How to become a doctor for real
Not sure if anyone here is really interested in becoming a physician, but as I alluded to I had considered this path myself and done extensive research on going from someone with a bachelor's degree in a non science-related field to medical school. I'm not an expert, but at least I am being honest about the limits of my expertise. Here's what I know.
To apply to medical school, you need one year EACH of chemistry, organic chemistry, physics and biology. Some medical schools have additional requirements, such as microbiology. All of these classes must be with lab, so they cannot be taken as online courses. There are several so-called “post-baccalaureate pre-medical” programs that allow you to take the medical school prerequisites on an accelerated basis, but they still take one academic year plus a summer of intensive, full-time study… and they are very expensive, around $25-$30K. At the end of the program you would be ready to take the MCAT, the standardized test for medical school.
This is just to meet the MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS in order to APPLY to medical school.
Then you have the application process, which takes another year (most medical schools have a deadline of October or November, to enter the following August or September). Some of the programs I mentioned previously do have special agreements with certain medical schools that allow you to skip the application year, and start medical school immediately after completing the basic science prerequisite program.
Once you’re in, medical school is four years. It is a grueling academic program, with little time to sleep let alone maintain outside employment. The final two years are clinical rotations that are scheduled on an on-going basis, so you don’t even have the traditional summer vacation and spring break that you have as a college student. Tuition at private medical schools is usually around $40K per year.
After that, you have residency, which is a minimum of three years for primary care specialties or basic internal medicine. Residency is even more grueling that medical school. 36-hour shifts are common, and recent rules to limit residents to 80 hours per week are frequently ignored or not enforced. Other specialties are even longer. Surgery is five years. If you want a medical sub-specialty like cardiology, that requires an internal medicine residency PLUS a three-year fellowship, for a total of SIX YEARS of residency. By the way, residents usually make around $40K.
If you decided, today, that you want to become a doctor and you don’t have the basic sciences completed, and you took the most accelerated track possible, you would not complete the shortest residency until the summer of 2016. If you financed the entire thing with debt, you would probably START your residency with $190K (40K times four years of med school, plus $30K for the science prereqs). You could try going to an in-state school and save on tuition, but it would take longer because no state schools have accelerated agreements with any of the post-baccalaureate pre-medical programs. Also, since most medical school have an acceptance rate of 3 to 5 percent, most applicants apply to dozens of schools and hope to get into one or two. They usually don’t get their pick. Check out US News and World Report’s graduate school issue if you don’t believe me. Even schools like the University of Iowa that don’t sound as prestigious as Johns Hopkins or Harvard have the same low acceptance rate.
Oh, and the $190K assumes you are able to pay for personal expenses on your own without debt. Because residents are paid so low, most of them defer payments on loans until they complete their residency. But interest accrues during that time. At 7% (good luck!), 190K would become 233K in three years. At 20 years repayment, that works out to $1,804 a month. (I’m not an MD, but I’ve been a CPA for more than eight years, so you can trust me on the number crunching).
If you make $160K, which is probably on the high side for a specialty that requires only a three-year residency, your take-home pay would be around 8,000 a month (assuming a 40% average tax rate… probably low, considering the way things will be in eight years with incoming president and congress). After your student loan payment, you would have 6,200 a month left. Not a bad salary, although you would have no or minimal income for the prior eight years or so. You probably do have better than average job security, as well as a lot of personal satisfaction and prestige… which, when you think about the sacrifice involved, is rather well-deserved.
This is all just for illustration, I'm sure everyone knows someone who makes more, or less, or had less debt, or more. I think this is a realistic overview of what you can expect the process to require.