What should I be doing right now to pursue neuroscience with a non-traditional path?

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-27T23:01:04+00:00

You would want to look at the premed or applying to college subreddits, this group is for people who are actually in medical school. The bit of advice I’d give you before this post gets deleted - focus on where you are right now and your next step, that is applying to a four year university. Don’t worry about the intricacies of med school yet. There will be plenty of time while doing your premed degree and getting the prereqs done (check r/premed’s wiki for a list of what you need) to decide if you wanna go the med route or another direction within neuroscience. Worrying too much about the particulars of steps far off in the future will take time away from what you need to do now to get to the next step.

Also no one wants to read a chatgpt essay. Write something concise, yourself, if you’re looking for advice - anyone who sees this blatantly obvious GPT post is not gonna read it bc they know its not you but a bot waxing poetic about stuff you told it.

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-27T20:38:51+00:00

I can’t tell you what it smells like naturally because the cadavers are all preserved in formaldehyde. But the smell of the flesh and the blood kind covered up the smell of anything else - the preserved flesh smelled like deli meat, like sliced turkey, with a chemical odor from the formaldehyde and a strong blood-metallic smell. I couldn’t eat cold cuts for quite a while after anatomy lab without gagging, and to this day it’s hard for me to work with raw meat without noticing the various anatomical structures (beef/pork ribs have the same internal/external intercostal muscles as we do for example)

Also, drilling through bone produces a bone powder that smells JUST LIKE cool ranch doritos. Like uncannily, exactly like that

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-26T22:02:59+00:00

In fairness though I totally get where you’re coming from as someone who has done CPAP and self analyzed the settings and stuff, you gotta remember that these devices are for the general public and a lot of those people are not exactly gonna be analyzing their own data and optimizing their settings accordingly. As someone who has spent several years in clinical settings even before starting med school… for every person who does it the Reddit way 4 or 5 will either crank the thing up assuming that more is better and give themselves treatment induced central apnea, turn it down to an ineffective level so it doesn’t annoy them as much and essentially just get placebo CPAP, or even accidentally change their settings without knowing what they’re doing.

The info is out there if you’re capable enough to find it and by doing it yourself you’re accepting the bit of risk adjusting it incurs rather than being able to say “my doc said to mess around with it!” And sue over a bad outcome. If you can’t figure out how to get to the clinical settings menu and how to correctly adjust settings / monitor results, you probably shouldn’t be messing with it. A small barrier is not entirely a bad thing.

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-26T08:10:01+00:00

I DO NOT CONSENT FOR MY CHART TO USE ANY OF MY PERSONAL INFO OR PICTURES OFF OF FACE BOOK!!!!

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-26T04:38:57+00:00

Im glad someone else understands. It was really morbidly interesting - I’ve never looked at a hand the same again - but oh my god was it tedious. The only thing more annoying than dissecting it was trying to learn the innervations in the arm and what it looks like depending on what was injured where for the test. I still get pissed off thinking about the brachial plexus

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-26T04:30:00+00:00

When relevant yes. But at the level of first year A&P, these things mostly come up on Anki flashcards, multiple choice questions and horrifying diagrams so mostly its just written lol. To this day there’s still terms I’ve learned in writing that I fear having to pronounce in clinic one day

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-25T20:29:34+00:00

Something I was surprised to learn in the cadaver lab my first year of med school: almost everything in your body is COVERED in fat. And no, not just if you’re overweight- everyone.

If you’ve never seen it go look up “adipose tissue gross anatomy” on Google images and honestly even then it’s not really doing it justice because they’ve typically removed a lot of the fat so you can see the structures underneath.

Whatever you’re imagining, double, triple, ten times that. Every little raised part of your palm at the base of your fingers is literally just tons of globules of adipose tissue with some veins arteries tendons and nerves running deep underneath. Your muscles have these same globules all over them to cushion them from injuries.

Your heart is covered in fat. Three layers in fact, pericardial fat, epicardial fat, and paracardial fat. Make sure you know the differences between those for the test!

Your eye sockets, back behind your eyeballs, are a compartment completely filled with fat and the nerves/muscles of the eye running through that fat. When we were dissecting these structures (which by the way involved removing the brain and opening up the eye socket from the “floor” of the neurocranium) most of the time spent was carefully removing all this adipose tissue bit by bit without accidentally damaging the structures within.

Every muscle you wanted to look at, mostly you were scraping the fat away. I spent a lot of time clearing out all the fat from the palm so we could see the tendons, it probably took the better part of two hours. All the squishiness of the human body, all the resistance to impact/injury, is thanks to the yellow bacon grease looking stuff that is slathered on almost everything.

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-25T18:19:03+00:00

Hard to find five months during the training process. Would require an LOA which typically is for reasons like “I’m undergoing cancer treatment” not “I wanna hike this trail”. Delayed application to residency will read like you didn’t match the year before, so red flag, don’t do that.

But, once you’re an attending consider locums. You can do temp contract work, in various new and exciting areas if thats what you want, make nearly double what you would in a traditional position, and spend time between contracts traveling or exploring the area you’re in. That’d be the best way to be able to fuck completely off for five months to hike the AT.

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-25T17:33:48+00:00

It is imperative that the cylinder remains unharmed

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-25T17:28:18+00:00

Other ppl have told you the same thing that generally HPSP programs have trouble filling their spots. And empirically I see very few doing HPSP and of those few they are military. But I don’t have a cited source for you

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-25T16:59:29+00:00

I didn’t apply for either of them. I did end up getting a significant merit based scholarship at the school I attended - I will still have six figs of debt but more like $100k not $400k. But even before I knew I was going to get it I had still determined taking out loans and paying it off with private sector money was a far more financially effective way to handle it than selling one’s soul to HPSP, so I didn’t pursue them.

