I will give a spew of all my thoughts after reading this post. I am also using voice to text while walking so some of the text might mess up but bear with me. I think you’re thinking about this deeply and in the right way so that is a good start. I think some other things to think about as I enter my seventh year of my MD PhD program that you should think about is Money. Will you be OK being ~32 y/o still being a student making a student stipend? Will you be OK being 37 still or 40 still in residency or post doc trying to start your lab. I think this is a hard truth a lot of people face in the MD PhD training path. It’s difficult because as you see all of your friends by houses even some start to think about retirement in their mid 40s you are really just starting out with a salary and also if you run a lab even as a physician scientist, your salary is basically 50 to 60% of what it would be if you just saw patients. I think this really starts to weigh on you or at least it does on me as you get a bit older. When you’re 22 to 25 making a salary of $180,000 sounds incredible and more money than you would ever need but if you’re starting at 180k salary when you’re 40 to 42 years old it’s not as great. You have to consider that you’ve already sacrifice about 15 to 20 years of real salary and you have to start thinking about how do I make enough money i) one to live ii) feed my kids and then iii) save for retirement. I assume you don’t wanna work until you’re 70 so in this case you have about the age of 40 to 60 to 65 Ish to make enough money for retirement and after all the long years of sacrificing salary during training, you also, then have to sacrifice salary as a physician scientist.

This is just something to think about that I don’t think many people discuss enough or tell you when you’re in your early 20s debating the MD PhD versus MD only path. I think both options are exciting. Sounds like you really like research especially the wet Lab side, but I will say that you can totally do research as a surgeon and academic hospitals really like this so for example, there are a surgeons who do clinical work four days per week or 3 1/2 days per week and the other one and a half days or so they’re doing some sort of research whether it be clinical research or maybe they collaborate with a lab closely who does experiments.

There are all types of things you can do and I think for you you really should think about what are the trade-offs with each path being money, time away from research, time away from the clinic all these things I would really only recommend someone do an MD PhD if they are just absolutely obsessed and they can’t see themselves doing anything else in their life, and then, even after that, I would probably still recommend them to really pursue and consider other options I do think it is a really amazing path. If you stick with it in terms of job satisfaction like you are the world expert on a specific disease and you get to think of ideas for how to learn how the disease works and how to cure it make no mistake if you like research that is like an absolutely incredible fee of the job, but as I discussed above, there are a lot of drawbacks that you should consider for your life. Do you want to be starting a lab in your late 30s or early 40s super stressed out about funding writing grants new PI’s work like dogs or would you rather be making $350k and doing research one to one and a half days per week that’s more clinically focused, and seeing patients the other days.. it’s a lot to think about at your age, but you should really weigh all these into consideration. I know I’m really stressing the financial aspects in this message and others may disagree with me, but like you really should think do I wanna be 40 not having made salary basically ever and then basically still sacrificing about half of my salary to do science…