Has anyone ever done grad school part time while working just to learn?
Especially with all of the online resources available today like Kahn, Coursera, MIT, it seems like an awful financial decision but just curious to hear if anyone did it and whether you are happy you did it in hindsight.
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Yes. I did two grad school / PhD track courses in 2016.
It was part of a package I was working on to apply for MD programs or an MD/PhD. So it was for interest as well as for my resume.
I couldn't just sign up for the courses though, I had to get the dean of neurosciences to sign off on it as they were both 700 level neuroscience courses.
One was partly finance related, called "Neuroscience Entrepreneurism." It was pretty interesting. We had VCs and Entrepreneurs as speakers in the neuroscience and medical field. Also, innovators and inventors. Our final presentation was centered around creating a new product in neuroscience and a couple VCs came to possibly invest. My group didn't get any investment and I had 0% equity in our company after a heated battle with this stuck up MD/PhD student that wanted all of the equity, but wanted me to do the business research. I did the valuation and model for the company, which pissed me off a lot because I did the market research before he told me I would have no stake in the company. But, I don't think he ever successfully created the device. Believe it or not, he designed a replacement for "Rigiscan" that was supposed to be a Bluetooth urology psychological diagnostic tool for ED. I talked about getting cut out of equity with one of the professors and she said at least I got a funny cocktail story out of it, which was true. lol
The other course was "Neuroimaging in Neurological and Neurodevelopmental Disorders." I got in this class as I was doing neuroimaging analysis under the head of neuroimaging at a hospital, mainly analysis of fMRI data from 'big data' from UCLA and Yale scans. It was largely detached from the patients and after that role I moved a little bit closer to patients in neuroscience as well at a different hospital in biotech clinical trials for Alzheimer's and dementia patients.
The courses were great and the research was good experience, science and research seemed infinitely slower believe it or not than business. Not only that, but it seemed like a lot of the PhDs would chase funding for whatever, while they yearned to do research in something completely different, with a constant ache about it, dreaming.
I tried to link up my PhD neuroscientist with research that could be pitched and invested in, but the grants seemed to be useless in conclusions many times, with final results being similar to 'we researched X and found Y'. Clinical trials were even more brutal, but at least each failure followed up a goal in mind. The grants were sort of ho-hum, 'eh we didn't discover anything', which was shocking to me coming from consulting previously.
Not only that, but a lot of these PhDs were forever in academia, studying what could be, studying the variables, and never getting their hands dirty with making it practical or profitable. The neuroscience entrepreneurism class was the first time many students saw 'profit' in the equation, in their life, in science. Some of these were post docs who were very intelligent.
We have a similar group of people in finance and most often refer to things like the Efficient Market Hypothesis as an arrow sign to where academia diverges from real world scenarios.
In summary, business and finance gets dirty and messy sometimes and things get f-ed up along the way, but I kind of like the ride.
This guy fucks.
That's awesome. What did you major in during undergrad? Did you ever do the PhD/MD and if not, are you happy you took the classes?
Yeah, I am happy I took the classes. It was a great experience.
During my undergrad, I received a B.S. in Business Administrarion, a B.A. in Modern Languages (Spanish), with a minor in East Asian Studies.
I was planning on applying without prereqs to schools that were liberal with that IF you scored high in the respective parts of the MCAT where your prereqs were lacking. I had a list of 10 or so schools where this was this case and personally wrote to the deans of many schools with my intentions. I only heard back from a few deans, but received a nice long letter and correspondence from the Stanford MD/PhD dean who ironically advised me only to pursue an MD as I could do research anyway without the dual degree. I would have never, ever, ever gotten into that program anyway (Stanford MD/PhD), but I gave it a thought at least.
I took a Kaplan MCAT course and bought their books as well as Berkeley Review. I thought I could self study the entire pre-med curriculum and learn it at a 99% level. I was wrong.
These books didn't contain all of the information like the CFAI CBOK or the like. They contained a LOT of information, but not all of it and for some sections I was getting decent scores in practice, but there were large holes in my preparation that could only be remedied by taking a post-bac.
For instance, in self study with these science subjects, I really needed a point of contact like a professor for constant follow up and to ask questions to gain a clearer picture of the central concept. Without this, I would not be able to reach high 90s on the MCAT, rendering my application useless.
I found the best post-bac for me was Columbia. The caveat was, it is expensive and hard as F. But, if you get a 3.7 or above, you have 'linkages' and are guaranteed entrance to some very good Medical schools including Columbia, NYU, etc. 3.7 in that program isn't like a 3.7 in finance, it's a tad harder. But, for some linkages, you don't even have to take the MCAT, which is a huge plus.
http://gs.columbia.edu/postbac/linkage
So that was the plan. But, I didn't really want to pay for the courses so found out certain positions that qualify for free tuition at Columbia and interviewed for a position there in finance, overseeing school budget, finance, operations and the like. The position paid ok, but with the tuition break, it was damn near competitive to a regular Wall St. position. I applied to a position under my pay grade and experience just to lock it in and was highly favored, but they gave it to an internal hire or something.
For a few other reasons, I had to put that path on the back burner for a bit, and I am pursuing other things at this point, but already have learned a great deal about the field and path, which is a lot. Also, I find hard sciences very interesting and find them to be the building blocks of life.
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