Bsc, MSc, and now what? - looking for advice

[Dr_Scully]

@astrogirl: you hit the nail on the head. Yes, some people might not like social work, PT, OT, speech-language path., nursing... but I know a family friend who went into nursing at 40 after marriage and 3 children, and she's happier than she's ever been now. I also know another guy who did B.Ed. after masters, and is now teaching in a private high school - financially he's doing very well....

 

@momo85: I had teachers in high school tell me I wouldn't get into university, and I'm doing an M.Sc. now, so people telling you "you don't have a shot" doesn't really mean much. Just throw your application at the school! Look at McMaster, if you look at their stats for the last 3 years, they have been taking more and more M.Sc. students (from about 30 to over 50 last year), and the average GPA went from 3.89 down to 3.75. Who knows if you'll get in or not?? NOSM adds 0.2 to your GPA as a grad student. If you have 3.7 that pushes you to a 3.9 which is huge! One person on the "non-trad. success" pages had a 3.44 gpa, 10VR, no publications (but some conferences/manuscripts in the works) and he got into McMaster. So stories like that make me wonder sometimes about the whole process....

 

Sometimes I honestly think the med schools just have a big lottery wheel that they throw the applications in and laugh as they randomly pull people to interview out of it....

 

@Real Beef: You are inspirational, truly I listen to comedy albums every night as my way to "wind down". I have every single George Carlin HBO special on CD. May I ask what your "lowly health career" is? lol

As for why I want to try physiotherapy, I happened to need the services of one (car accident) earlier this year. The guy had his own clinic with another physio, he was nice enough to let me hang around outside of my treatment times to see what he did and how he operated on a day-to-day basis. He seemed very content, financially stable, and having your own clinic with 1-2 other people isn't horrible in my eyes. You get to see new patients every day and it's not the same old boring routine. I knew nothing of physio before this, so I sort of see it as "fate" that I happened to stumble upon it by chance.

 

It's a hard, hard, decision to decide to give up pursuing medicine, especially when you've wanted to be a doctor since a young age, especially when family keep asking "why are you taking this or that, don't you want to be a doctor?????" When you feel like your parents are waiting on you to accomplish something since your older siblings didn't.... When your mother cries when you tell her you want to go to school and become a pastry chef because you love cooking... When you don't really feel "meant" to do anything else in your life...

 

I truly feel your pain right now.... but unfortunately we all need plan B's in life and if medicine isn't in the cards, just be damn sure you love your second choice too....

[keepontrying]

Thank you very much for all your kind word and advice, I'm trying to figure out the next step from here.

Real beef, I'm not sure what your intentions are whether it is to just insult me because you are bored while feigning care. I would really appreciate if you keep your life lesson learned from when you played your game back when you are 8 years old to yourself.

 

KOT thanks, you seem to be in most similar situation as I am, may I ask what your plans are and how you've arrived to that conclusion? I'm interested to hear from it.

 

All the others, I really appreciate your sympathy, I will keep you posted.

 

Sincerely,

 

P'med you.

[Real Beef]

 

@Real Beef: You are inspirational, truly I listen to comedy albums every night as my way to "wind down". I have every single George Carlin HBO special on CD. May I ask what your "lowly health career" is? lol

 

Dr. Scully: Thanks for your kind words. I love your name ... my girlfriend are sequentially going through X-files episode by episode, on season 3 now, so its cool to see "Dr. Scully" being used

 

My "lowly health career" is that of a dietitian working as a Diabetes Dietitian Educator for 7 First Nation communities. The cool thing about working in diabetes now with some experience is that we have medical direction/directives to adjust insulin and OHAs for patients who are not able to see there MD any time soon. Doing diabetes education you get to teach people the self-management of this chronic disease. This is in the form of one-on-one counselling (our bread n' butter) as well as teaching Diabetes Education classes.

 

Also I have a consulting business, providing management and clinical nutrition consulting services to a local nursing home. Therefore I am the home's nutrition department manager as well as clinical dietitian. Although I didnt originally think I would enjoy long term care and entered this area for the extra cash I have found it to be very rewarding professionally. It has been interesting managing a department, doing performance reveiws on employees, aking disciplinary action against employees as well as rewarding with raises, praise, etc. On the clinical side I would do monthly nutrition assessments on high risk patients (those with dysphagia, severe malnutrition/underweight, Stage 3-4 wounds). It is actually quite rewarding personally when someone is declining looking cachexic and after a dietary intervention over a period of months their cheeks fill in, they are more alert, regain strength ... all from an extra 500-750 calories a day from a simple oral supplement you ordered.

 

Both positions add about to a bit over 60 hrs/wk ...

 

I prefer the term 'allied health' to 'lowly medical career' for those posters that referred to it as that .... thanks ... anyhow I agree that being an allied health professional isnt where a person with burning desires for medicine should be for the rest of their life and I for one will not but it has been an awesome learning experience for the past 6 years. Without it I would never have had the opportunities that I have now that are getting me closer and closer to medicine ...

 

Beef

[Slashsev01]

Id do DO

they love people that show maturity in the application