Hi all,
I'm preparing to apply during the 2017-2018 cycle, and am in the unfortunate position of being undecided on whether I would like to apply to MD or MD/PhD programs. I was hoping to get some opinions here.
The issue that's giving me trouble is that I'm a bit picky, in that I would only be interested in doing a PhD in clinical neuroimaging. (Past experiences have lead me to believe I wouldn't particularly enjoy wetlab bench work).
There are a couple of problems I see with this: 1). it seems like less programs cater to the interest, and the ones that do are very competitive (i.e. Penn, Harvard). My application is alright but certainly nothing special, and I'm intimidated enough by just the MD cycle. 2). I'm not sure how useful a PhD would be. Neuroimaging research is pretty common in psychiatry/neurology, and I might be able to get by with the experience I already have if I had some good biophysics collaborators. On the other hand, if I really wanted to understand sequence design and not have to rely on collaborators (and not be considered a "blob-ologist" by the engineering/physics crowd) a few years of focused study would be really helpful. However, I'm not sure whether I can even get that deep, as my background is more on the biology side rather than the engineering side, and acquiring the requisite quantitative skills might not be possible.
If anyone has opinions on this, I would really appreciate it!
I'm preparing to apply during the 2017-2018 cycle, and am in the unfortunate position of being undecided on whether I would like to apply to MD or MD/PhD programs. I was hoping to get some opinions here.
The issue that's giving me trouble is that I'm a bit picky, in that I would only be interested in doing a PhD in clinical neuroimaging. (Past experiences have lead me to believe I wouldn't particularly enjoy wetlab bench work).
There are a couple of problems I see with this: 1). it seems like less programs cater to the interest, and the ones that do are very competitive (i.e. Penn, Harvard). My application is alright but certainly nothing special, and I'm intimidated enough by just the MD cycle. 2). I'm not sure how useful a PhD would be. Neuroimaging research is pretty common in psychiatry/neurology, and I might be able to get by with the experience I already have if I had some good biophysics collaborators. On the other hand, if I really wanted to understand sequence design and not have to rely on collaborators (and not be considered a "blob-ologist" by the engineering/physics crowd) a few years of focused study would be really helpful. However, I'm not sure whether I can even get that deep, as my background is more on the biology side rather than the engineering side, and acquiring the requisite quantitative skills might not be possible.
If anyone has opinions on this, I would really appreciate it!
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