Pursuing a career in the healthcare field can be a rewarding experience, but it also requires a great deal of sacrifice, hard work, and dedication. Before you can determine if this is the right career path for you, it’s important to understand a little more about the process of earning the degree you’ll need. In particular, here is a list of pros and cons that you should consider before making a decision. Pros and Cons of Pursuing a Medical Degree
Pros
Earn a Good Salary
Once you earn your medical degree, you can begin earning a good salary right after completing a residency program. A general practitioner can earn up to $190,000 a year to start, according to reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This ensures you can live in any city in the country and rent a decent apartment or house. As you gain more experience and grow the size of your practice, you can continue to grow how much you earn from year to year.
Choose a Special Area of Interest
As you start your education, you can look for fields or topics within the medical field that you find particularly interesting. For example, you might want to continue your education to earn a psychology degree, or you might want to learn more about medical research. You can choose an area of healthcare in which to specialize, such as pediatrics, cardiovascular medicine, or neurology. If you don’t want to choose one discipline, you can focus more on general medicine.
Enjoy a Rewarding Career
Once you graduate and begin working in your field of study, you’ll find that your career will lead to many different rewarding experiences. When you save a life or help a patient live a better quality of life, you’ll feel good knowing that you have benefited someone. You can also participate in research that may help lead to new medications, discoveries about human health, or different ways to treat certain conditions. Each day will offer a new and exciting way to help others.
Cons
You’ll Spend Many Years in School
Before you even begin working with online MCAT tutors to help you get into medical school, you’ll have to earn a bachelor’s degree in undergraduate school. That’s followed by another four years of medical school and any additional education you’ll need to practice in a specific field of medicine. It’s not uncommon to spend up to 10 years or more in school and training.
You’ll Deal With High Levels of Stress
From the moment you begin your education in medical school, you’ll be dealing with high amounts of stress and anxiety. The stress you experience won’t go away after you graduate and may even get worse. In fact, careers in healthcare are commonly known to be some of the most stressful jobs in today’s workforce. If you don’t take the time to deal with stress both in school and in your career, it can lead to mental health problems or substance abuse issues. It’s important to be aware that this career path does lead to excessive stress so you can take steps to relax and alleviate that tension and anxiety in healthy ways.
You’ll Have to Deal With Loss
Even before you start your career, the hours you’ll spend studying and going to class will affect your personal life. Your dedication to medicine could cost you relationships due to your inability to be available to people in your personal life. This situation will worsen as you begin your career, which is why there’s such a high divorce rate among doctors. Additionally, you’ll experience the loss of patients regularly in your career. You’ll have to accept that you can’t save everyone, and some patients will be beyond your help. It’s not easy to prepare for personal and professional losses on a large scale, but this is something with which you’ll have to learn to cope.
If you decide that you do want to earn a medical degree, you can learn more in a few different ways. You can reach out to schools in your area that offer degrees in medicine, or you can network with people who already have established careers in the healthcare industry. You can even look for internships or volunteer opportunities to help you get experience. As long as you’re willing to put in the time and work, there are many paths you can take to get started in the healthcare field.