a choice for the unaccepted

[cellophanetower]

Background:
I want to enter a phd in health policy, but i also want my md.  both are equally important to me.  I applied to both, got into none.

The choice:
I have a job opportunity to work in a well known (internationally!) medical wetlab, doing benchwork, with little pay, but decent benefits.
The other choice is maintaining my current job of

Comments

[roseofjuly]

Question: Does it need to be a health policy Ph.D? There are several MPH-MD programs in which you could focus on health policy in your MPH; they're shorter. You did say that the Ph.D in health policy is important to you, so that might not be the issue at hand here

[cellophanetower]

1) you're right. i've skimped on details.
2) i'm considering applying 2 years from now.
3) i prefer the phd vs an mph. reasons are a matter of my career choice: i'd prefer academia, publishing, employment as a prof over field work.

Thanks for the forebearance suggestion.

I have no idea if wetlab experience will help my MD resume, or my resume for health policy (i doubt it would have any affect on the latter). But i am meeting with a few schools' dir. of admissions at both md and phd programs. if my post has any overlap with your future interests, i can gladly tell you what i find out.

[pigfish]

3) I'm curious what you want to teach with these two degrees, it is AWFUL silly to get an MD if you don't want to treat patients.

And I know many many pre-meds who worked in a wet lab for 1-2 years (many labs want you to commit to 2 years before they'll hire you) in order to improve their apps, and they have since all gotten into at least one MD program.

[roseofjuly]

Not necessarily. A lot of physician-scientists go into medical research; MDs are very useful for that kind of thing. I have a friend doing an MD-Ph.D next year who doesn't want to treat patients either; he does research on nocturnal urine production and circadian rhythms. If you look at schools of public health and medical schools, a lot of the professors have MDs and don't treat patients any longer outside of the scope of medical trials/research.

[pigfish]

This is true, but you do still have to do 2 years of clinical work, which, if you really dont want to deal with patients, could be really miserable. I know a number of MD/PhD's, but the OP didn't even really seem to want to do research, but more teaching/writing.

[roseofjuly]

If you want to do research/work in academia, you can do that fine with an MD-MPH. I'm not trying to push you away from an MD-Ph.D of course, if that is your dream, but MD-MPH programs are less competitive (not that they aren't at all, just less so than MD-Ph.D). There are a lot of physician scientists that teach in schools of public health on health policy; look at the departments of health policy/management at SPH and you'll see that some of the faculty at these schools have MDs.

At my future SPH 12/27 (nearly half) of the faculty there have MDs with no Ph.D, and most of those have an MPH in HPM. At Michigan there's at least 7, with another large chunk of the department having only a JD or even a master's in a relevant field. Health policy is an interdisciplinary field and isn't one of those fields in which your doctoral degree has to be in exactly that before obtaining a position in the field.

But I agree with pigfish in wondering why you want to go to medical school when you don't seem to want to treat patients at all. While I