<p>I'm a third year in BME Pre-med, and I haven't been looking at med school at all. However, I am hearing a lot about people applying to medical school, so I guess I'm wondering, what do you do once you've finished? If I'm not fascinated with being a doctor, surgeon or whatever, is medical school not for me somehow, or are there other things that you can do with this degree?</p>
<p>You can get and M.D./Ph.D and be a researcher. Or you can teach medicine. Obviously, you don't HAVE to do anything medically related - Michael Crichton is an M.D. and he's an author!</p>
<p>Keep in mind that all those things still require you to complete a residency program which is almost entirely clinically based. </p>
<p>I really feel that if you don't want to be a doctor/surgeon/cardiologist/etc, that med school is not for you. I say this for a couple of reasons:</p>
<p>1) Anything you can be with an MD other than a doctor doesn't require an MD. You can get your PhD without getting an MD, you can be a professor at a medical school during the basic science years without an MD. If you go to medical school, that's four years of your life, four years of loans that are essentially a waste if you don't want to have at least some clinical facet to your research. Physicians that are at teaching hospitals still have clinic, still see patients, still do surgery even if they are professors of a specific class. The clinic part is still a major job expectation.</p>
<p>2). If you are going to apply to medical school and some how get in, despite your lack of interest, that's one spot you took for someone else is very deserving and would die to get in. </p>
<p>My advice to you is really examine whether you want to be a doctor, or if you just like the science and such. If your heart isn't telling you that clinic encounters are important, you're much better off going straight to grad school or the working world doing something that you love...</p>
<p>There are students who go to medical school specifically intending to do research - I believe these are MD/PhD programs and usually this is decided when they are admitted. </p>
<p>Other than that, I wouldn't even consider medical school if I had no intention of working a physician. There are other ways to pursue a career that you ARE interested in.</p>
<p>If you haven't been looking at med schools as a pre-med, what other plans did you have?</p>
<p>Pearl, you're right they do go for research, but some of the intention is that they are going to be doing research that is clinical or at least more applicable to clinical practice than say a regular basic science PhD. The clinic experience is important and if the OP is not interested in seeing (or at least helping patients - radiologists don't really "see" patients) than (s)he is better off not going to med school and instead heading straight to grad school. If they are interested in research that is biomedical in nature, but still basic science rather than clinical, many academic medical centers have graduate student programs so that their research is biomedical in nature.</p>