Deciding to Become a Doctor

Here are some questions you should ask yourself.

Realistically, this should take you some time to do. If you are answering these in a couple minutes, you should take the time to write out your answers so that they are very clear and devote some time to doing more research about what medical school is like. Sometimes it's hard to answer these questions without a solid understanding of what to expect.

1) Why do I want to become a doctor?

2) Do I understand what it takes to get into medical school? Do I understand what I will have to sacrifice during my med school and residency years? Do I understand what my life as a doctor will be like?

3) How will my answers to the question above (in #2) affect what else I want in my life? family? friends? free time? hobbies? other life goals?

4) Am I a strong enough applicant to get into medical school? Do I have the grades? Do I have the service work? Do I have clinical experience? If not, you can always make yourself a better applicant by doing the things mentioned here. The bigger question is: do I want to?

5) If you answered no to the question above (in #4), what could I do to improve my resume? How much work am I willing to put in it?

This is by no means a comprehensive list of questions. You will find a lot of questions like this in a lot of books about going into medicine.

The books that contain these questions are really useful because they also address a lot of the answers that you might come up with.

For example, they discuss answers to questions like "why do I want to become a doctor?" in great detail. There are, of course, good reasons to want to become a doctor and then there are not so good reasons. It's important to know which category your answers to this one fall under!