Law/Graduate School and/or Pre-Med w/ No Previous Science/Math

Graduate School
1

<p>I'm facing a dilemma of sorts, so I thought I'd bounce it off the boards here, and see what anyone else has to say, or if they have similar experiences.</p>

<p>Long story short, I'm a History major at the University of California, entering my 4th year and just about to leave for a 4 month internship at the Smithsonian in DC. I have been considering law school for the past 6 months or so, bought myself some practice LSAT tests, and put myself to work. My general plan was/is to enter law school right out of undergrad.</p>

<p>I do not have any qualms about studying or practicing law (except that there are quite a lot of people who get into it for the wrong reasons, or are not morally and ethically suited to a profession that ideally should hold firm to the principles of proper disinterest and service to upholding the laws, not circumventing them).</p>

<p>However, I am also interested in the sciences, and perhaps pursuing medical school. I am realistic with my expectations, and neither this nor law school is something I consider lightly. Being as I have not taken any serious math or science classes since my senior year of high school, I am estimating it would take me another 2 to 2.5 years to complete pre-med requirements.</p>

<p>So here's where I find multiple scenarios bouncing around inside my brain:</p>

<p>-Do I forget science and pre-med, and just focus on attending law school? </p>

<p>-Do I stay the extra time at UC (where the loans get higher and the grants smaller the longer you stay) and complete these courses here?</p>

<p>-Do I enroll in another university and get a second bachelor's degree in biology/chemistry/related-field?</p>

<p>-Do I take (if I am able) pre-med classes while enrolled in law school, or pre-med classes while pursuing a master's degree?</p>

<p>If anyone has experience with this, or could offer their insight, I'd love to hear it. Thanks!</p>

2

<p>if you are at UCI it will take you only 1 more year to finish med school requirements, but the logistics of it means that you will never get to do it since organic chemistry is closed to non-engineering/science majors.</p>

3

<p>-Do I take (if I am able) pre-med classes while enrolled in law school, or pre-med classes while pursuing a master’s degree?</p>

<p>No - law school isn’t going to be cheap, couple that with your UG debt (yes?), and then you are planning on going to med school, which is also going to cost a bundle - financially this a very bad plan if you are ultimately going to pursue medicine. Time-wise also difficult as law classes and premed classes at the same time would be little crazy (lab classes take a lot of time). (Also getting into med school is much more than classes. you need to have many many hours of shadowing physicians, volunteering in hospitals/clinics, doing other ECs related to medicine - getting into med school takes a ton of preparation. And don’t forget the MCATs - which will take some months of intense studying…). If you decide you want to pursue medicine - there are postbac programs designed for people just like you who have a non-science college degree and only at the end/after graduating, realized that they want to go to med school - but these programs can be costly too. </p>

<p>However, do you want to practice both law and medicine? Do you want to do law related to medicine? malpractice law perhaps? medical insurance related law? - if so perhaps a med degree could be useful. There are JD/MD combined programs out there so you can pursue both dreams - but you would need to be well prepared for both degrees as you would need to be accepted by both the med school and law school.</p>

<p>Without doing any of the premed preparation, it’s hard to know how much you would like the life of an MD (it isn’t the life for everyone), how you could handle upper division science classes (I have seen many a first/second year UG who did great in HS science crack under the pressure of premed classes and realize that med school wasn’t for them), how much you like being with patients/caring for people/etc etc. You might be fantastically suited for an MD - but you might not. If you choose to pursue your med school dreams and find out after volunteering, spending many hours in lab, and studying for the MCATs that med school isn’t for you, you’re really going to be up a creek. It’s a gamble. Are you willing to risk it?</p>

4

<p>Why would somebody with an interest in science go to medical school? You should be looking at a Phd if you like biological science.</p>

<p>There are careers that blend law with science. Intellectual property law is an important field. IP attorneys demand notebooks from scientists and scour them to assert ownership of ideas. They defend the rights of biotech/pharmaceutical companies to dominate specific technologies, bringing a financial incentive for companies to pursue research and development.</p>

<p>Often scientists that are fed up with the competitive nature of academia or irritated at the slow career progression in industry will go to law school for this career.</p>

