<p>My medical physics professor says that, if a physics major wants to attend med school, a smart move is to apply to medical physics graduate programs on top of med schools. My professor made her medical physics residency at UCLA, so she knows a little bit about American medical education, especially since she had to work with radio-oncology residents.</p>
<p>But my question is, is it good advice to advise a med school hopeful to load up with courses that will prepare one to do medical physics as well?</p>
<p>D1 was a physics major and medical physics was her back-up plan. D1 did not apply to both med school and grad school concurrently. She wanted to put 100% of her energies into her med school application. However, if she failed to gain admission to med school on her first round, she would have applied to med school and grad school concurrently the second round.</p>
<p>D1 had grad physics coursework, a strong physics subject GRE, plus 3 years of medium energy particle beam research experience. The med physics grad program (see [CAMPEP</a> Accredited Graduate Programs in Medical Physics](<a href=“http://www.campep.org/campeplstgrad.asp]CAMPEP”>CAMPEP Accredited Graduate Programs in Medical Physics)) at her undergrad told her they would admit her if she applied.</p>
<p>So medical physics is viable alternative career for a physics major interested in medicine. But getting accepted to a medical physics program at a med school will NOT help you get accepted to medical school. The 2 programs are completely independent with no overlap or interaction.</p>
<p>Medical physics. There are both MS and PhD programs. A MS degree will not qualify you for most hospital-based jobs. You’ll need a PhD plus 1-2 year internship for those. Most Master’s degree jobs are in public safety, equipment inspection or risk-management sectors.</p>
<p>My professor didn’t mean that med-school acceptance odds were affected by applying to, and getting into, medical physics programs, just that she recommended us to do so in order to hedge the bets.</p>
<p>You should look around for MD/PhD programs that would allow you to do medical physics work, that way the two could go together as a general plan. That being said, if you enjoy medical physics there certainly is no harm in applying as well as a solid ‘plan B’</p>
<p>You load up with whatever you wish before you attend Med. School. My D. decided to load up with music classes and some of friends (currently also Medical students) loaded up with Foreign language, art, whatever, Nobody cares as long as you complete all pre-reqs.
In addition, ND/PhD are extremely hard to get into and they take 8 years. Are you up to it or not only you can tell. My D. had no desire and she had no desire to have any back up plan at all. Just work hard, get your high GPA, decent MCAT score, EC’s and see what you can do with them.</p>
<p>At my school, there’s typically one physics major a year who consider med school, and that student usually takes the medical physics class. Of all the med schools those students usually consider, only one offers the possibility to do medical physics for the PhD leg of a MD/PhD (McGill; the other three med schools in Quebec don’t allow one to do a MD/PhD with medical physics for the PhD, and of the three, only Laval is CAMPEP-accredited, Sherbrooke has no medical physics program and U Montreal is unaccredited).</p>
<p>I am myself not interested in medical education but I pray that the student that is interested in medical education in my medical physics class reads CC… if that student isn’t on SDN.</p>
<p>The other physics major I know of that even remotely considered medicine… actually turned down an accelerated medical program (Quebec accelerated medical programs are 0-5 and ~1/2 of the med school seats in Quebec are filled through accelerated programs; the American equivalent of a Quebec 0-5 is to attend med school straight out of a community college) to go the medical physics route. </p>
<p>He claimed that there was more thinking required in a medical physics job vs. a physician’s job but personally I wouldn’t comment.</p>
<p>Sorry to bring up an older thread but this thread comes up in some pretty basic Google searches about medical physics and there is some misinformation here that people should be aware of:</p>
<p>“Medical physics. There are both MS and PhD programs. A MS degree will not qualify you for most hospital-based jobs. You’ll need a PhD plus 1-2 year internship for those. Most Master’s degree jobs are in public safety, equipment inspection or risk-management sectors.”</p>
<p>This is NOT true. Roughly half of the practicing medical physics population hold an MS degree, and the majority of them work in a hospital setting. Having an MS vs PhD in no way affects your ability to practice medical physics in ANY environment as both provide the same clinical training and both now require an additional 2 years of training in a CAMPEP-accredited residency program. Having a PhD makes you competitive for faculty positions (professorships) in academic institutions and allows you to better apply for grant funding for research projects and also to provide didactic instruction in medical physics graduate programs. </p>
<p>“You should look around for MD/PhD programs that would allow you to do medical physics work, that way the two could go together as a general plan. That being said, if you enjoy medical physics there certainly is no harm in applying as well as a solid ‘plan B’”</p>
<p>This is typically not going to be possible because “medical physics” in the way that most graduate programs teach it is a profession. The PhD part of the MD/PhD is typically not completed in a profession-based training program. Some programs such as Harvard will allow the PhD part to be completed in something called “medical physics” (as part of their medical engineering and medical physics (MEMP) PhD program, in the Harvard example), but the focus is usually on something like neuroimaging that an MD would find useful in their research practice.</p>