Am I Too Old to Study Medicine?

This was a question I asked myself for months – even a year – before I decided to take the leap and go off to a six year medical school. Now that I’m in the process of getting my M.D., I would like to talk a little bit about ‘old’ age in medicine.

This is an intensely personal blog post in the sense that it based solely on my thoughts, my priorities, my wants and my considerations; these might be complete non-issues for others, so please keep that in mind.

I frequently get asked this question, and I completely understand why. Age may be important for different people, for different reasons. For me, there were two factors that were truly key when I was considering what to do. I will talk about my path, my age, and my decisions at the bottom of this post, but let me begin by explaining why age was even a factor in deciding what I wanted to do:

1. Salary. I knew that if I did go down the MD path, I would be reliant on financial support for an additional x years. I had to decide whether to take out a loan or to be assisted financially by my parents (more on that later).
2. Family. I’ve always wanted children (minimum two), and I want to have them as soon as possible.

The pursuit of medicine is different in each country; I have the most experience with the US path: high school, 4 year undergraduate degree, 4 year medical school. After this, there is a residency (different lengths for different specialties), until you become an attending (full salaried doctor). In Europe, it’s slightly different; most students decide in high school on their path and apply to a 6-year medical degree, which they complete at the age of 24 or 25. They, too, have a training period; the length of this differs by country and specialty.

In an ‘ideal’ situation, a person becomes a doctor in the US at the age of 26, or in Europe at the age of 24. This is the point when they begin to earn a salary (albeit low, in many countries). If your path isn’t ‘traditional,’ then this is delayed by any amount of years.

Why am I ‘qualified’ to talk about this? Although I’m not ‘very old,’ I am older than my more traditional classmates. I am now almost 28 years old, and I will graduate medical school in 8 months. The purpose of this blog post is to walk you through my thought process, and to explain how I made the decisions that I made.

My Story

A little bit of my back story: I moved to the US when I was 8, and after high school, I decided to pursue biomedical engineering at an in-state college. In my junior year, I decided medicine was the better path for me – and I had to decide whether to apply to medical school in the US or go back to my birth country (Eastern Europe).

One issue was the finances – medical school tuition in Europe is expensive (as an international student), but in the US, it’s even more so. Not to mention, living expenses for the next 4-6 years for a young adult.

The second: my age.

My timeline:
– 2015 – finish college: age 22 (with B.S. in biomedical engineering)
– 2021 – finish medical school: age 28 (M.D. in Europe)
– 2022 – apply to U.S. residency for 2022 Match = GAP YEAR (I would start working as a resident ideally in June, 2022): age 29
– 2025 – finish 3 year residency in emergency medicine (ideally): age 32

I knew I didn’t want to have children in medical school. I know that some people do and are amazing at it, but that path wasn’t for me. So, all things considered, I will hopefully have my first child at the age of 30, and second at 31 (if all goes well). This is later than 18-year-old-me would have wanted, and it is one of the ‘sacrifices’ of pursuing medicine that I have decided to make.

As for finances, I am incredibly lucky that I have parents who are supportive both emotionally and financially. They have been able to pay for my tuition, but at the cost of their own financial ‘freedom,’ so to speak. By the end of my medical school, they will have been supporting me for a full DECADE; my living expenses, my hobbies and travel, everything. I am grateful, but also often feel guilty – for all the added expenses (USMLEs are 1000s of dollars!), any holidays I might take or luxuries I want to treat myself to, they all come out of their pockets. I know that they will go into retirement the second I get my own salary, and although they are happy to help me, I can’t help but feel a bit uncomfortable knowing that I am holding them back from that.

The Decision

So how does one decide if they are ‘too old’ for medicine? What is the cut-off? What to do when people tell you you’re too old?

There is no cut-off. Not that I would tell people what to do with their lives, but in my mind, there is no one number that I would consider an absolute ‘you’re too old’. I think it really comes down to what you want from your life. What you want to accomplish, what your priorities are.

For me, the only true thing that gave me pause was my desire to have children when I was younger (than I am now). I had to decide which was more important to me – having children ASAP or going to medical school to become a doctor. If I decided on the latter, did I want to have children in medical school? I had to decide which path would allow me to sleep peacefully for the rest of my life – would I regret not having gone to medical school? YES. Would I regret not having children earlier? I don’t know. Ask me again in a few years…but as it stands, I am happy with my choice, and I am hopeful that when I try for kids at the age of 30, all will go well and I will have a happy, healthy baby with a partner I love.

I don’t know how ‘old’ you are when you are reading this blog post and what has lead up to this point in your life, but I encourage you to ask yourself: which path would you regret not taking?

If you are worried about what other people will say – ignore them. They are not you. They don’t know you, and more importantly, they don’t have to live with your decision for the rest of their life. This decision is yours and yours only, and those who cannot support you on whichever path you choose are not true allies.

If you are worried about finances, please know: there is always a way. There are loans, scholarships, free programs; some pathways are definitely more difficult than others – but don’t let finances be the only thing that stand between you and your dream.

If you are worried about starting a family, know that there are many alternatives that might suit you (and your partner) perfectly, although they personally don’t work for me. It’s possible to have children in medical school; it’s possible to have children at a later time; you can also decide to adopt, and there are those who don’t want children at all. These are all completely fine paths, but they might be something you consider when making your decisions.

You can also do research into other career paths that are similar to physician – many people nowadays decide to pursue PA or NP (physician assistant and nurse practitioner, respectively) careers. I definitely recommend looking into these to see if they suit you, and if they don’t, that’s fine, but at least you know.

No one can make this decision for you. I can’t give you the exact answer you seek, but I can tell you what my professor told me in junior year, the sentence that made me realize that medicine was the right decision for me:

“What is a few extra years [of delay] for a career that you are going to spend the rest of your life doing and loving?”