Hey, all! I am needing your advice. I have a pretty solid educational background currently (I recently finished an MS in forensics), but because of the job market and a physical disability, I'm cut out of a lot of law enforcement and military jobs, making finding full time or close to full time work insanely difficult. I've been really wanting to take the MCATS to try to get into med school for ages. I would need around six classes (plus all the labs that go with said classes)to finish premed reqs, which doesn't seem like much, but because of the order they have to be taken in, I'm looking at a solid three semesters of coursework, one of which I might not be able to get funding for due to the low number of credit hours. There's no guarantee that I would get into med school after all the coursework and MCATS are dealt with, at which point I would be in the same situation I would be in now. With the low courseload, I might be able to work part time while in school though.

I have another option, which would be to get another full undergrad degree at the same time, likely in accounting, and do premed at the same time. I would be able to get loan funding, but the workload would be so insane that I wouldn't be able to work even one day a week if I ever found a position. It would also increase my time in school to five or six semesters. The main upside would be that I would finish and have a sort of backup education that I could definitely get a job with, so if medical school fell through, I would have a solid employment outlook.

Thoughts?

Personally, I feel like the Accounting idea seems more stable. It is a hard task though, can you manage it? How would you be able to make ends meet without working?

And the good thing about the second idea like you said is that you would have a solid fall back if Premed doesn't pan out. I don't know what your disability is but I figure something stable is going to be most important. And while it is more difficult in effort, you made it through once so far, so it sounds like you can handle the course load. My main concern is how you would maintain living space, food, etc without working?

That's the issue. Going for the accounting would blow through ALL my savings.

have you thought about going to nursing school or something like that instead? I knew a lot of people in undergraduate classes at least that worked as nurses or phlembotomists while pursuing medical degrees. I know from looking at it that getting your MD is extremely challenging and also kind of expensive, when you consider that you have to do your residency and get certified and all that as well before you can actually start practicing.

I honestly don't think going back and getting a second BA/BS is worth it unless you're really interested in accounting. You could look into getting your MBA instead but I feel like a lot of people are doing that so again, unless you have a goal or find that's useful in your field, I don't think it's the best idea personally.

Is there any way you could take a couple classes also that would give you enough expertise to slide into another field? Obviously you have some bench work background, so maybe taking 1/2 of the med classes and applying somewhere to work somewhere with biology would be useful. Another option would be to take some technical training or learn a skill (Ie programming, SAS, R, etc) and parlay that into another career field. Data science, especially health data, is a big field right now, and is starting to incorporate more disciplines in as well.

Anyway I know that's a lot but just some thoughts. Best of luck to you regardless, finding a job is hard especially when medical stuff gets in your way. It's no fun for sure

I did look into programming, as well as nursing, and PA school, but none of them really interested me as much as going to get an MD. I've done a decent amount of volunteer work in hospitals, so I've gotten a good idea of what appeals to me, and MD is at the top of the list. Nursing, EMT, PA and the like are definitely cheaper, but aren't want I want to do and the feedback I've gotten is that the schedules for them are so crammed there's no way I could do that while studying for medical school. Doing the premed courses would likely open up more in the field of chemistry for me, but not biology. For some reason the premed programs here are heavy on physics and chem but involve very little bio.

The chem I can understand... but I'm surprised there isn't more bio? I know the premed program at my college had microbio, infectious diseases, neuro as an option, immunology... in addition to biochem and the like. I don't know if they did that much physics though, which is unfortunate because understanding flow and stuff is kind of important.

That makes sense with nursing; I didn't think about that.

If your dream is to get an MD and you are most interested in that, I would suggest going for it. With the coursework being split the way it is, would you be able to keep a job at least part time while working through the 6 courses + test prep?

I should have gone into further detail on the coursework: The full premed program is 2 sems of bio, 2 chem, 2 ochem, 2 physics, and a smattering of other basic core classes, like English and basic math that I already have well under my belt. I really only need 1 chem, 2 ochem, and the 2 physics courses, but I'm adding another course in bio as an elective, as the biology courses I have taken were pretty basic, and while they count towards the program, I feel like I'd benefit a lot from taking gross anat or something akin. I would LOVE to take these all at once if I could, but because of the order the chem and ochems are taken in, I'm looking at three semesters minimum. Since That leaves me with taking a max of three courses at once (phy/bio/chem, I'd be able to work PT while taking the courses. I'm currently training as a medical scribe so I'll have PT work that will be relevant. The extra chem courses could open up a chem position for me if I decided not to go for premed at some point, but I'm trying to go all the way with this if I'm going to do it at all.

ah ok! Medical scribe sounds really cool actually c: And yeah, with something like this I definitely believe in following your dreams, especially if you enjoy it. My job is currently doing regulatory science + tech stuff, and I love doing a job that's in my field and uses all my knowledge. Even on rough days it's so satisfying, even though it's not as prestigious I guess as doctor work. I'm working at the organization I've wanted to work at for years finally and it feels good to have hard work pay off.

I personally loved anatomy and physiology even though it was basically the hardest class for me personally in my undergrad. I learned so much from that class and I loved doing the dissections in lab.

(As an aside, I kept reading PT as physical therapy, which is funny because one of my A&P lab instructors was a physical therapist. Which was really good actually because she had a lot of very useful knowledge!)

It's funny you say that about your lab work, as I was hoping to go into forensics at first for rather the same reason, that it would make more use of my weird diverse background. Where are you working, if you don't mind my asking? Personally, I'd probably work at 3M if I were doing anything like that. They seem to make EVERYTHING. I'm still in a very much accelerated training program for the scribe stuff, so it's a little crazy right now, but it sounds like it's going to be fun. I'm probably more excited than I should be about filling out charts, but I'm looking forward to actually working in a hospital again. I really liked reading about anatomy as well, but the course I took was terrible. It was a test run for an online textbook, half of which was missing, and a decent chunk of what was left was riddled with errors. x.x

I'm working at a health-related arm of the government. I don't like to be specific online because reasons. I want to tell more people where I work but keeping it vague is safer which kind of sucks but at the same time I can't really talk about specifics to non-work people anyway, so oh well.

3M is awesome, I always love what they're doing with chemistry and materials science. Ideally I'd like to work for the same gov org as I do now, but behind a lab bench... I didn't have enough experience with that when I was in school so even though I'd know what I was doing, places didn't want to hire me for it without a full internship of benchwork. But I've got my foot in the door and I enjoy learning about all the complicated regulations, which like you said I probably shouldn't enjoy as much as I do, haha.

Ughhh that sounds awful! If you have a good professor it's the best. Mine was amazing and went into everything in so much detail, but was really good at explaining it all. It was hard for me to catch the details sometimes, but I still remember a lot of the overall processes even now years later.

I'm hoping to at least review some extra anatomy stuff on my own before I take any more classes, since the pathology stuff I'm used to is kind of dead people specific. Hoping I'll have better luck on my own with it. I went to grad school in DC, so I have a decent number of friends doing chem-related work for various gov orgs. I know a bunch of them had the same issue where they couldn't get hired without internships. Then again, there are also a lot of places that bring on unpaid interns and then dump them at the end of the internship so they essentially have people working for free. :I

ha! No kidding. I had a professor that told me it would be an honor to work for free, whenever she wanted us to come in and with no schedule so we'd know ahead of time. I noped out of there and went back to working for my awesome internship advisor who did pay me. Shame, because I really liked her area of expertise (nanomaterials) but she was impossible to work with. It's really shameful, although I've found the medical/biotech fields are better than most at least.

That's good to hear. I've been hearing about too much unpaid work these days. ><