In the bioscience fields, the PhDs who don’t land an academic job, can investigate government jobs such as a research job in a USDA lab or as a patent examiner, or they can try for a job in pharma/biotech. But they should think clearly about their long-range goals and consider picking up some kind of management experience along the way. There is likely to be a point in their careers when they will find it nearly impossible to get a new bench job, and will be all but forced to move toward lab administration.
In life sciences and biomedicine, I would be curious to know whether there are more opportunities for someone is also a practicing physician (MD/PH.D.) to find funding for research.
In life sciences and other areas, would it be accurate to say that more research is being done than ever, but it is being done by folks who are not pure academics, tenured professors?
I don’t know all of my husband’s MD/PhD students have stopped doing research and just practice medicine. I don’t think “more research is being done than ever”.
I don’t know whether or not more research is being done, but I can definitely say that students have become more conscious of a waning job market for academic employment, and have acted accordingly. Especially the most talented ones.
I currently work in a BME lab at Columbia and most people don’t want to go into academia; the one that does is an MD-PhD. Most of them want to go into industry, but a few have gone into management consulting, which, IMO, pays very well at the associate level - certainly better than a tenure track assistant professor job.
I am personally in between an MD and an MD/PhD right now - I’ve had mixed feelings about the lifestyle of nonstop grant writing. That being said, I also wonder how much of the difficulty is geographical constraints - when you’re 30, you may be more picky with regards to the area because of a partner.
I think I’ll probably go for the MD/PhD because the PhD might be helpful for biotech startups, and if I don’t go for/get an academic physicians scientist post, I can just be a really solid doctor.
^ Is PhD really necessary when you have an MD? If you publish a few papers in journals such as NEJM, Science or Nature, you are fine imo. A PhD without good publications doesn’t mean much.
@eiholi Well MD/PhDs are made more attractive by being totally free.
Yes, but many of these jobs don’t involve doing actual research. (I’m an NIH contractor, so I see this all the time.) The PhDs who work for government agencies at levels beyond the postdoc level often perform administrative functions, rather than actually doing research. They’re still part of the scientific field they trained in, and their jobs are sophisticated and important, but they’re not truly scientists anymore. This is OK with some people but not others.
A big part of this issue is the plethora of Bio majors who did not make it to med school. Not sure how to fix that, but more reality needs to be instilled in this kids early on
^ There’s always dental, optometry, physical therapy, etc. . . .
From a purely academic perspective: No, they are absolutely unnecessary. Academically an MD teaches you everything you need to know, including research skills if that is your forte (doctors do research too). In terms of qualifications, an MD is more than sufficient to get a job as a professor or a researcher.
The difference is that instead of ~$300k in debt you have a 10-year MD/PhD program, where you just randomly shuffle between a year of MD work then a year of PhD work a few times (to stop you from just leaving with the MD), but you get to go for free. Also admissions are often easier than for just a straight MD.
@Marian - that is absolutely true. Happdad is a PhD bench scientist. So far he has managed to stay in the lab, but he really is at the limit. If he doesn’t get lucky with his next position, his only options will be out of the lab. He does not like what little management he’s done at all. He’s happiest as part of a larger research team.
I think it is important that young people be encouraged to look ahead. What skills will they need to have so that they can make lateral moves? At bare minimum, what hobbies/interests do they have that could lead to at least a part-time paying job if/when a biotech they work for lays off half of its people?
Just want to correct some possible misinformation in case there are any students reading this thread. One caveat - I am not an MD/PhD, but I have a relative who helped run an MSTP program, so I think what I’m writing is mostly correct.
It is true that it is possible to do research with just an MD. However, saying that “an MD teaches you everything you need to know, including research skills” isn’t really right. The MD degree is really about the practice of medicine, not medical research skills. There are always exceptions of course, but most MDs who want to pursue a research intensive track will need to spend extra years as a post-doc in order to get the training they need. By the end of this, they are more or less in the same place career-wise and age-wise as an MD/PhD. However, they do have an extra $300K of debt. It’s especially important to consider the amount of this debt since you’re probably going to be spending most of your time in research instead of clinical practice, so you’re not going to be making the same type of money as most MD’s make and paying off this debt will be a lot harder.