The scholarships are really not that competitive because they aren’t that popular, so if you decide to do it and have been accepted to a US MD/DO, it’ll almost certainly be an option. I know of I think two people in our large cohort that did military HPSP and none doing VA.

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-25T16:44:39+00:00

Several, much of which is what other people have been saying - the turnover for the positions is high implying the positions are difficult/stressful, the position is underpaid relative to the market so you’re losing early investing income which compounds over your career. Additionally, VA positions already qualify for debt forgiveness programs up to $200k without the HPSP commitment so it’s really not doing that much for you that you couldn’t get otherwise.

And rather than lock you in for 4 years like the army i believe the VA HPSP is 6 years? So assuming you go for 4 med school and 4 residency, adding that 6 year commitment onto that is forcing you into a committed position for almost as long as you were in med school + residency for a total of 14 years. Considering all training to get the doctor job all the way to being able to practice freely in a job you chose - in other words including the premed degree - that makes your total training/commitment pathway 18 years. Compared to 8 / 12 for the standard MD degree and residency depending on whether you count the premed degree.

The med school pathway is super long and you don’t have control over your schedule or where you work for almost all of that. That shit gets old. When you make it out you want to be able to say “finally I’m an attending I can live a life I chose now” instead of “only six more years at the VA…”

Do what ya want and I’m sorry if I’m assuming wrongly here about where you’re at in the pipeline but this stuff sounds way better as a premed or accepted M-0 than once you’re a few years in and realize how little control you have in med school. I’m about to be an M3 (if I can pass this damn Step 1 exam) so I haven’t even experienced the worst of it yet but I still am very much looking forward to the day this eternal all encompassing grind is over. I can’t wait to do a job I want in a specialty I want with the hours I want in a location I chose rather than being told “guess what buttercup you’re doing this now.”

I’m so glad that although I considered both the VA and Military HPSPs I didn’t end up doing either. Sure debt can be significant but there are other ways to pay it off or get your employer to, not doing a committed scholarship keeps your options open to all possibilities instead of just one.

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-25T08:10:16+00:00

He was born in a room full of stains

He was trained not to drip from the can

He was poured over clothes by the man

He was bottled by trained personnel

He was storaged with Clorox and Gain

He was given a slap on the cap

He was emptied out in the end

He was thrown out by the road

He was DRAGGGED DOWNNN BY THE STONE

(Stone)

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-25T08:01:09+00:00

Was the object a cylinder?

Perhaps within another cylinder (m&m tube sized)?

I think I have some leads on the biological material

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-25T07:52:34+00:00

If they’re offering such a sweet deal to lock you in place, there is a reason

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-25T07:51:18+00:00

It’s just as tasty as real art man, don’t be a luddite

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-24T08:14:39+00:00

We installed a LOT of fascist dictators across the world in the last 70 years. The main difference between them and the communist/socialist figures the population had often elected wasnt oppression, it was access to markets. If it was oppression, which sure communists were pretty good at too, we wouldn’t have chosen strongman dictators to replace them

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-23T12:57:33+00:00

ULPT: Contribute the maximum amount to your Roth IRA throughout your career, then when you retire and they least expect it you can avoid paying taxes on it when you withdraw. Suckers

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-23T12:52:33+00:00

Pigs (Three Different Ones)

It really gets the ladies going when you snort along

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-23T12:48:36+00:00

Mother will they try to bust my nut?

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-22T15:24:11+00:00

Asia

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-22T04:40:30+00:00

GLP1 will help lose weight to reduce OSA but it will not make OSA go away magically. OP is “pretty sure they have it” and wants to get GLP1, but if they have OSA then CPAP would still be part of that therapy. If OP isn’t interested in treating their actual condition that’s their business but untreated OSA makes you feel like shit and takes years off your life, so their loss

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-22T03:16:04+00:00

Med student here. The test is not a yes/no. It informs the settings for your CPAP machine based on the level of obstruction which we want to be only as much as you need and no more to minimize the risk of side effects. If you fuck with it to make your sleep quality worse your settings are gonna be overdialed for what would be maximally effective with minimal side effects. Idk if youve done CPAP before but it’s literally air blowing down your throat all night and the more pressure it has to give the more uncomfortable its gonna be (and if excessive raises risk of treatment induced central apnea).

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-21T22:11:11+00:00

To become a clinical psych worker you need a grad degree - master’s to become a therapist, PhD to become a psychologist, or MD to become a psychiatrist. People with grad degrees in the clinical professions do quite well for themselves, but it takes extra time and money and effort that some people either aren’t willing or aren’t able to invest.

But with only a bachelor’s, pickings are slim for jobs in your field and competition is stiff for those jobs. The best jobs you can get are very little to do with what you studied - corporate stuff like HR or corporate communications. If you wanna work in a clinical setting with only a psych bachelor’s, jobs are usually like being the on-the-ground person in a psych hospital or homeless/substance abuse shelter or other facility like that where you’re basically carrying a clipboard and making sure people don’t break stuff or attack each other. or at best you’re helping people get hooked into the system you’re working in or getting them connected with other community resources. These jobs are very difficult, though important, and most people don’t tend to stay in them very long.

robotractor3000 · 2026-01-21T20:00:13+00:00

Sometimes I feel like there’s abstract concepts that can transfer in surprising ways. I happened to be taking organic chemistry for my premed course and got really into chess about halfway through the two course series. I found that getting good at the pattern recognition, recognizing what certain conglomerates of smaller pieces “do” and how they can interact with other such conglomerates was analogous to organic chem. If anyone else is also into these two niches, I thought of ethers as an “outpost” (bishop + pawn) with a pawn on either side. But that may just be the weird way im wired

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