>be in MD/PhD-program in my country's top university

Universities usually have therapists for students, visit him. It helped me. I was a medstudent with similar problems.

>>17731106
Hadn't really considered a therapist. Worth a shot. Thanks, anon.

bamp

>bump for stress

Pre med student here, how hard was it to get into a MD/PhD dual degree program?

>>17731676
I'm not in the US, but: I've wanted to go into medicine since I was ten years old. I've always had perfect grades, and I got the third-best grade in the country on our equivalent to your SAT (we don't have a MCAT here). I started doing "research" with a wet lab when I was in what you'd call high school. I also did master's degree-level math when in high school. I've volunteered as an ambulance driver. I've gone through basic military training ("boot camp"), and was going into the fighter pilot program when I was accepted for the joint MD/PhD - I obviously elected to do the latter. Three people were accepted to the MD/PhD that year. One of the others was already an engineer who had patented some program and made millions, and now wanted to do an MD/PhD "for fun" (...).
Judge for yourself how hard it was.

>tl;dr: I always wanted to be an MD, I had a perfect "GPA" my entire life, started doing research when I was a kid, could have chosen to be a fighter pilot.

>>17731751

Is this Israel?

>>17731766
A European country. Won't specify further because >muh paranoia.

>>17731778

are you ABD or do you still have coursework to do?

>>17731784
Yeah, the data gathering for my project is complete; now there's just a bunch of manuscript writing to be done.

[spoiler]It's like having an anvil on my head, constantly. I had a normal BMI when starting med school, but have since lost 18 kg due to stress. [spoiler]Sometimes I want to fucking die.[/spoiler] Some of the time it's fun, too, though it's mostly >stress.[/spoiler]

I'm a pharmacist and hate it and am applying to medical school this year. Am I making a huge mistake?

>>17731815
I suppose it depends on why you want to go to medical school?

>>17731836
I hate the stress of pharmacy and want to be more knowledgeable and more able to directly help people. Too much of pharmacy is repetitive bullshit thats unrelated to actually talking to people or being knowledgeable about medications.

>>17731851
What's the nature of the stress you face in pharmacy?

>>17731865
People lining up to get their medication while people are waiting to pick it up while the phone is ringing and someone wants an injection and there are 15 prescriptions to physically fill. Makes me feel like i'm working at Mcdonalds.

>>17731895
Ah. Well, if you want a less stressful job, you could go into medicine and then work in an okay specialty, like clinical chemistry or pathology. I must warn you, though: until you're finished with med school, internships and residency, life will probably be at least as stressful as in pharmacy. It will, in periods, also be far more stressful.
The big thing with medical school is that, while the material's not hard, there's so much of it. I've heard it described as drinking from the fire hose.
(I've never been more depressed than the first two years I went into med school).

>>17731931
See, i'm not too worried because i've covered most of it in pharmacy already. We've done all the major disease states and know everything from pathology to treatment. There will be a lot I don't know, but I have a good knowledge base already because of my pharmacy background.

I got my medical degree from Cambridge, and currently working in a DGH down south

Med school is tough, but if you find yourself considering whether to drop it, just remember it doesn't get any easier

I absolutely love it. I get such a buzz from working that I'm bored out of my mind when I'm at home in the night. I pretty much just count down the hours until I'm back in work

Now you don't have to be that enthusiastic about medicine to make it, but it shouldn't seem like a struggle

Seeing people crying under pressure on the job isn't unusual, but you have to snap out of that pretty quickly. Keep looking ahead

>>17731943
Do you have a doctorate degree in pharmacy? Personally, I think the stressful part of med school is that you do 40-50 hour weeks in clinics, and then you study 4-6 hours when you get home. Not much time left in the day after that. But that's just my opinion.

>>17731943
I used to like pharmacy a lot during med school, but actually, you realise most of your prescribing is just to protocol

>biliary sepsis? CEF+MET, NO QUESTIONS
>pain? ORAMORPH 5-20MG, SCREW THE ANALGESIA LADDER AND WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN ADJUNCTS??
>nauseous? ONDANSETRON 4-8MG. I DON'T CARE IF YOU READ DOMPERIDONE IS BETTER

>>17731964
Pretty much. We see a lot of questionable stuff, or medications that interact but the doctors always say fuck it, stick to the protocol.

>>17731961
No, in my country we don't do doctorates for regular pharmacy degrees.

>>17731960
>Keep looking ahead
But what's there to look ahead to? Doing the PhD's fun because there's creativity, and there's some creativity in coming up with diagnoses sometimes, but generally as a junior doctor you're just a cog in a machine. And it's not gotta get better, seeing how hard it is to get an internship and how long the hours will be in the coming 10+ years as a junior MD.

Fuck.

>>17731970
Which country are you in, if one may ask?

>>17731977
Canada. And to be fair it was only my province. I kinda got fucked because they changed the program after I graduated.

>>17731974
>But what's there to look ahead to?
If you're asking this, you need to change your frame of mind if you're not going to end up depressed

Sure you're a cog in the machine, but you'll be making big decisions fairly quickly - especially at night. And you have to see it all as experience that will justify your increasing responsibility

If the hours bother you, you're in the wrong profession. I worked just short of 100 hours in one week last month, and I loved it

>>17731981
Ah. Well, as a (soon-ish-to-be) MD/PhD, I think you'll probably like it in med school!

