My daughter is living in London, and has made several trips to her English doctor. She says that doctors don’t go through medical school after college, but rather take it as a college major. Does that mean that US doctors are better trained, or overeducated?
Not sure if they’re better trained, possibly the qualification route is simply different. As a doctor in the UK you will spend five years doing a general medicine degree then another three years working as a junior doctor (usually doing doing a few placements to get a feel for different parts of medicine) before then going off to specialise, so in all it takes about 8 years to fully qualify. Also certain specialisations like psychiatry require more academic training (masters level) and then FURTHER junior status in that field.
Minor hijack - from watching films/TV I don’t quite get how tertiary education in the US operates. It appears people go to college (what we would call university) and then got to ANOTHER college to do their specialism. Like (cringing at using this example) Reese Witherspoon’s character in Legally Blonde does what I assume is a bachelors at UCLA then goes to Harvard to study law. In the UK you would go to university to study law then do some further training (about a year) to specialise into either being a solicitor or barrister, but you don’t go to university twice.
In the US (and most of Canada as well) law and medicine are professional degrees, which means that you need a bachelor’s degree (or at least a few years of university studies) to even be admitted to these programs. But if you’re not doing a professional degree, you don’t need to change universities (and you can do your undergrad and professional degrees in the same universities as well).
Here in Quebec (and from what I see in the UK as well) law and medicine are undergraduate degrees. You don’t need a prior degree to study them.
Undergraduate work in the U.S. for the most part qualifies you for nothing at all. It’s to teach you how to do academic work if you want to go further and give you some polish and experience if you don’t. It’s just a ticket to punch, which is why more than 50% of high school graduates go on to college today.
Becoming an expert in any subject - from English and Art History through advanced Physics and Engineering to a myriad of professional degrees including journalism, architecture, and nursing - you have to get at least a Master’s Degree or the professional equivalent. Getting a Ph.D. varies by field. You don’t usually need one in a professional degree unless you’re planning to teach the subject and the same is true for most non-science degrees. In virtually all the sciences, though, you need a Ph.D. to do any work in your field, even outside academia.
What you’re describing is called graduate or professional school, and it’s certainly not the norm in all professions. You can, for example, get a bachelor’s degree in education and start working as a teacher immediately. Medicine and law are different; those subjects normally are not offered as majors at the undergraduate level. Typically, an aspiring lawyer would study a subject like English or history at the bachelor’s level and then apply to graduate programs in law (an additional three years of study after the BA, and technically a doctoral degree, although nobody with a JD is actually called “Dr.”). The career path in medicine is similar, except the student would be expected to have a bachelor’s degree (or at least extensive coursework) in the sciences.
It is certainly possible to get a graduate or professional degree at the same institution where you got your undergraduate degree, assuming it’s a university that offers that particular degree.
We don’t refer to postgraduate work of any sort as “college,” by the way – that’s the undergraduate degree. We would call it “law school,” “medical school,” “grad school,” etc. (“Grad school” is a catchall term that can refer to many different degrees, but would more typically be used for a program where the goal is a PhD and an academic career, rather than a professional program.)
Many British medical students also obtain another undergraduate degree on the way to their degree in medicine, IME. Many students in Edinburgh, for instance, take a year out halfway through the course to complete a BSc in Medical Biology or some other related field.
Also, I lived with two final year vet(erinary medicine) students last year. They work really hard, and the standard course is longer than a normal degree (5 vs. 4 years, without interleaved extra degree). Getting an undergrad degree in vet medicine isn’t the same as getting an undergrad degree in English, for instance.
The American law degree used to be an undergraduate “Bachelor of Laws (LLB)” as in the UK, but starting in the late 19th/early 20th law schools starting requiring prior undergrad study (eventually full degrees). As law became a graduate program the name of the degree was changed “Juris Doctor (JD)” to reflect it’s new status (Yale was the last to award the LLB in 1971). Unlike in the UK there isn’t any practical training or apprenticeship required after finishing law school. As soon as you pass the bar exam you’re a attorney at law and can take clients and appear in court. A few states still allow lawyers to qualify the old fashioned way (articles of clerkship under a judge or attorney) instead of law school, but it’s very rarely done.
I just might add that the bar exam is not an examination administered by the law school itself. It is a state-wide exam for all prospective lawyers. Each state has it’s own bar exam, though some states recognize the bars of other states.
In many cases in the US you can go to a medical (or veterinary, in which I’m more familiarized) without having done a bachelor’s degree… as long as you take and pass the required science, math, and other classes and the standarized tests… And of course apply and get interviews and all that…
But the route to getting those courses done is so hard that many students just finish a bachelor’s before applying to vet or med school. Plus it gives you more time to work on other things like research opportunities, practical experience, jobs, etc. that will make you a better candidate that one who comes “fresh”.
I don’t see the UK (and many Europeans, heck most countries) way as less rigorous. In a way it is more… Think about cramming the bachelor degree with the medical school part and that’s their medicine/professional degree (before specialization). Of course, a lot of “fluff” courses are removed, and whether that is good or not can be debated.
Also, college (university) is different here. Undergraduate degrees are three years, rather than four, and are specialised. So it’s three years stuyding your major, rather than two years liberal arts plus two years of your major.
Define fluff - you still have to do courses that aren’t actually directly related to fixing sick people like medical ethics.
That’s pretty related, though isn’t it? It’s not like British science undergraduates have a requirement to study X hours of art courses, like Americans do.
But to be clear, you must reapply – and law school admissions are different and often more rigorous than the undergraduate admissions at the same school. For example, NYU’s undergrad program is 34th in the nation (which isn’t too shabby), but the law school is tied for 4th in the nation with Columbia, a “Ivy League” university.
I was rejected by the law school of my undergraduate university (William & Mary… sob)
Nitpick: undergrad degrees in Scotland are normally four years. The actual structure varies between universities, though.
Depends which “here” Blue Mood is in, if he/she is in England then it’s three.
In many ways, I wish the arts/social science folks at my university (Glasgow, 1990-94) had been required to do some basic “Introduction to Science” type things. Some of them, especially those from English schools, appeared to have studied no science since they were about 13.
Fair enough. I made the assumption that the poster was in England, but his/her location field only says “UK”.
That is not fluff, that is related to medicine still. I meant what others have said, in many American universities, you don’t really get to concentrate on your major until two years in. You have to take some courses in English, math, social sciences, etc… It doesn’t matter if it is remedial or not, there are harder introductory courses for those ahead. It is possible to test out of some of those requirements, but many majors still require X amount of hours in classes outside your field.
I did undergrad in 3 years, taking up to 7 classes per semester (I’m couting science labs as classes), and going to school over summers. I still had to take a lot of “general education” courses. They wanted me to take math, even though in high school I had taken up to Calc II!!! Thankfully, I was able to solve that glitch and graduate. And my concentration? Animal science, with minor concentrations in zoology and Portuguese (see, I took all the electives required for my degree in Portuguese).
Would-be doctors in the UK go to Medical School. This is from a BMA guide.
Medical Schools are attached to universities.
My wife is currently a medical student in the UK.
Her course is specifically for students who have already received an undergraduate degree; as such, they fast-track the medical degree (4 yrs rather than 5yrs). This is not the norm, however.
She studies only for a degree in MBChB but could leave the course midway through with a degree in biomedical science.
My brother studied medicine as an undergraduate and did not undertake any further degree study (although professional on-the-job training continues for several years for both approaches).