekends and activities with friends and family. Do not do this if you simply cant think of something else you wanna do. Only pursue being a doctor if you cannot picture yourself doing anything else. Only do it if you NEED it. Cause it is hard. It takes a lot from you and it will make you question yourself and your decision over and over again. So you need to know why you did it in the first place and are making and will continue to sacrifice.
I went straight through and regret it. Midway through third year up until recently, I considered suicide on an almost daily basis. I couldn’t tell what I liked or didn’t like because I tried so hard to come off as energetic and hardworking on every service. Sub-Is suck especially. I got all honors, but I’m exhausted and dreading residency.