Respectfully - it sounds to me like you are telling yourself what you want to hear and that the only real advice you are willing to entertain is that which aligns with what you have already decided, or builds upon it.
So you are not in med school yet and have not owned a business, but are planning tackle both at the same time because your partner has a business, you think it will be easy, and (IMHO) misguided med schools run by out of touch academics are telling their students to spend their time focused on creating side businesses instead of being dedicated to learning medicine as a career?
If it is actually true that some medical schools are now commonly telling students to also focus on creating and running side business while going to school, I find that to be insanely ridiculous, but I suppose par for the coarse these days.
The “out of touch academics” teaching medical students are generally themselves practicing physicians…
It’s ironic that you suggest I lack knowledge about attending medical school or running a business, yet I’ve financially and logistically supported my partner in building a successful business over the last 5 years and am months away from completing my first doctorate. Meanwhile you seem to feel more qualified than physicians to determine what is required for the practice of medicine, yet your only qualification is knowing people that went to medical school.
Also I’m genuinely curious… what makes you need to believe it’s impossible to succeed at both medicine and business? I’ve always found it odd when people are determined to place limits on what others are capable of achieving. Are you just risk averse? Do you truly believe that running a business and attending medical school will be catastrophic? That I’ll somehow pass all of the rigorous licensing requirements to become an MD despite having no actual medical knowledge because I spent four years thinking of nothing but corals?
Nearly everyone has offered helpful advice, plenty of which contradicted my initial plan, which has since changed in light of new information. I’m more than happy to take advice and change my perspective when people offer valuable insight. You just haven’t. In fact, you have yet to offer any tangible knowledge or share why you’re qualified to give advice on the topic. All you seem to have are opinions and some oddly rigid ideas about what doctors can and can’t do with their time.
So, respectfully, no I won’t take your advice to quit before I even start. In reality, the worst case scenario is that I spend some time and money on something that ultimately isn’t successful and I don’t have a coral business. It’s really not that big of a deal and I’d much rather try and fail than not pursue my interests or passions because I’m afraid of failure.
My husbands ICU rotation was 4-6 weeks of 12 hours with only 4 days off while still writing research papers and prepping for all the dang step tests.
I can't imagine doing coral farming and that. In pre-med you could mess around with it but not once you get in the thick of it. It may be a struggle just to maintain your own tank some days.
If you are looking for a strong app to specialize, that is going to be in performing, writing and publishing research papers.
Medical school is not a break. You need to perform well, do side **** to make your app look nice and secure a residency.
I spent the last 4 years working in a clinic (10 hour shifts 4 days a week) while taking a full load of graduate level courses, teaching college courses and tutoring, and completing a dissertation. I’m not saying that medical school is easy, but it absolutely will be a break compared to the workload I’ve been carrying for a very long time. Available data indicates the average work week for a medical student is about 60 hours. For the last four years my average work week has been 80-100 hours.
That being said, it sounds like your husband had a particularly brutal rotation and you’re completely right that I would have to offload responsibilities onto my partner or hire help if I had a similar rotation but the 3 schools I’ve been accepted to so far have very transparent clinical rotation schedules that are very chill. Two of the schools have clinical experiences spread across all 4 years as there’s been a push toward longitudinal early clinical experiences, and third year is pretty much completely open to focus on research, entrepreneurial opportunities, service work, and/or local or global electives. They also don’t have any mandatory lectures so you can watch them on 2x speed at home, and in information sessions 3rd and 4th yr students talked about how much time they had to focus on extracurriculars and how great work-life balance was (this was not the case everywhere I interviewed lol).
I’ll be doing genomics and bioinformatics research, which is what my PhD is in. Once you have a good grasp of bioinformatics, turnaround time for genomics projects can be extremely fast. Collect samples, send them out for library prep and sequencing, and once you get the sequence data back you can assemble a genome from scratch in under a day. It’s pretty amazing stuff!
