Summary: Episode 52: Learn to do the math; how much will ignorance cost you? Download transcript: How Research Fixed y 1 Million Dollar Mistake Welcome to the Pre-Med Podcast Episode 52. I’m your host, Dr. Dan. Today’s topic is “How Research Fixed My $1 Million Mistake.” Interesting topic, huh? Let me explain something to you. I graduated from medical school in 2007 and started off in residency in emergency medicine. It didn’t go so well. It wasn’t just that I didn’t like emergency medicine because there were parts of it that I truly loved, but I did not get along with the people that I worked with. The skinny of it is I finished about 1 ½ years of that program. It’s a 3-year program. That’s almost half of the entire emergency residency and I was on schedule to graduate in 2010. As it were, I got burned out. I left the program. They were malignant which I have taught about in the past on the Medical School Podcast and in my private groups. I just left. That’s when I got in to research. It really helped repair and saved my application. I had no idea how much that experience would grow into what I would do as a physician and in my career. I really thought it was a saving grace turning on pre-med fire and fuel just to work harder and show persistence to get myself out of that rut. I know what it feels like to not match into a residency and try to come in and had to sit out an extra year or two trying to get back in medicine. Folks, that’s the day we’re in now. Unfortunately, we are in a situation in United States right now where the number of medical students are overtaking the number of residency positions. You may find yourself like me with an MD behind your name and unemployed. Not fun, I can tell you. Many sleepless nights. We’re talking months and months of dread. I have looked at the surveys, done lots of research with the Mastermind Community. We’ve literally touched tens of thousands of lives as a community. I think in some ways it’s a little bit like Ezra in the Bible and others where it’s just such a time as this that perhaps the Mastermind Community was purposed and destined for. Let me walk you through the numbers of how I come up with $1 million. I left at the end of 2009, was supposed to graduate in 2010, and have currently over in a residency program scheduled to graduate in 2015. That would be from 5 years worth of attending physician salary as an emergency medicine physician, which is probably on average around $350,000. I’m not going to take into account the difference in salary between emergency medicine which is in that 350 range with psychiatry that’s in the 220 to 250 range, something like that. That was a $130,000 per year loss because of this mistake too, and I’m going to show you how to correct it. I’m just calculating that. Now, of course, as a resident in this period of time, 5 years or so is going to be … rather 4-year residency consumed with making 40 to 50 thousand dollars per year. That subtracts about $200,000 worth of salary that I’ve made here. That attending during that period of time if I had stayed with emergency medicine would have been about $1.75 million is what I would have made during that period. How do you come back when you’re wiped out, when your career is down, when the MCAT score comes back low, which I’ve been there and you know that? How do you come back? How do you bounce back? I think that, in retrospect, I looked back at a moment. There was a tipping point for me. I was laying on a couch thinking about what had happened. It just struck me things that Napoleon Hill had said, things that I knew from other resources in education and friends of my life, I knew I just could not take that hit and lay there and stay there on the couch. You can’t take the loss, so the moment that you give up on a situation is the moment that you quit. No one can ev[...]
