<p>I am hoping you all have some advice? My daughter graduated from Princeton in 2009, in psych and neuroscience. She was not pre-med. Having worked for a medical equipment company now for a year, she has been increasingly interested in actually become a doctor. A neurosurgeon, she thinks. She has been in the OR several times, and likes it more each time.</p>
<p>So now what? In terms of her academics, she did quite well in her undergraduate work. I think 3.7-ish, although I didn't really track it. She needs to take Organic Chemistry and one other class - she did take Mol Bio. So I understand she can apply for programs to give her the pre-med requirements. Yes?</p>
<p>Then she would apply to medical school. Here's the thing. We spent all her college fund on undergrad. At the time she had no thoughts of med school. How does one pay for medical school? She has no loans from undergrad, but I am not in a position to pay anything for medical school, nor is her father.</p>
<p>Maybe she can stay at Princeton for one more semester, take organic chemistry, then graduate? Post-bacc programs, IF i remember correctly, are generally for people who have graduated from college and haven’t taken all or most of the pre-reqs. No point in spending another 2 years re-taking all the pre-reqs if she only needs to take organic chemistry. After taking organic chemistry, she can spend like 4 months studying for the mcats, take the test and apply to the medical school…as long as her EC’s are in line. Good Luck…</p>
<p>Becoming a neurosurgeon will take forever…too much stuff to do after medical school…</p>
Colleges0701, I believe OP has been graduated for more than one years. It may not be practical for her to go back to her college (unless she really likes to go back to “enjoy” college life again in the mean time – it could be a costly option though as most generous financial aids is only for the first 4 college years.) She may only need to take a couple of classes at some local university. A lot of people did that, I think.</p>
<p>Unless the family is very rich, most medical school students take loans, unless the student goes the Md/PhD route, which would take like 8 years for the medical school alone.</p>
<p>She graduated last year and has been working ever since. She only needs a few classes, and apparently both Penn and Columbia offer this kind of program - although they are of course very difficult to get into. She doesn’t want a phD. She wants to be a doctor. In the OR.</p>
<p>Naive question. How much does medical school cost until the young person starts earning some kind of a living? And how long does it last? You can tell this was not in our sights.</p>
<p>I am not an expert on this. But I think it would cost at least 200k for most medical schools, unless you are very lucky to go to a tuition free one. For some expensive private medical schools, it could be as high as 300k. I think the “sticker price” for the tuition alone for a private medical school is a little bit higher than that of a private undergraduate college. The difference is there is not so much financial aids as in HYPS undergraduate and some other private or public colleges.</p>
<p>I think post-bacc programs also cost a lot. In your D’s case, I think it is not necessary to shell out money for that. (Glad that DS has taken his premed classes :))</p>
<p>I don’t know where your daughter is geographically but the first place I would start to explore possibly applying to med school is back at Princeton. You might have already seen the link I will post below but I would suggest that your D contact Princeton’s pre-med advising office and ask how to go about meeting with an advisor to talk about her transcript and what she needs to do to set herself up to apply. This particular page is for undergrads but it tells you the basics and who to contact.</p>
<p>She might be able to arrange a phone “appointment” if it is a hardship to get back to NJ.</p>
<p>I should add that my daughter continued to use Columbia’s advising office when she applied to medical school two years after graduating. They were incredibly helpful.</p>
<p>Is your daughter a resident of california?(Based on your location). UC system has some good medical schools(UCSF,UCD,UCSD,UCLA) and free tuition for in-state students.</p>
<p>Random answers that I think are at least in the ballpark realizing that I’m close to 3 decades out of the immediate firing line. There are many possible avenues for Post-Bacc courses to cover the prereq courses and prepare for MCAT/Admission process which I think you gotten some basic information on in this and the other thread.</p>
<p>Costs are somewhat hard to gather, but are almost definitely more expensive than UG university. FA and Scholarships are available though nowhere near the extent of UG education. I randomly looked at several State Med Schools and found ranges from 14K to 30+K tuition for the 2009-10 year plus 3-5K other fees and books. Private Schools certainly 40-50K and increasing yearly are expected. Living Expenses, Health Insurance, etc are on top of that.</p>
<p>Med School is 4 years with pretty limited ability to earn money other than maybe the summer after 1st year.</p>
<p>After MS, then 3 year Residency programs are a minimum for many Primary Care MD’s and 4-7 years for more ‘complicated’ specialties, but are paid positions – current average 1st year salary is somewhere around 45-50K depending on program and specialty per year plus Health Insurance and pretty nice benefits at most programs. The salary escalates each year. You aren’t going to starve to death though 80-100+ hour workweeks aren;t unusual despite the “work limits” that are attempted in many places. ‘Moonlighting’ I think is still done and some folks used to pick up some substantial extra spending money – picking up a shift somewhere as an ER doctor or covering a night/weekend call for a local physician or covering a Hospital inpatient shift (some schools/hospitals use to strongly discourage this practice while others actually somewhat controlled it by helping residents find something they deemed appropriate). </p>
<p>Neurosurgery I think is a 7 year program – some places it 1 year general surgery and 6 years Neurosurg, some places it looks to be a 7 year integrated program. 7th Year Chief Resident salaries are in the mid 60K and maybe higher in some programs.</p>
<p>There are several government and private programs available to help with costs – Rural Medicine, Underserved Area, etc where you education costs may be covered, but you pledge to work for their organization for some length of time at a discounted salary after you finish your training.</p>
<p>Loans are available to cover costs and living expenses through a lot of the same sources as UG with some special application procedures though coming out of school with 100-200K+ in loans can be scary. If you complete the whole Neurosurg training program the salary for an average Neurosurgeon is certainly high enough to cover most of those costs within a somewhat reasonable time frame assuming nothing bad happens in the meantime (health/injuries, family or other emergencies, trouble setting up a practice, etc).</p>
<p>The average medical student at a state school (which is generally the ideal choice if only because of costs) will be about 150k of debt upon graduation. Private schools will run probably another 100k on top of that, though may have more generous scholarships. EVERYONE takes out loans. It’s an accepted part of the process and most schools simply hand you the standard budget and you sign your life away.