The trend over the last few decades has been for more people in research to have an MD/PhD. MD/PhD programs have only been around for a few decades, so many well-known researchers from older generations will have done an MD degree, but this is changing.
It’s also not really right to say that admission to an MD/PhD program is easier than to an MD program. The reverse is probably closer to the actual truth. An MD and an MD/PhD really serve two different purposes, so it’s a bit silly to compare the applicant pools. However, from just a “stats” perspective, successful MD/PhD applicants need significantly higher MCATs and GPAs than the average successful MD applicant. MD/PhD applicants also have lower overall acceptance rates than MD applicants (there are a lot fewer programs), and the quality of the pool is generally higher.
I chuckled when I read just “publish a few papers in journals such as NEJM, Science or Nature, you are fine”. That’s a really high bar for most people even a few years out of an MD or MD/PhD program. It’s a bit like saying “no need to get a college degree, just be the founder of a multi-million dollar startup and you’ll be fine.” 
The statement is 100% accurate, it’s just not very useful advice for most people
If you want to get a Ph.D. in any field, make sure you get it from a top tier school. It is pointless to get a Ph.D. from a thrid tier school.
@hzhao2004, depends on end goals, actually.
Easier said than done.
I was always under the impression that it was harder to get accepted as an MD/PhD than a straight MD.
Relatively few of my friends in grad school school end up in academia at a large research-teaching institution like where we got our PhD, however almost all are in research jobs. We got our PhDs in Biology, but focused on organismal biology. Many are in government agencies (federal or state) or in NGOs or Tribal agencies. My fields who got PhDs in applied math or economics had varied career paths: industry, academia, start-ups, NGOS. But again most are still involved in research (publishing papers).
BTW, basically no one went from PhD to academic job. There were 2-6 years of post-docs first.
I agree with @al2simon 's comments. At the university I used to work at, a lot of the PIs, including my fantastic mentor, just have MDs, but when I broached the idea with my premed advisor at CU, she flat out told me that getting to that point with just an MD nowadays is much harder.
The thing about the MD/PhD I have concerns with is that you effectively lose 3-4 years of income, and many MD/PhDs tend to just do medicine, so assuming a 200k/annum starting salary post-residency (I just made this up), that’s a loss of 800k and 4 years of your life. Sure, you have to take loans with a straight MD, but the average debt load is 133k for MS graduates, which seems manageable. There are also MD programs that are more research oriented, like Cleveland Clinic, HST at Harvard, etc.
Plus, even if you do manage to land an academic research job, you deal with politics, an apparent pressure for more clinical work (since that gives the hospital more revenue), grant writing, and reduced income. Science is amazing, but I feel like it’s very different being the person doing experiments and analysis, and the supervisor who tells people what to do. How can you know if you’d enjoy that when it’s not an experience you can really have?
I guess I feel like there’s a fair bit of risk and sacrifice you take should you add on the PhD, and I guess if you go that route, you really have to be ok with it.
This is simply not true and easy to disprove. Go to the web sites of research universities and peruse the bios of tenure track faculty. Sure, on some campuses you’ll find mostly grads from elite schools. However at the majority of campuses you’ll find that faculty come from programs at every “tier” of school. The reason is that different research campuses have strengths or areas of excellence that are not reflected in the broader reputation of the school. After one or two postdocs the alma mater becomes irrelevant if the researcher has developed a promising system.
The discussion on this thread is focused only on biomedical/MD research, but microbiology and agricultural research are also undergoing a revolution facilitated by gene editing technology and the loss of chemical control options for pest and disease control. Tenure track positions in Entomology, Plant Pathology (virology,bacteriology & mycology) and Nematology are stable or increasing, and industry demand for these specialties is also healthy. The problem, as mentioned in earlier posts, is that undergraduates are fixated on medical related fields and don’t broaden their exposure to other disciplines.
I really feel for these postdocs and don’t mean to be harsh… however, I must second @sorghum ’s post #15: the majority of biology postdocs are completely unprepared and unqualified to become principal investigators, and should not waste public funds to do so. Also, those postdocs who believe that industrial R&D jobs are less challenging and competitive than academic ones are in for a major disappointment: it is not any more difficult to write a successful grant than to develop a novel drug that actually works.