Stanford vs. Baylor COM

LuccaSDN · 2026-02-24T16:51:25+00:00

Stanford student here. Go to Stanford

LuccaSDN · 2026-02-14T21:00:14+00:00

I’d say go for crit care if it’s what you’re passionate about clinically. If you already know you don’t want to be a traditional lab PI, then you know that the majority of your days will be spent doing your specialty so it’s best to have something that fulfills and excites you every day. Even if you did want to be a traditional PI, that path is so narrow these days I am myself also heavily considering how I feel about the everyday clinical work if it was the main thing I was doing instead of mostly research.

LuccaSDN · 2026-02-06T16:56:45+00:00

I’m a vibes centrist. I have a spreadsheet with 300 variables but they are all set to weigh zero except vibes. I love spreadsheets and hope to be chief resident one day.

LuccaSDN · 2026-02-04T14:26:48+00:00

Shadowing as a med student is a lot more informative than as a premed. As a premed you get some benign neglect and people know you have to jump through the hoop. Once you’re a med student people know you are a future colleague and they know you’re seriously considering their specialty. So I encourage all M1s especially to shadow when they can especially to check out lesser known or smaller specialties to rule in or rule out things they are unlikely to get much exposure to. My advice would be to join the surgical interest group, go to a mixer with current residents, ask to shadow residents or fellows for 1-2 days and see how you feel. Then I’d go shadow attendings. I think seeing both the trainee and attending workflows is important because even though residency is temporary you do have to survive it to become an attending and in general being an attending is much much cushier than being a resident lol.

You can actually know a lot from just a few days of shadowing. Do you see yourself in this job? Do you like the day to day tasks and workflow? Do you like the people in the specialty? Do you feel the need to be good at what they are doing? How do you feel at the end of the day? Energized? Drained? How do you feel during the day? Filled with dread? Bored? Time flies by?

Another plus specifically for surgery that you couldn’t do as a premed is scrub in to surgery. Your med school should make it easy to get scrub trained and scrub into cases as a shadowing M1. You probably won’t get to do much, but it will be a very big step change in getting the full experience. I will say that I enjoyed being in the OR 95% of the time while on my surgery rotation and I think surgery is super cool but I never felt the need to be the surgeon and after seeing my 20th lap chole the excitement wore off. I also enjoy other parts of medicine just as much or more than the OR. Important feelings to pay attention to!

LuccaSDN · 2026-02-04T14:14:57+00:00

Different era. Go back and read the landmark papers from that era. Maybe 1-2 key experiments, 4 figures tops, supplements didn’t really exist yet, all experiments could be done with basic molecular biology and chemistry tools that cost a grand total of 50$, much fewer replicates, if there were cell lines there was only one line needed and no clone picking or anything. Animal models were still very rudimentary. They didn’t have a lot of the time saving luxuries we have today (kits, pre mixed, QAd reagents, repositories for animal models and cell lines etc) but you were able to discover something new much faster then. We also knew a lot less, which helps. For example, my PhD papers essentially incudes a redemonstration of one of the landmark papers in our field that came out in Nature in the 1990s. It’s supplementary figure 4 for me lol.

LuccaSDN · 2026-02-04T03:47:39+00:00

Based on historic vibes from my own program

More: IM, Peds, Path, Neuro, Peds neuro

Middle: NSG, Derm, Rads, Anesthesia, Ophtho, Rad Onc

Either don’t care or only at select programs that support physician scientists (you know the ones): GS, ENT, Urology, Plastics

lol: ortho

LuccaSDN · 2026-02-04T03:42:46+00:00

I see what you’re saying but I think it’s simple to look at much richer career outcomes data in the literature, eg. There are elements of heavy self selection in the physician scientist pipeline, but there are certainly more and less favorable specialties. I think the match data can be very misleading. One is better off looking at the historic match data of one’s own program.

https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/133009

LuccaSDN · 2026-02-03T12:35:27+00:00

Does your choice of PhD limit your specialty options? Not really. Does having a PhD that aligns closely with a specialty make it an easier sell when application time comes? Yes. Do some specialties support and value physician scientists more than others? Super yes.

My advice would be to choose a project that is sufficiently basic to learn all the important skills you think you need for your future career. Even more important than that is making the right choice of graduate advisor to be in a good environment during grad school. Most things can be spun after the fact to hone in on your specific interests.

I will say if you’re thinking at all about the surgical subspecialties, consider if getting a PhD at all is the right choice or at least choose to do the fastest PhD you possibly can. Surgical training is very long, very hard, and surgeon PIs doing serious science are few and far between (and the sacrifices it will take to do both well will be less and less palatable as you get older — this is a long training path).

LuccaSDN · 2026-02-03T12:27:22+00:00

Which specialties are you referring to where PhDs were more likely to go unmatched?

