Blog
Alumni Career Advice
Enrolling in a Dual M.D/Ph.D. Program
By David Freeman '16
April 24, 2023
Tags Health Care
When I first arrived at Hamilton, I was quite confident I wouldn’t be in school a decade later. Even upon graduation, I wasn’t fully sold on the idea of having another ten years to go until my next graduation. Now, with three and a half years until my final graduation (hopefully), it’s beginning to seem a little more obtainable.
I am currently in my fifth of eight years in the M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Utah. My trajectory to a dual degree, like many, was far from linear. I wasn’t even aware that programs like Utah’s existed until my senior thesis advisor at Hamilton, Mark Sasaki, brought it up to me one day. I had done short research stints over summers at different institutes, but it seemed like a big jump from a few months in the lab to eight more years.
I must once again credit Mark Sasaki who pointed me towards the post-baccalaureate research program at the National Institute of Health (NIH). Rather than going right from Hamilton to medical school, I decided to take two years to do research full time to see if it really was the right fit for me. As a post-bac at the NIH, research is your full focus. There are opportunities to take accessory courses that may pique your interest or pursue clinical exposures outside of work, but the priority is diving into a project that you can make your own.
I spent my two years in the lab of Dr. Michele Evans at the National Institute on Aging studying the role of secreted factors isolated from individuals’ blood on type 2 diabetes progression. It was a big change from some of my five-person seminars my senior year at Hamilton, but the accountability and emphasis those courses placed on thinking both analytically and independently were invaluable.
Ultimately, spending two years away from a classroom setting made the commitment to another eight years in school seem just doable enough for me to apply to M.D./Ph.D. programs across the country. The decision of where to go to medical or graduate school is often made for you based on the sheer number of hyper-qualified applicants every year and my case was no different. I applied to Utah on a whim, knowing almost nothing about the school but figuring at the very least I could get a trip out to see some cool mountains. Fortunately for me, that not-entirely-thought-out decision led me to both an amazing place to spend a chunk of time and an incredible M.D./Ph.D. program.
Although changing bit by bit, most medical schools are structured as two-years of didactic courses followed by two years in the hospital rotating through different specialties. For individuals like myself who couldn’t decide between research and the clinic, the option exists to dedicate time to a Ph.D. right in between those two-year medical school blocks. This results in a structure that is two years of didactic medical school, followed by four (ish) years of Ph.D. research, and then wrap up with the last two clinical years of medical school. The ‘ish’ in the previous sentence is an important qualifier, as any graduate student can tell you a research project doesn’t always just finish because you’ve worked on it for the planned amount of time.
As a fifth year student at the University of Utah, I am nearing the end of my third year of graduate school with my attention next focused on beginning the final block of med school. While I’ve painted this program as eight years of school, that’s not an entirely fair description. For M.D./Ph.D. students, classes finish after your first two years of med school. Most of my days now are spent in the lab working on different experiments, prepping for talks to different groups, writing early-career grants, and a small fraction of days are spent in-clinic trying not to forget everything I learned during my medical school years. My research now focuses on identifying new pathways in breast cancer that can be targeted to block metastasis of the disease. While it’s a long way from what I was doing at Hamilton, many of the core lessons I learned on the Hill continue to prove useful time and again.
I graduated from Hamilton in 2016. And yet, unlike most of my other (perhaps much smarter) classmates gainfully employed for a while, I’m still in school. Despite all that time, I can confidently say I’ve made the right choice for me. For pre-med and pre-graduate students, there can be a lot of pressure to start your next bit of school as soon as possible so you can finish it up and finally get a ‘real’ job. I think there is a lot of value to taking the time you need after you graduate to make sure it’s something you truly want to do. After all, even when you finish medical school, you still have a little thing called residency standing between you and that real job.
