For those who are new here, my name is Cindy, and I’m a third year MD-PhD student currently in the PhD phase (doing my PhD in biomedical informatics!). Today I want to share how I got to this path–maybe it helps some of you, and maybe people are just curious :)
A little bit of a background, I majored in statistics in undergrad. I was always premed and medicine was always kind of the “plan A”, but I think a small part thought “oh, if premed doesn’t work out I can always do research or or something in data science.”
As I went on in my major though, I realized I actually loved my entire statistics degree. I also ended up doing business/econ research in undergrad. All throughout college, I did the premed requirements like volunteering and shadowing, but I also explored career options outside of medicine during my summers (mostly in healthcare consulting). My problem was that even though I truly loved my statistics degree, and I loved the data science aspect in research, I didn’t see myself doing what I did over the summers career-wise.
After one summer, I brought up some of these thoughts to my research professor about this, who responded by casually saying “have you thought about MD-PhD programs?”
Before that point, I didn’t even know that existed, and I didn’t know if I would be competitive. But that led me to doing more research about MD-PhD programs, and learning that some programs do allow you to do your PhD in non-traditional fields of study. It was around then that I realized I actually can continue doing informatics and statistics, and essentially be able to combine these seemingly disparate interests through an MD-PhD.
I think at the end of the day I loved doing statistics, but I really only wanted to do it long term, if it also had implications on improving health and wellbeing. I also honestly enjoyed interacting with people when I was shadowing and volunteering, so I also really can’t imagine a career without that aspect of it. In my applications, I essentially wrote that the healthcare/medical impact of informatics research is what makes my love for statistics meaningful
After undergrad, I took two gap years doing computational clinical research, where I worked with an MD-PhD, and my decision was further solidified. All in all: the MD-PhD degree works out for me in the sense that I am able to combine all these things I love in a future career.
Everyone’s path to deciding on whether MD-PhD is right for them looks a little different–though it usually takes some form of wanting to do both research and clinical work in their future career. This is just my path, and I have loved how this degree program will give me lots of flexibility for my future career as well as an avenue to combine things that I love doing.
