The Difference Between Medical School And Graduate School

Ben Ferguson -- Everyone always argues over whether graduate school or medical school is harder, or more difficult, or more tiresome. Everyone. If you’re not currently arguing over it at this very moment, you’re totally missing out.

Some say the former is far, far tougher; it comes in like a lamb, has its lion phases here and there, and then exits more or less like a lamb again depending on the niceness of one’s thesis committee and the degree of copying-and-pasting of one’s previous journal articles. Some feel that the latter, by its sheer time and physical demands and by its ubiquitous emotional toll, is far, far tougher; then they become interns and laugh it off. Some say that each is difficult in its own right, that each is physically and intellectually demanding in ways and over time periods different from the other.

Regardless of which is actually harder (for the record, at this point in my career, they’re about equal in my book), there are most definitely some black-and-white differences between the two:

1. Each has schedules to follow and places to be. It’s just that in medical school, you’re expected to be somewhere at a certain time of the day, but in graduate school, you’re expected to be somewhere at a certain time of the decade.

2. No one cares what you look like in graduate school. No one cares when you arrive, or how much progress you make, or how inattentive you are toward others, so long as you get your work done in a reasonable amount of time. (This all goes out the window when your advisor walks in.) In medical school, your appearance matters very much, both to attendings and to patients. You must arrive on time, make strides in making patients feel better (or at least act like you’re trying), and always be cordial to them.

3. The “DOOR CLOSE” buttons in hospital elevators actually work. In other educational buildings, not so much. (Isn’t it fascinating, though, that we always try? Apparently the variable ratio reinforcement is too engrained in us to ignore.)

4. In graduate school, you worry about the lives of worms and mice and rats and immortalized microscopic fragments of tissues that were intact decades ago. In medical school, you worry about the lives of humans, which is slightly more stressful.

5. Neither medical students nor graduate students are particularly well-versed in dressing well. They may even be known for their inability to dress well, or to even dress appropriately for the conditions or given situation at all. In this department though, medical students totally dominate. Graduate students are completely hopeless for the most part, but that’s okay because no one ever sees them anyway. (I’m not in any way excluding myself from this group, either.) Note to future graduate students (and future medical students for that matter): Black pants + black shoes + white, pilly, holey socks (+/- publication(s) +/- international awards +/- bubbly personality) = immediate rejection. Write it in your lab notebook so you don’t forget it.

6. In graduate school, you often spend entire days transferring liquid from one tube to another, perhaps after waiting for the liquid to thaw, and then adding some other liquid(s) to the tube, and then adding the mix to some other receptacle. If you’re lucky, you get to invert it several times, or if you hit the jackpot, you pipette up and down. Your life is liquids, receptacles, and vectors to get the first into the second. Amazingly, the final outcome of this fails more often than not, and you must redo everything several times. In medical school, depending on the service, you often spend entire days transferring liquids from vials to patients, removing pooled liquids from patients, observing liquids (and solids...ooh!) that patients excrete, measuring pressures of liquids, and writing stuff down about all of them.

7. The most common question you’re asked as a medical student, by far, is, “What are you going to go into?” (I have no idea.) The most common question you’re asked as a graduate student, by far, is, “When are you going to be done?” (Never?) or, if you’re also a medical student, “What were you thinking?” (At times, I wonder that myself.)