March 7, 2024
Written By
You're scrolling through Reddit at 2 a.m., questioning everything. Your friends are getting tech jobs making six figures straight out of college while you're staring down 11-15 years of training, $200,000 in debt, and residency salaries that barely cover your student loan interest.
Is becoming a doctor worth it?
This article breaks down the brutal reality of what becoming a doctor actually costs (time, money, and sanity) and what you get in return. We'll walk through the entire timeline from undergrad through fellowship, the real numbers behind medical school debt and physician salaries, the lifestyle you're signing up for, and why some doctors are leaving medicine.
If you're serious about this path but feel overwhelmed by the complexity of getting there, you don't have to figure it out alone. Premed Catalyst provides mentorship and application advising to help you through the entire process. Our mentors are med students who know exactly what it takes because they've done it themselves. We had a 100% acceptance rate for on-time applicants in the 2024-2025 cycle because we don't give generic advice.
Book a free strategy session, and let's turn that 2 a.m. doubt into a concrete plan.
The math is simple and unforgiving: 11 to 15 years minimum after high school before you're truly practicing independently. That's 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of medical school, 3-7 years of residency, plus 1-3 years of fellowship if you want to specialize further.
There’s no such thing as a “premed major.” It’s a track, not a title, and your real job is taking classes that medical schools care about: Bio, Chem, Physics, Math, Psych, Soc, English. That’s the bare minimum.
Most students default to majors like bio or chem because the overlap makes life easier. But if that sounds like a bad fit, you can major in poetry and still be premed, as long as you crush the science requirements and the MCAT.
And speaking of the MCAT: A 501 might get you in the door of med school if you have something else extraordinary on your application. A 512 is better. Same goes for GPA. You want 3.6+ to compete. Period.
But the numbers aren’t enough. Med schools want proof that you actually care about medicine. That means clinical hours, research, and shadowing that all connect to create a compelling narrative about who you are and the doctor you want to become. The student who treats undergrad like a checklist gets rejected. The one who treats it like a proving ground? That’s who gets in.
Some other things to keep in mind:
Four years. That’s the standard. But don’t let the number fool you. These years hit different.
Here’s what you can expect:
Years 1 & 2: Preclinical
Books. Labs. Simulations. You’ll cram anatomy, pharm, path, micro, etc. while low-key forgetting what sunlight feels like.
But not every school does it that way. Places like UCLA, Harvard, and other progressive programs throw you into the hospital as early as year one. You might shadow surgeons before you memorize all the branches of the brachial plexus. You might talk to real patients before you’ve learned how to take a full history.
Either way, by the end of year two, everyone takes USMLE Step 1, one of the most brutal exams in medicine.
Years 3 & 4: Clinical
Now you’re in hospitals, on your feet, rotating through surgery, psych, OB/GYN, peds, internal med. You’re still learning, but now it’s in real-time, with real patients. You’ll feel clueless. You’ll be tired. You’ll learn faster than you ever have in your life.
Before you graduate, you’ll face USMLE Step 2 and maybe your first real clue about which specialty best fits you. Finish it all, and you earn the title: MD or DO. But don’t celebrate just yet. You’re not done. You’re just cleared for residency.
Now comes residency, the part where you actually learn how to be the kind of physician someone would trust with their kid, their parents, or their own life.
You pick a specialty. You enter The Match, one of the most cutthroat, algorithm-driven games in medicine. If it goes well, you land at a program that wants you as badly as you want it.
Residency lasts anywhere from 3 to 7 years, depending on your field. And during that time, you’re not sleeping, not sitting, and not paid nearly enough for what you're doing. Most interns make around $56K a year. That’s $17/hour for 60–80 hours a week of high-stakes labor.
You’ll take USMLE Step 3 sometime during PGY-1 or PGY-2, while also balancing notes, codes, consults, and figuring out if you remembered to eat.
There are still compelling benefits like health insurance, a few weeks of PTO, and likely a cafeteria meal stipend. But what you’re really earning is muscle memory: how to think fast, stay calm, and not break when everything around you is chaos.
Residency done? You could stop there or you could double down.
Fellowship is the next level, a chance to specialize even further. Cardiology, oncology, GI, peds surgery. If there’s a niche, there’s a fellowship for it.
These programs run for 1 to 3 years, and they’re just as competitive as residency. Maybe more. You’ll be doing advanced patient care, research, and teaching. The hours don’t ease up much, but the focus sharpens.
You’ll finally start making more than a resident, but you’re still not at attending-level pay. What you are gaining is expertise, credibility, and sometimes, if you choose right, more control over your time later on.
Liking science and “wanting to help people” is a start, but it’s not enough. Med school demands more, and the people you’ll care for deserve more. You need to bring depth, grit, and a skill set that goes way beyond good intentions.
Here’s what actually matters:
These aren’t bonus points. They’re the core skill set of someone who makes it, not just into med school, but through it, into residency, and into a career that doesn’t burn them out in the first five years.
Let’s kill the fantasy up front: being a doctor doesn’t feel like TV. There are no slow-motion hallway walks set to orchestral music. No wise attending who always has time for you. No perfect diagnosis before the second commercial break.