>just DO IT

>>17731989
>If the hours bother you
Nah, the hours never bothered me as such. I think I'm just semi-depressed at the moment. I did go into medicine because it was my dream. Working ~100 hours doesn't sound so bad, as long as it's doing something you love. I'm just starting to wonder if maybe I want the PhD more than the MD.

Guess I should see a pscyhologist.

>>17731989
What specialty/department do you work in, by the way?

>>17731991
Yeah, i'm sure I will. unfortunately I don't know if my grades are good enough so I may have to go to an international one which fucks over my chances for good specialties. Oh well, better than pharmacy.

>>17732017
What specialty would you like?

>>17732026
Not sure, I think it's impossible to say until you've done some rotations but I think Derm or psychiatry would be nice. Maybe an internalist or a geriatric specialist. What are you going for?

>>17732038
I'm thinking psychiatry or internal medicine (hematology) right now. I've also considered interventional radiology I have two years left of med school after I finish my PhD (computational biology).

>>17732052
My dude. Why do you want psychiatry?

>>17732059
Psychiatry is the least appreciated specialty in my country, but personally I think helping people with problems of the mind is the most noble thing a person can possibly commit to doing. Also, seeing how little we know about the mind and how prevalent the psychiatric diagnoses are, plus recent advances in neurology, big data and high-throughput methodology, I think there's a lot that a "computational physician" could accomplish in the coming decades.

How about you?

>>17732014
General surgery
Upper GI at the moment

>>17732094
Ah. I worked there once upon a time (as a nursing auxiliary). It's fun to be in the OR. I get why you're excited to go to work!

>>17732052
>psychiatry or internal medicine (hematology) right now. I've also considered interventional radiology
Good Lord - add in orthopaedic surgery and you'll have four of the most unrelated specialties possible

IR is a solid choice. Massive future ahead, good pay, good hours, good private work. Go for it if you're remotely interested in it


From my point of view, psychiatry is just too underappreciated. Now I don't care what other doctors or society thinks, but most of all, it's underappreciated by the very people you're trying to help. I just wouldn't get any job satisfaction from it
GPs seem to handle psych issues just as effectively (informal comment/opinion - I'm sure that's not truly the case)

>>17732110
>Good Lord - add in orthopaedic surgery and you'll have four of the most unrelated specialties possible
Well, that may be the case. I think my problem is that I could consider any specialty (except for ortho - is there a more overly macho specialty in the world?).
I've been considered IR for some time now. Problem is that there are literally four interventional radiologists in my country, and one IR hybrid lab in the country. Also, we have to train as radiologists first (i.e., five years residency) and then do a fellowship in IR.

Senior/4th year in CS here in a high-ranking uni in the US. Please don't go into CS if you specifically want to just make vidya. (Similarly, don't bother doing physics if you want to make gaymes. Nowhere near as applicable as CS would be, unless you were writing a 3D game engine from scratch.) I've seen far too many friends and acquaintances do CS because of it and they either fail miserably because they realize it's a lot more math and hard work than they realized or they just never find any jobs pertaining to their specific interests. OP, you seem smart to say the least, so I'd only be worried about the latter.

Just be warned that the grass is NOT automatically greener elsewhere; it'll be as green as you make it. Depending on what school you go to, it can either be a complete shitshow of a CS department where professors pull exam questions from online textbooks or just another living hell where you have to turn in thousands of lines of code every 2 weeks. I'm currently taking a class on operating systems/multithreaded and concurrent programming, and while I love it to bits, the stress of the class plus all my other classes gave me anxiety attacks and nearly pushed me to a bout of pneumonia before I cut out other obligations in my life.

>>17732241
>>17732241
I'd say to stick with what you have, find a therapist, and in the meantime, take online classes about programming. Start off with Python if you want to ease into things, but C++ is the typical starter language for us here. Once you nail the mental gymnastics of programming, go into algorithms and data structures (knowing these and when to apply them is what differentiates a good programmer from a bad one), then other stuff like concurrency, cryptography, graphics, embedded systems... The great thing about CS is that you don't really need a degree per se to know it (though oftentimes having the uni CS experience will enrich it further), which is why you don't really need to drop out to try it.

Also, look into L-Theanine. Doesn't always help with my low blood pressure but it seriously does wonders for stress and anxiety, and it works well with caffeine.

>>17731895
Maybe you should work in a hospital not a shitty retail clinic.

>>17731073
Is being an MD as difficult as it sounds? It seems like you have to dedicate your whole life to your job and can't have a life outside of work.

>>17732071
I am a US psychiatry resident, and am having a good time of it so far. If you're interested in computational psychiatry, there are some emerging studies regarding Bayes' theorem and psychosis that is interesting to think about.

Other than being noble, seeing the functional improvement individuals have is terrific. And when I am working on the more medical side, those skills from psychiatry really work to get things done.

>>17733475
What groups, specifically, focus on computational psychiatry? Sounds awesome.

>>17731073
Totally unrelated but bc all people sharing here here's mine
>be in third word country
>passed med school done with intership
>now failed my post grad entrance exam three times
>feeling loser af
>have developed real exam phobia
>currently struggling to to figure out WHAT I SHOULD DO?
HOW ESCAPE FROM FATE OF ENDING UP AVERAGE DOCTOR