Dear Dr. Toshi, How do you become a doctor?
Have you ever wondered what a "resident" or "resident physician" means? What are interns? How did they get to work at the hospital? Today, I'm going to give you a quick overview on how a person becomes a doctor! This process I'm going to explain today is about doctors who have an "MD" (Doctor of Medicine) or "DO" (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine) after his or her name.
So, here is the process that most doctors went through. There are some exceptions, but those exceptions are very rare, so I won't get into that today.
After high school, people who want to be a physician go to a four-year college and take lots of courses in biology, chemistry, physics, and math. These students don't have to major in a science, but many do. They graduate from a four-year college or university, and they have to get an A in most of their classes because it's very competitive to get into medical school. After graduating from college, they apply to medical schools. As a part of their application, they have to take a very difficult exam called the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test), and they have to get a high score on it. It's like SAT and ACT for getting into college, but for medical school. They also should have clinical experience working with patients, volunteer experience, and lab research experience, and they need to get letters of strong recommendation from their college professors, and fill out lots of other paperwork (it's a huge amount of paperwork, including essays about the things they've done in their lives) as part of their application to many medical schools. Then the medical schools review their applications, and when they find applicants who meet their standards, they invite them to come for interviews. Medical schools only accept about 100-200 people every year from among the thousands of people who apply, so it's an extremely competitive process.
Medical school tuition is very high, and right now the average student loan is $250,000.00, which of course they have to pay back afterwards. You might say, "Oh, but doctors make lots of money." Well, not so much, considering how much money they had to borrow to go to medical school.
The students who make it through four hard years of medical school graduate and receive their doctorate degree (an MD or DO), so they become doctors at this point. But their training isn't over yet, and they can't practice as a physician until they go through the next part of their training: residency. In their fourth year of medical school, students have to decide what specialty to go into, and they apply for positions in residency programs for that specialty. A residency program is a training program where doctors get their hands-on training. These doctors are called 'residents" or "resident physicians." The shortest residency is three years and the longest is six, but some residents continue their training even further in more specialized programs called "fellowships." Some specialists end up having up to nine years of training! During their years of residency, doctors are currently paid about $50-60,000 a year on average, but that comes out to a pretty low hourly wage because their work hours are so long. When I was a resident, my hourly rate was less than 11 dollars an hour. It takes many doctors 15-20 years to pay off their $250,000.00 student loans, so it's basically like paying a mortgage on a house!
A resident in his or her first year is sometimes called an intern. Residents work under the supervision of "attending physicians" who are their professors and mentors. When they finally graduate from their residency program, they can apply for a license to practice medicine independently. Every doctor must be licensed by the state in order to practice in that state.
So, this is how it works. Altogether, it's 11 to 17 years of very hard, competitive, and expensive college and training after high school. If any of you readers like helping people and are thinking about becoming a doctor, but this sounds like lots of years involved, just remember that 11 years from now, you'll be 11 years older no matter what you do. So why not be 11 years older and a doctor instead of 11 years older and not a doctor? It's one of the most interesting jobs in the world!
Dr. Toshiko ("Toshi") Luckow, MD a Family Medicine physician at the West River Health Services hospital and clinics.