While it is bad enough that medical residents are mistaken for students, I’ve come to realize that there are many other misinformed people in the community that do not realize what medical training entails. Yesterday I spent the afternoon at a private ophthalmologist’s office, and I chatted with his senior technician for a while (she has been working as an ophthalmic technician for 14yrs):

Technician: So, do you want to be a doctor?

Me: (wearing long white coat with my name embroidered on it): Yes, but I’ve finished medical school already. I am training to become an ophthalmologist.

Technician: So will you be doing surgeries as well?

Me: (getting agitated) Yeah, I chose to become an ophthalmologist because I wanted to perform surgeries.

Technician: How do you even learn to do a cataract surgery? Do you have to go through special training?

[Thought: she needs to be educated.]

At that point, a new patient arrived, and I walked off to examine him.

Later in the afternoon, I had another conversation with her that started with her asking me whether I had applied for ophthalmology training. While I assume that there are people who are bold enough to advertise themselves as future doctors when they were 10, 15, 20, or even 25 years old, it would have been pretentious of me to state that, “I am training to become an ophthalmologist” without having matched for a spot in residency.  This is frustrating indeed.

To set the record straight, I’m going to lay out how a person becomes a physician in the US. Hopefully, some of you readers can help me spread the word. There are basically two traditional routes:

1. You are in high school or college. You decide to become a doctor. In college, you study whatever you wish, but complete the required courses to apply for medical school. This usually includes some basic chemistry, organic chemistry, some biology, physics, and literature courses.
   1. You take the MCAT while in college, which is a multiple choice and essay exam covering the basic sciences and reading comprehension. The verbal section, as I perceived it, is like the SAT section on steroids. And for some reason, it is more difficult than the verbal sections on the GRE, LSAT, or GMAT.
   2. You go to medical for four years. During your fourth year, you decide what to specialize in, and apply for residency training.
   3. If you are fortunate, the programs you apply to will invite you for an interview. At the end of the interview season, you make a rank list of your top training choices that you interviewed at. The training program will do the same on its interviewees. In the spring, everyone will find out where they “matched”. The entire process is as grueling as you make it, and how competitive your credentials are. For some specialties such as Family Medicine or Internal Medicine, you would only need to apply to a handful of programs to guarantee an interview and a spot. This is usually because there are many available positions in these fields. For other specialties with fewer positions, you’d have to apply to more programs–some people apply to 50-70! However, if you want to train at a well-known top institution, it’ll be tough no matter what specialty you choose.
   4. Depending on the specialty, you are in residency for 3 to 8 years. If you decide to subspecialize later, a fellowship adds 1-4+ years of training. In total, medical training after college runs on average 8+ years.
2. If you decide to become a doctor after a career change, it simply requires about 18 months+ of post-bac courses at a college, and a recent MCAT score. The rest is the same.

Again, this is a rough outline of the training process. If you or your children are interested in applying for medical school or even college, I do review personal statements and offer advice at a competitive rate to help strengthen your application.  See my Services page for details.

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