5

<p>Don’t get a second bachelor’s. If medicine is what you really want, there are tons of programs called post-baccalaureate pre-medical science programs that prepare you for medical school. Some not only train you in the classes necsesary to get into graduate school, but also give you MCAT preparation and may even set you up with research internships with physicians. Here’s an example of one:</p>

<p>[Agnes</a> Scott - Post-Bacc & Graduate Programs](<a href=“http://www.agnesscott.edu/academics/post-bacc]Agnes”>http://www.agnesscott.edu/academics/post-bacc)</p>

<p>These post-bacc programs usually only take 1 year, although the logistics of it means that you will actually see 2 years before you get into medical school - 1 year for the post-bacc, and one year to apply to medical school.</p>

<p>You will NOT be able to take pre-med classes while enrolled in law school. Depending on the master’s program you may be able to take pre-med classes, but I’m going to wager probably not. But my question would be why on earth would you go for a master’s? If you know you want to go to medical school, then you should spend the next 2 years preparing for that instead of paying for a master’s degree that will ultimately be useless to you - unless it’s in a related field, like say you wanted a Master’s in Public Health. Being in that field, I will tell you that you will NOT be able to take pre-med classes while doing an MPH unless you do the MPH part-time, and if you do, it will take you four years to complete. Furthermore, there are lots of executive MPH programs for people who already have MDs that only take a year; there are also lots of MD/MPH programs that take 5 years, and I had a friend in graduate school who took two years off between his 3rd and 4th year of medical school to get his MPH and then went back and finished medical school and now he has a great residency.</p>

<p>If you wanted to do medical malpractice law I still don’t recommend getting a JD and an MD separately. Maybe a JD and a master’s in a biomedical field or in public health. There are tons of malpractice lawyers out there and very few of them have MDs. If you want both I recommend pursuing a joint program.</p>

<p>SO HERE’S MY ADVICE:</p>

<p>-Figure out what you actually, really want to do. Do you want to do law? Do you want to do medicine? Which one?</p>

<p>-Don’t feel compelled to figure it all out now. Even if you have to take some mindless cubicle job to pay the bills for 2 years or something while you decide what to do - please do that. I went to graduate school straight out of the box and I wish I had taken the time to really decide what it was I wanted to do with my life - even see what the realities of life are LIKE before I decided on a career. I’m content with my choice, but you could end up wasting a lot of time and MONEY if you choose something because you feel like you have to and then drop it.</p>

<p>-Spend some time investigating other careers. A lot of people think about their set of interests and assume that law or medicine is the best thing for them because it’s the first thing that comes to mind. Why are you interested in law? Do you want to “help people?” If so, there are a vast variety of careers in which you can “help people” in a variety of different ways.</p>

<p>Because this</p>

<p>(except that there are quite a lot of people who get into it for the wrong reasons, or are not morally and ethically suited to a profession that ideally should hold firm to the principles of proper disinterest and service to upholding the laws, not circumventing them</p>

<p>Seems like a very unrealistic view of law. Lawyers - lawyers in ALL fields - circumvent the laws to satisfy their clients’ needs. This may happen more or less depending on the field you are in, but it WILL happen. If you become a prosecutor, you may find yourself circumventing laws or adhering only to the letter and not the spirit of the law or even using laws in ways they were not intended in order to put someone in prison that you don’t think is guilty, but your boss does or your boss needs this conviction to be reelected or the mayor needs this conviction to restore order to the city or whatever. If you become a defense attorney - well, that speaks for itself. If you become an in-house corporate lawyer, your job is to represent the best interests of the company and laws be damned - if you can find them a way out of losing money, you better or you won’t keep a job. Similarly when you represent a nonprofit, you just get paid less to do it. A divorce attorney may need to circumvent laws to get the best decision for his representation…and so forth…it’s not lawyers’ job to uphold the laws. If you want to do that, go into law enforcement (although that comes with its own set of problems). Lawyers represent clients, point-blank.</p>

<p>-How do you know that you are interested in the sciences if you have never taken a science class in college? Science in college is a lot different from science in high school. Is it possible for you to add a science course (maybe just audit it) to your schedule this year and and see if you actually like it?</p>