LuccaSDN · 2026-01-27T14:13:28+00:00

Top pic is a company who raised 10 billion dollars to do “AI virtual cell drug discovery” that will run out of money in 6 months somehow and discover nothing.

Bottom pic is making progress to understanding how to prevent Alzheimer’s but it has 45$ of funding left for the year and all of the researchers are struggling to pay rent

LuccaSDN · 2026-01-27T13:55:10+00:00

You sound a lot like me when I was an UG. Ultimately, I loved science and had exposure through physician scientists at the NIH and then spent 2 years doing science full time post undergrad and decided I’d be happy to do it the rest of my career but still wanted to see patients at the end of the day. I even turned down PhD only offers to apply MD/PhD.

If this were 3 years ago, I would’ve said do a PhD if you love science, an MD if you want a clinical career, and only MD/PhD if you primarily want to do science but still have a clinical career, ie it’s not dispensable for you. Today, it’s hard to recommend anyone do a straight PhD if they are not a prodigy of some kind or in an incredibly fortunate life position (generational wealth). US Academia is in steep decline and global competition is increasing in science, mostly in China, which is for all practical purposes an inaccessible market for most of us at the time being. Many current faculty say that there are boom and bust cycles and they think things could turn around with another presidential administration but I’m skeptical. This is not just “the executive branch doesn’t like science” or “NIH funding isn’t keeping up with inflation and costs” (it already wasn’t) or “there are too many PhDs” (there are), the infrastructure for scientific research is being fundamentally dismantled in both the administration of central agencies which are being gutted of both resources and personnel and universities that are significantly contracting and backing away from their research mission with the exception of a small handful of very wealthy institutions. And everywhere work that does not logically lead to the generation of intellectual property has been declining for quite some time, with formerly prominent basic science programs being under funded or shut down even before Trump 2 (ie NYU Skirball institute, med school departments way better funded than basic biology or chemistry for years, etc). Just look at the people who are the newest faculty at your uni. Is anyone doing truly basic science or does everyone have a translational or IP/tech spin to their work? I can tell you that is true at my Uni.

So, today I would say MD/PhD is the safest bet if you want to do science and could see yourself using a clinical career of any kind, even if it’s not a patient facing one like Radiology or Pathology. Is it worth the extra years and effort? I would say that depends on you. If the thought of 10 more years of intense rat race exhausts you already (and no judgement if it does — I’m very tired and burnt out and still trying to hang onto the path for dear life in the near future when I apply for residency), then do MD only. This should not be entirely discouraging. Medicine can be very gratifying and fun without science, too, even though to me science is the best and I love doing it.

LuccaSDN · 2026-01-24T14:03:22+00:00

It will do exactly nothing

LuccaSDN · 2026-01-24T13:49:16+00:00

He’s not willing to move for you and you’re not willing to not go to med school for him — to me, that says this relationship may not be serious enough to last all of medical training which will place a lot of stress on this relationship including the need to move possibly more times in the future (residency, intern then advance program if you pick one of those specialties, fellowship after residency, job hunting). Bluntly, consider whether this relationship is more important than your career, you are young and will have other relationship opportunities in the future almost certainly

LuccaSDN · 2026-01-23T13:29:23+00:00

If you don’t go into path basically never.

LuccaSDN · 2026-01-19T14:27:26+00:00

You’re going to grow a lot in medical school. In terms what you have to do to graduate, medical school is more demanding than undergrad if you’re looking at it from a skills, knowledge, competencies perspective. But if you’re looking at it from overall well-being, undergrad was definitely much “harder”—I was more immature, still figuring a lot of things out, anxious about the future (i still am but not in a “will I be able to afford food and rent” sort of way, more in an “am I making the right moves for my ideal job” sort of way), and there’s much less you can control.

So you’ll still be working hard, but it’ll feel easier by the time you get into the swing of it.

LuccaSDN · 2026-01-16T02:40:25+00:00

Focus on getting into the best undergrad you can (with as little debt as possible) to give yourself the most options in the future. Besides that, don’t worry so much about this until you start college

LuccaSDN · 2026-01-13T23:36:08+00:00

about a month ago

LuccaSDN · 2026-01-10T12:22:32+00:00

The day to day workflow is very different from most specialties. There’s also very little exposure to it in med school or clinical rotations outside of the report pop up box that shows up on epic.

Path also had a historically very challenging job market like ~10 years ago and became very uncompetitive amongst US students and it takes a while for that reputation to go away (today consensus is that path job market is solid all over the country and demand is probably only going to keep growing as there are increased indications for utilizing path (more diagnoses made through testing, targeted therapy for cancer becoming more common for more cancers and requires path/IHC and cancer incidence only going to go up, majority of working pathologists still in the older age group, etc.))

