The process to become a doctor in the US is terrifying.

You start off with four years of an undergraduate degree. God help you if you get anything below a 3.5 gpa, no chances of becoming a doctor now. If you're applying to med school straight out of college say goodbye to any type of social life. You had better be volunteering and spending countless hours working in a medical clinic of some kind. Medical school entry is so competitive nowadays that you are almost guaranteed rejection without clinical hours. Study your ass off for the MCAT, pray you get something high. Spend your senior year applying to med schools. Still get rejected, because fuck you someone else wrote a more compelling personal statement.

Should you get into med school, that's another four years of intense studying. The last two years are spent being disregarded by doctors just trying to do medicine.

Finish med school and congratulations, you're now a doctor! For the next 3-7 years you'll be treated like shit, work shit hours, and get paid for shit. Apparently the 80-hour work week rule is considered more of a guideline in many hospitals. God help you if at the end of all this you decide to do a fellowship.

Now of course the paycheck at the end of all this is quite substantial. I sure hope you haven't gone into any debt through your 8 years of schooling and 3-7 years of residency.... Oh and by the time you've graduated the shortage of physicians has increased even further. You'll most likely be needed to continue to work an insane amount of hours.

So I've looked at all of this and yet still decided fairly resolutely that this is what I would like to do. Due to the fact that I'm only about 2/3 of the way through an undergrad with zero science pre-requisites. I'll most likely have to do a post-bacc as well. Thankfully I can skip a large amount of the clinical hours and voluntary work. The earliest I can see myself making it to med school is at 30, which puts me finishing residency at 37 should I chose a shorter specialty. How is all of this sane? How is this sustainable? I keep asking myself is it all really worth it? I know it is and I'm going to continue towards this path but that's one hell of a lot of pain to commit to.