What it actually feels like is this:
You're running on three hours of sleep, scrubbing in for a case you barely had time to read about. Your pager won’t stop. The patient’s family has questions. Your intern is overwhelmed. The nurse needs orders. The attending is breathing down your neck. And while all that’s happening, you’re still supposed to be learning. Still supposed to be kind.
And there are days you’ll feel like just a glorified note-signer. A button-clicker. The person they wake up at 2 a.m. to approve a catheter you already approved yesterday. You’ll wonder why you signed up for this.
But then there are other days.
Days when a terrified parent trusts you with their child. When a patient says thank you with tears in their eyes. When you walk out of a case knowing, not guessing, that you made someone’s life better.
Those moments don’t just feel good. They feel right. Like you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
According to AAMC, the average cost of attendance for just your first year of med school in 2023–2024 looked like this:
And that’s just one year. Multiply that by four. Then tack on interest.
Most med students graduate with $200,000+ in debt and that’s not even counting what you borrowed for undergrad. Repayment? On average, you're looking at 13 years. Longer if you take the scenic route through deferment and income-driven repayment.
But here’s the nuance: there are ways to make it manageable, to pay for medical school without drowning financially. Scholarships, service-based forgiveness programs, financial aid, and smart repayment strategies can help.
Let’s talk about the money.
Once you’re out of residency (or fellowship, if you go that route), your income jumps big time. The training years may leave you broke and exhausted, but once you're on the other side, the salary hits different.
The median physician salary? Over $208,000, according to Forbes. That’s the floor. In higher-paying specialties, you're looking at much more.
Here’s a rough breakdown of average physician salaries by specialty:
The top earners like ortho, cardio, and plastics can hit $500K+, especially in private practice or high-demand regions. And yes, it’s true: some physicians break seven figures. But they’re the exception, not the rule.
You won’t get rich overnight. But if you stay the course, medicine will put you in the top 5% of earners in the country.
There are careers where you work long hours, solve complex problems, and feel the pressure to perform. But few careers ask you to do all of that while someone’s life is in your hands.
Medicine demands a very specific kind of stamina. The kind that holds up through 28-hour shifts. The kind that keeps going after you've missed sleep, meals, birthdays. The kind that carries the weight of mistakes you can't undo.
Plenty of careers are demanding. Engineers pull late nights debugging systems that break hours before deadlines. Startup founders bet everything on products no one asked for. Wall Street analysts work 100-hour weeks to build pitch decks their managing directors will rip apart. Lawyers grind through endless cases with billable hours breathing down their necks.
And yes, engineers, consultants, and entrepreneurs can make more than doctors. Some have more freedom. Some build very meaningful careers.
But, ultimately, this isn’t about comparing careers. It’s about knowing what kind of difficulty you’re built for and whether this one is worth it to you.
There’s this quiet myth in medicine that once you survive med school and residency, you’re set. That the grind is temporary. That you just need to “get through it.”
But for a lot of doctors, the grind never ends. It just shifts.
Maybe now you're getting called at 3 a.m. for a surgery that could’ve waited until morning, but the hospital’s understaffed, and the OR schedule’s packed. Maybe you’re juggling a full clinic while drowning in charting, referrals, insurance denials, and bureaucratic nonsense.
This is how burnout creeps in. Quietly. Repetitively. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
Medicine has a shelf life for a lot of people. Not because they stop caring. But because the system wears them down faster than they can recover.
You’ve seen the YouTube videos. You’ve read the blog posts. Doctors walking away from medicine in their 30s with no regret and no looking back.
Some leave because the system feels broken. Because they’re tired of fighting for patients inside a healthcare structure that rewards volume over value. Because they didn’t sign up to be data entry machines or spend more time clicking boxes than talking to people. Because they gave medicine their twenties, their mental health, their family time, and it’s still asking for more.
Others leave because they found something they love more. Ali Abdaal built a global creator business. Kevin Jubbal scaled a company that helps students get in. Zach High turned content and coaching into something sustainable and fulfilling.
And yet a lot of us stay.
We stay because of that moment when a scared parent hands you their child and trusts you with everything. Because of the patient who remembers your name a year later. We stay because medicine, when it's good, is real in a way few things are. It demands all of you, and when you're aligned with it, it gives something back.
Let’s be honest: most of the system wasn’t built with your long-term well-being in mind.
So, if you want to make it in medicine and stay in it without burning out or selling your soul, you’ve got to build a career that works for you.
Here’s how you do that:
Only you can answer that.
Yes, the road is long. Eleven to 15 years of grinding before you get full autonomy. Hundreds of thousands in debt before your first real paycheck. Training that pushes you to your physical, emotional, and mental limits.
But on the other side?
You won’t get rich overnight. But you’ll build a life with meaning, stability, and the ability to take care of others and yourself. If that still sounds like something you want not just in theory, but in reality, then it’s time to get serious.
The path to becoming a doctor is long, expensive, and full of landmines most people don’t warn you about. Mediocre advising. Cookie-cutter personal statements. Application strategies built for stats, not for people. And at the end of all that? One rejection email after another.
That’s not how it has to go.
Premed Catalyst is built for students who are all in. We help you build an application that cuts through the noise with a story only you can tell, backed by everything you’ve done to earn it. And it works. 100% of our on-time applicants got accepted into med school in the 2024-2025 cycle. That can happen to you, too.
We only work with a few students each month. Book your free strategy call, and let’s get you into med school, your next step to becoming a doctor.