Thread

Hello all. I’m a third year medical student with no CS background suffering from an early mid-life crisis. I have recently concluded that my passions in life are best suited to tech startups. Although I have no shortage of great ideas and see so many tech problems that need solving, I am crippled because my background is in medicine, not tech. I am just now teaching myself the basics of web development, coding, database management, etc. My aim is to be able to build highly functional dynamic web pages and write web-based software; in short, to be a formidable Web 2.0 entrepreneur.

Do you see the massive dilemma? I earn my M.D. in about 18 months, and all my classmates are excited about jumping into residencies and making medicine their livelihood. As for me, I like medicine, yes, but I am not passionate about it. What I really want to do, what I must do, is throw myself into startups, spend all my energy solving perceived problems with one or two partners, develop projects that at least have the chance of getting seed, angel, and VC funding. I am bright, imaginative, and extremely hard working, and I am determined to make this happen.  My question is, what is the best way to do this? I’m way behind, obviously, but all is not lost. I can salvage my situation. Here are the facts:

1 - I will have about $200K of school debt when I graduate (yikes!) 
2 - I could use ER Medicine as a baseline income to pay back loans, cover living expenses, and seed-fund my startups
3 - ER medicine residency is usually 3 years, and residents earn about $40-50K a year
4 - ER doctors can earn about $200-280K a year for (on average) 12 12-hour shifts a month
5 - Many other types of doctors make much more, but have zero flexibility and zero free time (in other words, they’re stuck being what they are, can not work on startups)
6 - ER doctors can work part time and still earn $100K+ a year, and have great flexibility in hours
7 - I am currently involved in the business side of a Web 2.0 startup (early stages)
8 - I do realize that most startups fail before they even gather momentum
9 - I also realize that with no tech background I am not the best candidate to head a startup
10 - I do understand that an MBA is not necessary if one has a business sense, a great product, and a real drive to succeed

MY QUESTION: So do I go straight through residency, working on teaching myself web development/database management/hacking/etc. in what little free time I would have as a resident?  Or do I take a year or two (max) off between graduating med school and beginning residency to study this stuff fulltime in a formal educational setting? Are there any web development jobs that would hire an M.D. with very basic web knowledge and train them on the job for a couple years? Do university CS programs even teach about AJAX, RoR, MySQL, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and all the other Web 2.0 essentials?

Help!!!  I’m just a med student!!!

I’d recommend completing med school, doing your residency and paying off your debt.  Attempting to do anything else with that type of debt load will generally cause a person to do things with their next meal in mind instead of what’s best overall.  I think you have the right idea with item #2, using your income, which as a doctor the potential as you point out is considerable, as a way to bootstrap your startups.

As far as schools, you generally won’t find any place that will teach this stuff. There is a value in getting a formal computer science, computer engineering and/or even graphic design education, but none are strictly necessary (though all of the best “developers/programmers” I know have a CS/CE background, not the case with designers and generalists).

Thanks cshort, you speak sense. And I’m glad to hear you confirm what my own research has shown, that CS programs do not seem to offer training in high-end dynamic web development. Still, I do wish there were a way to get some general CS education. Of course I might audit classes, take correspondence courses, read more books, etc. Anyway, thanks for the post, I appreciate your thoughts.

Finish your schooling. If you do not the student loan debt will not allow you to breathe let alone start a tech company.

The benefits to being an MD AND knowing technology would be enormous. Talk about a money maker. I worked on a US Department of Defense project for a couple of years. We were creating a healthcare management system. We had several doctors on staff but none of them were technical. They all made alot of money and worked as MDs as well. I would imagine there would be a high demand for someone with their MD and a strong technical background.

As for schooling…. I tend to lean away from schooling for anything web development related. Unless is it a particular class on a particular subject. But dont go back to university and get a degree in CS unless you really really have to. Just take some courses on the individual languages that you may need.

Now that’s encouraging! Thanks for the great post!

No sweat… and keep your dream alive. Don’t let the rigors of Residency dampen what it is you want to do. Even if you do the ER route and work 12 12 hour days that still leaves an average of 18 days that you can do what you want with. Even if you take some off then you still have time for a little light reading on AJAX or PHP 😉

Good Luck!

M.

Damaeus,
I must concur - finish your schooling. Not being able to throw yourself fulltime into learning and doing software development may actually be an excellent asset.

I’m a stay at home mom with 3 kids - 5, 3, and 6 months. I don’t have much free time and I haven’t had much for the past 5 years. Ironically, it’s been a wonderful blessing for my business. With arrival of each child, I’ve had to take a step back from my web design business and each time I realized that I’d been over zealous and was headed in the wrong direction. If I hadn’t taken those three steps back, I’d never be in the place I am right now - knowing exactly what I want to do. If I’d been able to work fulltime from the start, I’d currently be neckdeep developing websites for fields that I’m not remotely interested in.

With a 6 month old, I’m still having to force myself to wait and perfect my skills, build my network and develop my business plan. But now I know it’s all for the best.

All that to say, sometimes having to “paint the fence” and “wax the car” will help you succeed in the end - even though you might prefer to start off kicking and punching.

(In case, you’re not familiar with the above reference, it’s from the movie The Karate Kid.)

Thanks Kat. Your perspective was interesting to say the least; use my lack of time as an asset, fine tune the approach. Your story was great, and an inspiration. Thanks very much!

(I found this thread searching on AJAX, but as long as I’m here ...)

Your phase of medical education is about the most difficult psychologically. You have spent years and years inching up a totem pole only to arrive on the wards and find yourself at the bottom of a new pole, the absolute bottom. And every time you switch to a new rotation, you are at the bottom of a new pole. The natural feeling for ambitious people is to want to turn to something they can be great at, sooner!

You are wise, nonetheless, to consider the alternative values of an MD degree because healthcare is pretty much a labor of love these days. And you won’t get rich taking care of sick people or doing biomedical research.

With that said, I agree with everyone that finishing up the MD and PGY training (ER medicine is good for your purposes) will help pay the bills. On the other hand, it’s tough to do for a living for long. I would suggest anaesthesiology, radiology, etc. which can make you some money while still leaving you some free time, and will also be there for you in case you actually fall in love with it, which you well might (not to mention, there is enormous room here for related IT development). Either way, though, you’ll want to finish up the training, which gets to be fun after awhile. Internship, even, is a blast after you’re about 8 months into it. You get the feeling there’s nothing you can’t handle.

In the meantime, I would sign up for a bare bones Virtual Private Server and dope out how to configure the whole thing from scratch, including your own DNS server. Develop your own web presence on the thing (presumably that’s part of why you’re here on EE), and give away some space for some of your friends’ domains. Mess around with all this in your free time, creating every fancy trick you can think of. Google the heck out of every new project you start. You’ll find, as you already know, no doubt, that each new idea (AJAX is a good example) goes from a mystery to clarity with a short while of intense work.

Over the course of your medical training, you will slowly come up to speed with much of the latest in web development, and it will be a fun diversion from medicine anyway. There are some huge changes right around the corner in computing, btw, so by the time you finish your residency, much of the web-related stuff you study now may be less enticing then. The key is to stay light on your feet, and build a foundation of learning by doing as you assess the evolving situation.

Where do I get off saying all this? Well, it’s been almost a quarter century since I graduated from medical school. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t fantasize about the kind of life you describe, but the trouble is, I have also come to love what I do as a doctor. So, I spend a lot of time doing that, but I also pursue my music avidly, and I am intimately involved in a computer startup that I firmly believe will change the world (I’m entitled to believe that, right?).

Hang in there. You CAN do it all.