So You Think You Want To Be A Doctor
In theory, being a doctor seems like a great career option. It's honorable, you get to care for people in their most challenging times, there are a variety of interesting fields and opportunities. But how do you decide if it's really for you?
Deciding to become a doctor
There are a couple of key factors that can help you decide if becoming a physician is the right career choice for you.
Make sure you find the material interesting. You will spend a decent chunk of medical school learning anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and pharmacology. Then you will spend a decent chunk of the rest of your life learning more detail about the human body, the organ systems, how to recognize and diagnose medical conditions and diseases, and how to speak to and treat human beings. If you're someone who passionately hates biochemistry, that's something you can probably power through. But if you find the human body to be boring or bodily functions to be gross, that's probably going to be a difficult hurdle.
Get experience in the field. Television loves to glamorize medicine with shows like Grey's Anatomy and House. It's important to get real experience. Many hospitals have shadowing or scribing opportunities. I personally walked into my local pediatrician's office and met with the head physician there and told him I was a premed student who was potentially interested in outpatient pediatrics, and he hired me for the summer so I could get a feel for things.
Talk to people in medicine. See if there's any type of liaison program in your college or university that can put you in touch with alumni who went into medicine. See if you have family, friends, or friends of friends or family who are in the medical field. In the days of social media, you can always reach out to people online as well, but the best way to get the stark truth is through regular people who have nothing to gain or lose by being honest with you.
Think about your reason. Why do you want to become a doctor? If your answer is anything that sounds like "doctors make a lot of money" or "my parents want me to" or "they're so important" or "they look so cool on TV," it might be time to rethink it. Make sure your "why" is something more intrinsic than extrinsic. Maybe your grandfather passed away from cancer or you had a major surgery as a child or you really want to help people or you think the human body is fascinating. If your reason isn't something that's inherent to the job and what you actually will spend your days doing, you're not going to be happy with your choice, especially when you're working crazy hours as a resident.
You need to be able to work under pressure. Medical school it's incredibly challenging and moves at a very rapid pace, covering enormous amounts of material in a short amount of time. Residency will have you working many hours a day for many days straight without a break and during that time you will have people's lives in your hands. It’s going to be important to be able to handle a stressful environment.
The timeline of becoming a doctor
Okay so you went through these questions (or maybe you didn't, that's okay too) and you know medicine is for you. This is it, you want to be a doctor. Now it's important to know what you're signing up for. There are a lot of complexities in becoming a doctor, including many sets of required exams and options regarding the timing of these exams. For the sake of this post, I will discuss a very basic timeline of the training alone and will not be going into detail regarding the exams. Stay tuned for a later post with more information regarding the types of exams you will take during and after your medical training.
Regarding the timeline of training itself, there are two options - the traditional path and the nontraditional path.
The Traditional Path
This refers to individuals who go straight through their training without any breaks or extra education. These people will go from high school to college to medical school to residency.
First you'll need to complete the pre-requisites that are required to apply for medical school. Many colleges and universities have a pre-med major or track that you can follow to complete your requirements. This does not necessarily mean you will have to major in a science. If you want to major in something like Journalism because you enjoy it, and do your pre-med requirements, that will most likely be very achievable. At the very least, you will need to take chemistry, biology, organic chemistry, physics, and the labs for each of these courses. Additionally, many medical schools also require biochemistry, an English class, and a math class (usually calculus but statistics may be useful as well).
The next step will be medical school. Now, there are some combined undergraduate and medical school programs. For the sake of this post we will talk about the standard medical school training. Typically medical school lasts four years - the first two years, or the "preclinical" years are spent in the classroom while the latter two years or the "clinical" years are spent on rotations through medical specialties. Usually the third year consists of primarily general surgery, internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, psychiatry, and some electives which can include neurology, emergency medicine, anesthesia, and more. There are also sometimes options for research electives. Fourth year tends to include required rotations including emergency medicine and intensive care. Many students also use early fourth year to do "audition rotations" with programs where they would be interested in doing their residency. It is during the beginning of fourth year when you apply for residency and during March of your fourth year when you match (again something that will need its own post).
Residency programs typically range between three to five years, with some outliers requiring longer, such as neurosurgery which is seven years. Following residency, there are many options of fellowship training as well which, again, can range in time usually from about one year to three years. Some individuals will also choose to do multiple fellowships. After this, you will start your attending job.
This means that, at the very least, you will be committing four years to a bachelor's degree, four years to medical school, and three years to residency, which is eleven years. There will be exceptions, who will finish college early or get into a six year program that combines college and medical school, but you should set your expectations to be a minimum of eleven years.
The Nontraditional Path
This refers to individuals who choose to take gap years, or breaks in their schooling. These breaks can be true breaks to do things like travel, do research, or have an entire career outside of the medical field that was intended to be a career for life and was never supposed to be any kind of "break" at all. For some, these breaks will be more schooling such as getting a master's degree or participating in a post-baccalaureate program to fulfill the prerequisites that weren't taken for reasons like not knowing you wanted to do medicine, being unable to balance the workload, not passing a class, or any other reason you may have.
Some medical students who want to go into more competitive specialties might take a gap year during medical school to do research. Some may do an MD/PhD program and do the first two years of medical school, then take four years to get a PhD (give or take), and then do the final two years of medical school. Some may take a break to get something like an MPH. Even others might take time between medical school and residency, or take time off during residency.
Fortunately there is no single set path to become a doctor and even if two people seem to have taken similar paths, they will still not be identical. It's part of what keeps the medical field diverse and helps to maintain the individuality of physicians.
My hope is that this is helpful if you or someone you love is considering becoming a doctor. Stay tuned for future posts going into greater depth about what goes into becoming a physician and staying true to yourself throughout the process.