6

<p>I was an engineering major, so I did not need to take physics and inorganic chemistry, but I did need to take bio and org. chem. before applying to med school (and I was already out of college). I took the first semester of bio during the spring, took the MCAT (studied with a book on my own), and then found a school that offered two summer terms and took Bio 2 and org chem 1 and 2 and applied to med school that summer. It worked out, but I did need to get the 1st org chem teacher to send in a letter with my class grade, as the official transcript would not be available in time for the application deadline (I was applying to some early notification program - not sure if such a thing still exists). I found out I was in while my friends were still stressing over interviews. So the entire application process does not necessarily have to take a lot of time.</p>

7

<p>Thank you all for your replies thus far. (I had asked to be emailed upon new thread posts but evidently that isn’t working). I realize I must sound more than a bit unrealistic with some of my aforementioned questions and statements. If I were honest with myself, I would have to say that I do not know exactly what I want to do. I’m 21 but I feel that I may be limiting my future options if I start down one path to the exclusion of another.</p>

<p>I grant you that lawyers must bend the law sometimes (every occupation has its “Rules” and its “rules”). I have not always wanted to be a lawyer, but I think that may be positive in some respects, because I have not been bred (or bred myself) to put ruthless career advancement before the duties of my profession. Not that I would not be a diligent and industrious lawyer– but the only reason I even consider practicing law is from the models of those rare few who actually practice to uphold what is right, not what is in one particular party’s best interest. I have never been drawn to law by lawyers’ ineffable popularity.</p>

<p>Doctors seem to enjoy a bit more prestige (and mostly well-earned, too), and I must be upfront that I am still trying to separate the realities of practicing medicine from what shows up on TV each week. My father is a molecular biologist (read into that whatever you’d like), and though I’ve never envied his job, I am well aware that medicine and science is, for the most part, a solid profession. I will be the first person to admit that I may wind up not liking science, but I feel as if I will have shortchanged myself without giving it, and myself, a shot. I wouldn’t dare devalue the pre-med/med students who’ve dreamed of practicing medicine since they were eight, but after all, this is America, and if I work hard enough and am good enough at something, it doesn’t matter how I got there.</p>

<p>Again, this may all sound a bit foolish, but I appreciate having a sounding board here to bounce these thoughts off of. The post-bacc option is something I had not considered and was not really aware of, but I will look into it.</p>

8

<p>That’s awesome eg1!!! Congrats on getting into med school in a non-traditional way.</p>

9

<p>Thanks, I think I just like making things difficult for myself . . . either that or I’m crazy (or both). Some people just take longer to figure things out, and apparently I’m one of them.</p>

10

<p>“Some people just take longer to figure things out, and apparently I’m one of them.”</p>

<p>I’ve got you beat.</p>

<p>Went to school for 3 years studying Communications, with a concentration in film. Realized that wasn’t for me (let’s face it, a film degree isn’t super practical). </p>

<p>Worked for 10 years in the real world.</p>

<p>Going back to school to get a BS in Statistics, then a MS in BioStats or Statistics. </p>

<p>The two majors (Communications & Statistics) couldn’t be further from each other, so I’ve had to completely rebuild my completed courses. By the time I graduate I will be pushing 180 credits (on a semester system)…and that’s just for the BS!</p>

11

<p>OP, relax. You’re only 21; no one expects you to have all the answers yet! It’s okay if you’re not sure exactly what you want to do, you’ve got a lot of time to figure that out.</p>

<p>There are many jobs that incur prestige as a part of the job. But you have to discover if you really want to be a physician. It looks glamorous on television, but most TV shows show physicians working in hospital settings during their hospital privilege time. For most physicians (especially in the primary care positions), the bulk of their work is done in a private practice in their own offices. Aside from caring for patients (and they may only spend 15 minutes with each patient), there’s dealing with insurance billing, managing your office and employees, taking continuing medical education (CME) courses, that sort of thing. If you are in certain specialties - surgery, oncology, emergency medicine, sometimes cardiology for example - you may spend more time in a hospital.</p>

<p>Is it possible for you to volunteer at a hospital or a physician’s office during your spare time this year? You might get a better handle of what physicians do and let you know if you really want to do that. Also, consider other careers. If you want to work directly with patients, you could become a nurse practitioner or a physicians assistant.</p>