<p>On average the MD/PHD programs range from 1-3 years and it usually depends on what you want to recieve your PHD in. Something like Biology, BioChemistry, Chemistry, and Psychology almsot always take one year to complete and at most 2 years. Also, if you put in the cost that people in the MD/PHD program mostly never have to pay tuition because the medical schools realize how much time they are putting in. So MD/PHDs are almost always free tuition for medical school and for your PhD, you put in most of the time an extra 1 or 2 years at max and rarely do doctors want a phd outside of Biology, BioChemistry, Chemistry, Psychology and Philosophy so it almost never takes 3 years unless they are doing something hardcore humanity or engineering. So, you go to school for free and you get paid a subsatntial amount more than the average doctor for putting in 1 or 2 more years. So no, you don't lose money in an MD/PHD and yes of course you should only pursue this if you really have interest in a field, but again you miss the point of my argument, I told this to the poster in the sense that he may have interest in a peculiar field and that MD/PHD might be good for him and won't cost him anything and that he won't make less money than a regular MD by putting in an extra year or two. This would be a concern for people who would want to pursue a PHD in perculiar field after medical school, but would think that they shouldn't because they would be too much in debt and won't be able to move on easily with the start of their life outside the academic world. I really want to know what your arguing here Sakky: because I said this to the poster as a plus if he thought he would be making less money or putting himself in a disadvantage if he wanted to get a PHD and I clearly stated that he would put himself into a benefit and would actually earn more while going after his passion. So again what are you arguing for because I know for a fact that at New York Presbyterian Hospital a doctor with a phd can make $50, 000 more starting because the hospital sees his research experience and Phd as a benefit and they do make substantially more because they most of the time don't pay tution either. Sakky if you want to make anymore random accusations on my behalf please don't bother because I won't respond any more. I was only providing the Poster with accurate information because he/she was considering doing a masters before an MD and I thought that they should know some of teh benefits of an MD/PHD if the y are interested in a particular. I never did say that they should do it JUST for the money. Any idiot would know that would be a stupid thing to do, but apparently you wanted me to state common knowledge, which I thought we all knew.</p>
<p>But I am going to state it again just so everyone is clear:</p>
<p>"DON'T PURSUE A PHD FOR THE MONEY, ONLY PURSUE A PHD IF YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT A SUBJECT FIELD AND WOULD LIKE TO DO RESEARCH IN IT!" </p>
<p>I hoped the poster and Sakky are pleased with this response because I am not replying to this post and Sakky just for common knowledge " I am not arguing, but only making a statement, which YOU are not arguing against, but only talking about and adding your information too. You sometimes tend to make your posts on CC to be argumentlike even though I really like reading them, I just want to remind you that I am making a statement of fact, and that you shouldn't relentlessly be arguing against a piece of information.</p>
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M.D./Ph.D. programs are among the longest and most rigorous training programs in the world. Program length varies considerably between schools. During the past twenty years, there has been a trend of increasing time to graduation for M.D./Ph.D. students. This has paralleled the increase in time for graduate students to earn the Ph.D. According to available NIH statistics, the current average time to graduation from start to finish in MSTPs is 7-8 years. This includes the four years of medical school and three or more years of Ph.D. work toward the thesis requirement. Recently, the NIH has pressured certain programs that had notoriously long training times to reduce the number of years students spend in the program. In particular, the Ph.D. phase needed to be condensed, as students were spending as much time as regular graduate students in laboratories, and hence taking as many as 8, 9, or 10 years to graduate.
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On average the MD/PHD programs range from 1-3 years and it usually depends on what you want to recieve your PHD in
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<p>First off, pre-medwannabe, I have never heard of a general MD/PhD program that takes such a short period of time. Now, don't get me wrong. I am sure that there are a few super geniuses who really do get their PhD in just 1 extra year. But this is far from common. The statistics posted by my$0.02 are far more typical - that the MD/PhD takes about 3-4 extra years of time on average, with some people taking substantially longer. </p>
<p>And that's my basic point. On average, the MD/PhD will not pay off on a net-present-value standpoint. Nobody is arguing with you, I just want to make sure that the facts are clear to everybody.</p>
<p>The best I've ever heard was that faculty members with an MD/PhD student will "try" to give the student a straightforward project for his/her PhD -- meaning the project would take around four years to complete rather than around five or six.</p>
<p>The first year of a science PhD program is, after all, only taking classes and choosing a lab in which to do your thesis research -- it's emphatically not possible for someone to finish in one year, since students haven't even picked a lab at that point.</p>
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The first year of a science PhD program is, after all, only taking classes and choosing a lab in which to do your thesis research -- it's emphatically not possible for someone to finish in one year, since students haven't even picked a lab at that point.
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<p>There have been super-geniuses who've done it. For example, I seem to recall that Robert Woodward got his bachelor's degree at MIT when he was 19, and then completed his PhD at MIT the following year, when he was only 20, and was already teaching at Harvard when he was only 24. </p>
<p>Of course, Woodward is arguably the greatest organic chemist in history - the first man to synthesize quinine, chlorophyll, cholesterol and strychnine, and utimately winning the Nobel Prize. He was also the first to synthesize vitamin B12. To this day, nobody has come up with another way to synethsize B12. He also would have arguably won a 2nd Nobel Prize for the Woodward-Huffman Rules of organic stereochemistry (Huffman won the Nobel), except that according to the rules, you can't win a Nobel posthumously, and Woodward died 2 years before Huffman won. If Woodward had won 2 Nobels in Chemistry, he would have been only the 2nd person to ever do so (along with Sanger). </p>
<p>So the point is, I don't deny that there are some people who can get their PhD completed in 1 year. But it is far far far from the norm.</p>
<p>Perhaps they've changed the structure of the programs since then. I think it could be possible if you stayed in your undergrad lab -- ie if "admitting" you to the PhD program was a formality, since you'd already done work on the project.</p>