You can get a job as a lab tech like the person doing PCR above or as a research tech, that you don't want, and that's about it. You could get an education degree and teach science, but you can't do much without a Ph.D.
But you have to love what you do in order to get a Ph.D. or an M.D. Applicants to grad school who obviously are applying because they couldn't get into medical school sometimes wind up doing great, and I actually switched my own career goals from medicine to basic research when I was a year farther along than you. But I tend to not look kindly on those applications, tend to not want people in my lab who just want to re-apply to medical school after they get a Ph.D., and if you don't like working in the lab, grad school and postdoctoral fellowships will not make you a happy camper. Also, it doesn't take less brains to go to grad school - it takes less memorization, but at least as much if not more analytical ability.
It's really not too late to buckle down and study harder, if your grades aren't good, or to work on your test-taking skills if your problem with the MCAT is really a problem with multiple-choice questions. If your SAT scores were high and your MCAT scores were low, I'd think it's a matter of knowledge. If both were low along with your grades, I'd think of not becoming a pediatric neurologist - unless you've got stuff going on in your life, like putting yourself through school working full-time, that makes it hard to study. Oh, and your GRE scores will probably be similar to your SAT scores, or at least mine were virtually identical. If you took ACT's instead, you'll have to translate using percentiles instead of raw scores, but same general idea.
I'd take a good hard look at your grades and study habits and see if you can simply buckle down. I found there was a huge difference going from first-year courses to second-year ones, in that it was suddenly the first time I had to take notes or study in my life when I hit organic chemistry and anatomy, and I didn't really know how. When I realized that, and got studying, I was back to being an A student again.
Beyond that, I'd look at those careers in medicine and molecular biology out in the real world. Trail a pediatric neurologist around for a day as they do their job, if you haven't. That one day is half of what talked me out of medical school. Do a summer research project in someone's lab next year, preferably in a lab where they grant Ph.D.'s, if your school does, and see what you think about the work, the lifestyle, and whether if you actually went to grad school and wound up doing research, you'd like it. That was the second half of what talked me out of medical school and had me, at an interview I didn't cancel, telling the poor guy interviewing me that I really wanted to do research, not be a doctor.
There are other things you can do with a Ph.D. You can teach at the university level. You can do research in academia or industry. With a law degree, or maybe without, you can help a lot in patent offices. With some computer knowledge, there might be a place for you in bioinformatics. If you like writing, there are editorial jobs that routinely open up - for people really excited about research - in Science and Nature. Even I was offered one once. Check out the career info periodically published in Science or in the ASCB newsletter (ascb.org) - they tend to talk a lot about alternative careers in science for those with a Ph.D., particularly this last 8 years when research funding in the U.S. got so difficult to obtain.
At your stage in life, you can do anything you want. Your choices aren't limited to graduate school in something biological or medical school. Grad school is nice in that if you go into a biomedical science you'll get free tuition and a $20K/year stipend to live on, but if it's not where you want to spend your life, there's no point to spending 5 or more years getting a Ph.D. At your stage in college, there are going to be elective courses, or maybe even required ones, that may spark your interest in something you never imagined doing before. In my junior year I developed sudden interests in linguistics and in social psychology - who knows what you'll come up with?
Answered By: Bored Now - 11/17/2008 |