I’m doing a PhD in Biology rather than working on an MD for a couple of reasons. First, everything I’ve read, seen, and heard about med school makes it sound like pure utter hell to me. Combine that with the fact that even after their education is over, doctors often work long, shitty hours. I want to have an actual life with my family some day.
Secondly, I am introverted and more than a little misanthropic. I was meant for a more-or-less solitary role in a lab, not caring for or dealing with actual sick people. It’s best for all concerned.
I used to get this question a lot- with a PhD in biology, people ask me why I didn’t want to be a “real doctor”. In fact one year for halloween, when I was working writing biotech patents in an IP law firm, I dressed up as a real doctor- my lab coat and my son’s toy doctor kit. Other scientists got it, the lawyers didn’t!
My mother is a physician and watching her over the years in terms of hours committed, debt accumulated, and overall inability to separate work life from home life made it clear to me that if there was one profession I didn’t want, it was that.
I had excellent grades, especially in the sciences, and scored very well on both the GRE and GMAT. I suspect the MCAT wouldn’t have been too bad had I taken it. In the end when I was ready to go to graduate school, I didn’t know what I really wanted to do, so I said “what program least pigeon-holes your future career, takes a reasonable amount of time to complete (without follow-on schooling and slave labor requirements), and pays your debt back the fastest in terms of a significant bump in pay?” The answer? MBA!
Okay, whew, I was beginning to think I was the only one who never pictured as a child being a doctor. I knew it was a good thing to be, as doctor was the standard fill-in for What You Should Be, but I’d daydream about other stuff, like being a dancer, or singer even though I can’t sing, and I was probably the only 9 year old around who spent a lot of time fantasizing about being a Supreme Court Justice.
I’ve always found doctor offices and hospitals to be unpleasant places. It has nothing to do with the people who work there (who are usually kind and pleasant); they just creep me out. It never even occurred to me that I would want to work in either, even though I had the academic ability and discipline to do so.
I never wanted to be a doctor, even though I was good in math and science. I wanted to be a scientist, either a physicist or an astronomer. I ended up as a physicist, although now I’m a software engineer.
The only person from my childhood who actually wanted to be a doctor was my cousin, and he did become a doctor. He is a pediatrician.
Yup, this. I have plenty of things I fantasized about being that I’ll never follow up on, for many reasons, some more or less valid than others. Heck, I still don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up, and I’ve had a ‘career’ job for six years now. I just never particularly wanted to go into medicine.
(There’s a lewd joke somewhere with that last sentence, and the fact that I’m about to marry a doctor.)
Because being a doctor is a crappy job. Menial, little thinking involved, but requiring constant extremely high stakes decisions with minimal information; one false word and someone is hurt or worse. Hours stink. No room for intellectual curiosity. I knew it then, and now having an MD and a wife who practices medicine I know it even more.
Thank goodness not everyone feels this way, though more and more practicing physicians do, judging from my wife’s co-workers.
That’s more or less how I feel about it too. I work in labs right now, enjoying being behind the scenes while remaining an important player in medical science.
I probably didn’t quite have the grades for med school, and I definitely didn’t have the massive amount of volunteer and extra-curricular activities that they look for in the applications.
Honestly, I would love to go to med school and learn all that stuff, but I don’t have any desire to go through residency and be treated like shit and never sleep again, and I’m not sure I’d want to deal directly with patients anyway. I belong in the lab.
Nope, in my view the doctor’s office was a strange, scary place where you never knew what they were going to do to you or stick in you, only that it might be painful. I no more fantasized about being a doctor than I fantasized about being a torturer.
My chemistry skills are seriously lacking. I am a college student who had contemplated going the pre-med track, but my experience with chemistry last year was horrible. I had never had chemistry in high school and so I found myself in a large class full of people who had prior experience with it, and the class was too fast paced to make up for those of us who were falling behind.
With that said, the professor encouraged me to drop the class. She said it was a “weed out” class where they encourage anyone who is not good at it, to consider another path. I was told that anyone unable to get a B+ or greater, is likely not going to succeed at the other science classes (organic chemistry, biology) to the extent that medical schools would look highly upon it, and that it would be better to find another path.
2) I do not have the patience to deal with people and would likely make an incompetent doctor anyway.
I am now an economics major. It suits me much better.
I don’t like touching people I don’t know. Especially the sick ones. Looking back I see there are plenty of medical fields that wouldn’t require me to touch sick people but I didn’t know that at 18 or 20 when I had to decide the course of my education.
I am a doctor. There are plenty of good reasons not to become one:
Crummy hours for a number of years during training if not throughout your whole career.
The “prestige”/respect for doctors isn’t what it used to be. Anyone who has googled their symptoms thinks they know more than you do and often by the time they see you they have gotten attached to the idea of some miracle cure they read about online and won’t be happy with anything else.
Throughout the training processes it is normal to be subjected to verbal abuse and humiliation from your superiors (and when you’re a med student pretty much everyone who works in the hospital is your superior).
Eventually you make good money but you have to take out a huge amount of student loan debt for med school. I had 200k in debt from med school and I know others with more debt. God help you if you flunk out of med school or get fired from residency, cuz if you don’t make it to the end of the marathon of medicine training you ain’t never paying off that debt (and you can’t get rid of student loans in bankruptcy so basically your life is ruined)
Also, have you ever smelled a homeless alcoholic with gangrene or a nursing home patient with a very long-neglected bed sore? On tv patients look clean and pretty. Real Patients can be pretty stinky. Oh and I didn’t even go into the ways that poor hygiene and malodorous vaginal discharge can create a perfect storm of evil.
I actually enjoy my job more often than not but almost all of us become cynical to some degree by the end of residency.
Long story short, be a doctor if you seriously enjoy medicine and have had enough patient contact to be confident you’d enjoy interacting with (and smelling) patients. If you don’t like that stuff stay away. It’s not a good road for people who just want to prove to everyone else they’re smart or want to make a lot of money. People like that do get into med school sometimes but you’ll pay dearly for it.
In fact one year for halloween, when I was working writing biotech patents in an IP law firm, I dressed up as a real doctor- my lab coat and my son’s toy doctor kit. Other scientists got it, the lawyers didn’t!