Some people do manage to work a little during the first and second years, but generally only in extremely flexible jobs (tending bar, teaching for Kaplan or the like). The third year of medical school is clinical, and there is no time to do anything other than school.</p>
<p>Residency is paid, but to clarify what duncan said, the salaries are standardized by INSTITUTION - so an academic medical center which has residency programs in numerous fields, everyone who enters the same year and has the same experience level gets paid the same. Even the fellows (physicians who have completed residency and are getting more specialized training - ie cardiologists, neuroradiologists, so on and so forth) will get paid the same as residents who are the same number of years in training as they are. For example, I’m a pediatrics resident (peds is a 3 year residency) who wants to do a peds critical care fellowship. When I start my fellowship I will be a Post Grad Year 4. I’ll get paid the same as a neurosurgery resident (a 7 year program) who is also PGY-4.</p>
<p>As for work-limits…these aren’t just “attempted” they’re national rules and programs can be put on probation, even losing their accredited status if the rules are continually broken. The rules state that residents can’t work more than 80 hours in a week, when averaged over 4 weeks. So you can work 100 hours or more one week, so long as they are balanced out the next. Of note for your daughter if she really does want to do neurosurgery, nearly every residency program in that field has applied for and received a 10% waiver on work hours. So NSGY residents actually have 88 hour work week limits. They actually work WAY more than that, and avoid the rules by doing lots of “home-call” which doesn’t count against work hours. For a quick peak at a NSGY resident “day in the life” check this blog post: [Residency</a> Notes Blog Archive Day In The Life…](<a href=“http://www.residencynotes.com/2010/09/day-in-the-life-2/#more-2626]Residency”>http://www.residencynotes.com/2010/09/day-in-the-life-2/#more-2626)</p>
<p>Your daughter has a long road ahead of her. In addition to taking the pre-reqs, she’ll need to prepare for the MCAT, and continue any clinical experiences she’s started. Certainly the medical supply company is a useful start. If she is California resident, then the task becomes that much harder. The medical schools there are typically among the most competitive to get into because of the number of applicants both from in-state and people who want to live in California. Just another layer to keep in mind.</p>
<p>Bigredmed – thanks for the update. Do certain specialties not still add a ‘bonus’ – I know in the 80’s there were certain programs that used to hide a little extra to attract applicants. Sometimes these were called Research or Lab stipends, but everybody knew it was a salary bump for minimal actual work to differentiate certain Surgical Specialties from the Primary Care track (or course those every other night or 3rd night call schedules more than made them earn it).</p>
<p>A lot depends on her grades in the premed science courses that your D has taken. If she has a 3.7 in Frosh Chem/Calc/Bio, then she could probably get by with just taking Orgo (and physics?) at any local Uni as a special student. With a high gpa, no need to enroll in a “special program”, IMO, if she only has one/two extra classes to complete. If she is in NJ and she has the money, she could ask Pton for permission to take the classes, adn I’m sure they’d be happy to oblige. But if she’s back in California, any UC extension program will work.</p>
<p>(btw: Columbia’s is not that difficult for admissions, but no better than NYU or even Fordham for taking classes as far as med school goes.)</p>
<p>She lives in New Jersey now. So would be taking courses in the area. She hadn’t mentioned the possibility of taking the courses at Princeton, so I wonder if she needs more than just Physics and Chem, which is all she has mentioned.</p>
<p>Her freshman Calc class was not an A, if I remember, and I don’t remember what she got in Mol Bio, but she did graduate high honors in Psych, and honors in the Neuroscience. Listening to all you say, I think the best thing would be for her to go back to the Princeton advising office and get their ideas given her actual record and what they know about kids in her situation. Thanks for the suggestion. Much appreciated.</p>
<p>If she only has a couple of courses to take, then keep working and take them as night classes or extension courses or whatever it it that the school will allow.</p>
<p>One important consideration-residency? Not medical residency, state of residence. Is your DD now a legal NJ resident? Or is she still a CA resident. She is going to have the best luck getting into the state schools of the state for which she is a resident.</p>
<p>Each school & state has their own rules which may not be consistent with other states. Does your DD want to attend medical school in the UC system and be close to home or in NJ? I feel like NJ has several schools with medium stat difficulty (DD did not apply in NJ so I don’t recall for certain) but I KNOW that CA has tons of applicants for good schools with high average stats.</p>
