The Bogeyman: Medical School

I went to a really solid public high school a million years ago, and was in the "smart kid" crowd. After graduating, I went off to school in the Midwest, but most of my friends were of old Southern stock and opted for schools like Duke and UNC. Several of my friends were people who must have come out of the womb with a stethoscope, because they (or their parents) knew they wanted to be doctors from freshman year of high school onward.

Who really decides what they want to do freshman year of high school? We belittle kids who are freshmen in college for coming onto WSO and posting about exit opps from JPM vs MS, but to claim to know what you want to do in your freshman year of high school??? Bizarre.

The really crazy thing about this is that I am thinking of 3 people in particular -- all three of them are going to top med schools in the next couple of months.

Now, I was the type of guy who changed his mind about everything in college at least a dozen times. I was dead-set on getting a PhD and being an academic...now I want to have nothing to do with academia. I was dead-set on being a congressional staffer...nope. I was dead-set on........well, you get the picture. Finally I feel like I have found my calling -- for two years now I have stuck with investment banking!

In any case, this isn't an article about me, nor is it an article about people who never changed their minds about what they wanted to do (read: people who had their parents make most of their decisions for them).

This is an article about how prohibitively expensive it is to apply to medical school, let alone how expensive it is to attend.

Mostly, I'm interested in hearing if applying to business school is at all comparable (as I write this, I am pretty sure it doesn't even come close, but we'll see).

I met up the other day with a friend who just graduated and is in the process of applying to med school, having decided to take a year off. She brought to my attention that she submitted 16 applications, also telling me that, on average, an application ran her about $150 bucks in fees.

$2400 in application fees.

She has taken the MCAT twice, at $250 a crack: $2900 total.

Her transcript fees (remember, you have to submit a "medical school" transcript during the process) ran another $200: $3100 total.

Now, she really blew my mind when she told me that she has to pay for her own interviews. Maybe I'm deluded, but having applied to PhD programs (for which I was flown out) and for a wide array of corporate jobs (also, obviously, flown out), this was _extremely_ shocking to me. Not only does she have to take personal time off from work, and a lot of it, but she has to pay for her own flights and accommodations for all of her medical school interviews.

Now, assume she gets 8 interviews, chooses to go on 6 (in reality, she would certainly attend them all, but let's be conservative). I would reckon that they don't give you a two-month period to order plane tickets, so you're already paying a premium: call it, conservatively, $400 round-trip. Hotel and transportation to and from the interview, again being conservative, $150.

That means that she is out $3100+$3300 = a whopping $6400 for one round of medical school admissions.

And 16 applications is _not_ uncommon for medical school applicants. Similar to JD applications, applicants are recommended to cast a wide net due to how competitive the process is these days.

I'm not sure of how it works for business school, but people must _at most_ apply to the entire M7 and a few safety schools and call it a day, maybe 10 applications at most. Do people have to pay for their own flight and accommodation during business school interviews? How about law school interviews? Is there even an interview process during law school admissions?

Now, I can see why some people cannot afford to attend medical school, but hell, some people out there can't even afford to apply! If you're spending $7000 to apply to medical school when you aren't even guaranteed admission since many applicants are on the "try again next year plan", how on earth, and why on earth, do people do this?! Funny, I asked my friend why she wanted to be a doctor, and her response was that she doesn't even know anymore..."but at this point, what else is there?"

#firstworldproblems for us all.

Discuss.