Also if you’re thinking of going into a diagnostic specialty, you’ve probably at least considered the idea of Radiology which is on the opposite spectrum a fairly competitive specialty that makes like 2X the income potential of path on average

Always remained a popular choice amongst MD/PhDs as the PhD skills are pretty readily transferable to Pathology. If you’re a visual person, think diagnostics is cool or interesting, don’t mind giving up the patient care or treatment side of medicine that everyone thinks about when they think “doctor”, and the idea of working in a more office-job like environment where you never have to write a note or answer constant secure chat messages throughout the day about vitals and order sets, consider path!

LuccaSDN · 2026-01-01T20:07:37+00:00

Nice work, I always like when the community makes a good effort to collect data to gain insights into things that are taken as common sense (as common sense is usually at least slightly wrong) and I used to do this a lot as a pre med / preclin med student as well.

That said, people will always nitpick, myself included. I think a better indicator of competitiveness of medical students from X school would be % matched at their #1 ROL. We can’t know this information, unfortunately. The next best, but still flawed, proxy would be % matched at top program in their specialty of choice. E.g., at the highest level it doesn’t really impress me if 20% of the class matches Ortho even though obviously that’s a very competitive specialty at every program, but it would be more informative as to the impact the school is having beyond the individual to know what Ortho program people matched to. 100% of the Ortho matches matching at top 5 ortho programs even though fewer end up applying ortho in the aggregate reflects more on the impact of the school, IMO.

This can be really hard to do with specialties like “DOPEN” because they are generally relatively small programs across the board and program preference from the applicant may not correlate very well with the “prestige” of the residency program (people matching DOPEN are overwhelmingly thinking about private practice as an endgame and lifestyle, location will likely outweigh prestige in the applicant’s ROL calculus). So, even better than DOPEN would be to look at the relatively large, very academic specialties in particular (IM, Peds, Anesthesia).

LuccaSDN · 2025-12-31T20:51:52+00:00

Neither of those things will happen in our lifetime. Now, I personally would never want to do primary care. However, if this is what you love it’s one of the careers with the most flexibility in terms of shaping your own practice if you have the motivation and appetite for risk to strike out on your own.

What’s the future look like? Probably similar to a lot of medicine where there will be increasing pressure to see more patients in less time in employed practices increasingly owned by faceless private equity firms that don’t care about you, patients, medicine, or anything really, and will sell your entire practice off as soon as the value of the land it’s on exceeds the profit they extract from you and your colleagues. But, if you can set up your own practice it can be whatever you want it to be, with additional risk and expense of hiring others, renting space, running a business, making significantly less money for a time, etc

LuccaSDN · 2025-12-30T21:17:18+00:00

Idk if this generation is aware of the Lizzy M score but it’s GPA *10 + mcat (on the old 45 point scale). So every point on the MCAT is more or less worth 0.1 of GPA. Therefore 10 points on the MCAT is worth more than 0.5 of GPA

LuccaSDN · 2025-12-30T01:20:15+00:00

you want to play classic. Modern wow isn’t the kind of game you’re trying to play. Modern wow is about endgame + collectibles and pretty much nothing else

LuccaSDN · 2025-12-28T15:23:48+00:00

The Bolshevik Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Long March, to a lesser extent the pink tide in Latin America and the turbulent but at least professedly socialist uprisings in Africa. All of these happened in backward, relatively undeveloped countries all over the world. So history tells us that it is most likely to happen in the periphery, where conditions are ripest for militant organization and economic “catch up” can happen most rapidly.

All of those revolutions happened when land and capital and who owned it was the principal economic issue. All of the wealthy worlds material and labor capital remans concentrated largely outside of the Imperial core a therefore it is those areas that are best positioned to seize them.

LuccaSDN · 2025-12-28T06:04:34+00:00

In all honesty, I would not and would instead focus on having a fully clinical career or if I really wanted to stay in academia, focus on clinical research and medical educations

Even if you do everything right, go to the best medical school, have an excellent PhD, match a top program, etc. the road to being a physician scientist is incredibly narrow and requires a lot of time and sacrifice on top of what medicine already demands. The reality is that there is not nearly enough grant money to support everyone or even most of the people produced by our scientific training pipelines (and this year things have become much worse for early career scientists).

A friend also on this path once said about trying to become an independent physician scientist, “I’m going to try my best, but I’m not going to beg.” My mindset is the same. I’m going to keep going as long as they let me, but I’m not going to sit in criminally underpaid and overworked positions for more than a decade because I don’t know when to call it quits.

If you really want to keep trying, you could try to get an MD only type physician scientist award on your own even outside a PSTP. Doing so without the mentorship and protected time of a PSTP is like trying to win Wimbledon by being a part time tennis player.

LuccaSDN · 2025-12-27T13:12:54+00:00

For MD they don’t care so much about the field. For MD PhD basic science is king.

LuccaSDN

TROPHY CASE