<p>My DD attended a UC, but was able to be a resident of a different state for medical school (my state). If your DD has already been working for a year she likely cannot qualify as a resident based on being your dependent. She should make a deliberate decision as to her chosen state of residence in time to apply accordingly.</p>
<p>My DD did work out of state in a location of which she was not in any way a resident, but she was careful to not erroneously assume any auspices of residency.</p>
<p>How long will it take her to complete those courses? Is she too late to begin this fall? She needs a full year of Ochem and physics and she should plan to apply in the June/July time period in the year she applies. She also needs to fit in the MCAT and should get her scores before applying to all the schools. If she could take the coursework 2010-11 and take the MCAT June 2011, she could submit her main application with the state schools and get it verified, then when getting her MCAT score a few weeks later, she could add the other schools- you won’t know where to aim for reach/etc until you know the scores</p>
<p>Well, there certainly are a number of different ways to provide a little extra cash, but not enough to consider it a major discrepancy. “Education funds”, “book money” and various other departmental bonuses were all sorts of things I found on the interview trail (I myself am a “Chairman’s Scholar” and get an extra $1500 for the last two years of residency - 3k total - which I’m going to use to pay for board exam fees and state licensure fees). However, given those 80 hour work week rules (and the new rules limiting interns to only 16 hours of consecutive duty at a time), it’s probably cut down on some of those bonuses that led to widely variable salaries between specialties at the same institution.</p>
<p>I know that for some fields, there was certainly this attitude of “you should be so lucky that we’d even think of training you”. My friends who went into things like Ortho and ENT certainly did not get anywhere near the perquisites that I did or even that my friends going into internal medicine did when interviewing. Their interviews were also a lot more about proving they would be an asset to the program rather than the program selling them on why they should come to that place. I don’t expect most programs to be as nice as the Departments of Pediatrics, but it was shocking how rude some programs were to applicants.</p>
<p>16 hours maximum shifts – really? Man, I really am old. I now know what my professors and older partners now meant when they laughed at my ‘paltry’ 3rd or 4th night call schedule, 15K yearly salary, and that I actually had a real apartment to live in. Those House of God stories from training in the 50/60’s were just unreal – true House Officers with 4-5 nights per week on call, 6 1/2 day/week work schedule with paid room and board (as long as you lived in the Hospital Annex and ate at the Hosp Canteen/Cafeteria), and I think $200-300 monthly stipend. </p>
<p>I think I sat with a couple my surgery friends and we actually figured that over their PGY-1 year they literally were in the hospital over 115 hours per week and each of them had at least one or two months where they went home to pick up the mail and wash clothes once a week for a few hours, repacked their bags and basically lived in the hospital call rooms for over a month (they were out of the hospital doors for less than 12 hours for the entire month). </p>
<p>I actually enjoyed my Peds residency interviews where they asked about 6 questions just to make sure you could speak clearly and then spent the rest of the day selling you on their program and telling you how much you were wanted (what a love-fest). I agree about those Surgeon interviews and the 3rd degree stories – of course a lot of my surgery buddies said they basically walked away from those type programs and went somewhere less abrasive.</p>
<p>Take the remaining courses she needs at an inexpensive but still well respected school that will prepare her for the MCAT, perhaps Rutgers since she’s in NJ. Even if she’s OOS the OOS credit rate for RU isn’t too expensive. It doesn’t look like she needs that many more courses to fulfill the pre-med requirements and a postbacc is unnecessary for two courses.</p>
<p>Yeah, I’ll be a PGY-3 next year when those rules go into place and I think it means I’m going to have a lot more work to do. Of course I’m looking at Peds Critical Care fellowships at the moment, and it’s going to be 9 months of q4 call pretty much every where I go as a first year fellow…so it really doesn’t bother me that much. My friend who wants to do Allergy and Immunology though is freaking out about her (peds) program’s anticipated changes next year, and her fellowship is just a <em>touch</em> different.</p>
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<p>I liked the free gifts too! I ended up with like 4 different tote bags, two t-shirts, 6 throwaway calculators, an unknown number of pens that I managed to lose all of in less than a month, BBQ seasoning (from Children’s Mercy in KC), a flashlight, and probably a significant number of things I’ve forgotten. One of my friends who interviewed at Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee for peds said they gave away bottles of beer!</p>
You can tell this was not in our sights.</p>