WCI #60: An Interview with Ryan Gray from Medical School Headquarters

This is the White Coat Investor podcast where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011. Here's your host, Dr. Jim Dahli.

Welcome to podcast number 60, an interview with Ryan Gray.

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Our quote of the day today comes from Mae west, who said, money is a value for what it buys. And in love it buys time, place, intimacy, comfort, and a private corner alone. All right, today we have a special guest on the podcast. We have Ryan Gray, MD, of Medical School HQ. I had the opportunity to meet Ryan a few months ago at the fincon conference, which is for those who aren't aware of it is kind of a conference for those trying to professionally blog and podcast and videocast and do those kinds of things. And we had a dinner where we kind of had the physicians who are in this space get together and meet each other face to face. So it was a pleasure to actually meet Ryan. I think he's doing some wonderful work that we're going to talk about in the podcast today. Welcome to the White Coat Investor podcast, Jim.

Thanks for having me.

Well, let's start with getting our listeners to know a little bit more about you. Can you tell us about your upbringing and education?

So I grew up in the Los Angeles area and a little thing called the Ronnie King riots happened and moved to Florida and spent my time there. Thought I was going to be a professional baseball player and hurt my shoulder and was introduced to physical therapy and athletic training. I'm like, oh, this is kind of cool. Like if I, if I can't be a professional baseball player myself, I'll help other people do what they want. And so I thought I was going to be a physical therapist and then I dissected a cat in high school. Poor Mr. Bigglesworth. And I was hooked. I was like, okay, I need to cut people. This is what I want to do. So I married those two together and went to University of Florida as a pre med exercise physiology major with the goal of becoming an orthopedic surgeon. And I had terrible pre med advising at University of Florida when I went. And it still is one of the largest colleges here in the US and my pre med advisor met with me my sophomore year and said, you know what? You shouldn't apply to medical school. You won't get in. Not because of my grades or anything else, it's because I was a white male. And so she racially profiled me, unfortunately, and I never went back to her and kind of tried to figure everything out on my own and didn't get into medical school the first time, figured out why, reapplied and got in my second time and went to New York Medical College up in Valhalla, New York, and hated it. I hated med school for a while. I'd been out of school for a couple years and forgot how to be a student. And I only wanted to cut people. I'm sitting here learning biochemistry and histology. I'm like, I just want to put people back together. I don't want to be a carpenter. And wasn't very happy my first couple of years until we finally got to the wards and loved it from there on out. And to pay for medical school, I went to Uncle Sam and went to the Air Force recruiter. And I said, hey, pay for med school for me. And so I signed up for an HPSP scholarship, which meant when it came time to match, the Air Force had the power to tell me no, which they did to Orthopedics. And so I did a transitional internship year up in Boston and then went active duty shortly after that. Spent a couple of years in Dover, Delaware, and a couple years up in Boston at Hanscom as a. As a general medical officer, flight surgeon. Had a blast doing that. Was unfortunately diagnosed with Ms. In 2014, four years into my active duty career. And they wouldn't let me fly anymore, which is one of the best parts of being a flight surgeon. One of the most important parts of being a flight surgeon, that was kind of my first foot out the door in the medical world, in the Air Force world. So I'll stop there and let you go where you want to go.

I think that was just getting interesting. I want you to keep going right where you were. I mean, you were Diagnosed with a serious illness. Was that disabling for you? That prevents you from practicing medicine at all? How did that impact your life? I ran a blog post this morning. We're not recording this, obviously, the day it's. You guys are hearing it, but I ran a blog post this morning about military docs and disability insurance and how difficult it is to get any sort of disability coverage. So can you speak a little bit to that as well?

Oh, I didn't have any disability coverage. And I've been lucky that my. My disease burden hasn't been anything more than what it was originally. And at this point, it's. We're questioning, like, is it really Ms. Or is it just some random viral attack or something? I definitely have some demyelination in my spinal cord and stuff, but I had facial symptoms. I never had the stereotypical optic neuritis and blindness and stuff. No sensory or no motor issues. So I've been fine. From a disease burden standpoint, from a health standpoint, I think where we were at the time, and you have to preface this with my wife is a neurologist, and so she's in her neurology training. She was out of her training at that point. And we are deciding what to do next. Okay, I'm gonna get out of the military. What do I do next? And I had this medical school headquarters thing on the side, but do I wanna continue practicing? And should I go back and do a residency? Do I go back and do ortho, which is what my goal always was, to be an orthopedic surgeon, or do I maybe do, like, ortholite and do PM&R? And the PM&R docs are gonna be mad that I say that, but PMNR is kind of like non surgical ortho. And we had that discussion. And it came down to, at that point in time, this was still a relatively new diagnosis. We didn't know what my disease burden was going to be or what the course of it was going to be. And my wife being a neurologist, she's like, look, if you go back into ortho, you go do an Ortho residency. It's five years, 100 hours a week in a hospital. Guess what causes your disease burden to be worse? Stress and lack of sleep and poor eating and everything else, which is what residency is all about. And same thing for. For any residency. And so I think with that fear, if you want to call it fear, with that fear of what could be, I. We decided to kind of go the entrepreneurial Route and continue building what I thought was just going to be a fun little side project with medical school headquarters helping, helping pre meds get into med school.

So we're going to get into medical school headquarters. I want to, I want to dive a little deeper into your time in the military. Most regular listeners know I spent some time in the military as well. Among those with an HPSP commitment and even those who went to use shoes or, you know, have other military commitments from ROTC or something, there is this big fear of getting to the military match and being told you can't do the specialty you want to do. You're going to get stuck as a GMO, you're going to get stuck as a flight surgeon, etc. Can you talk about that? And as someone who, you know, for lack of a better word, got hosed in the match, you talk about how that affected you and your life and whether you thought that was bad in the end, now that you're on the other side of it and what it was like being, being a GMO and a flight surgeon.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm glad. Right. I wouldn't be talking to you right now if, if I didn't go the route that I went. And so I have no regrets doing what I did. I'm a huge advocate, evangelist, whatever, for HPSP4 students. But I think there needs to be more education and more awareness around that fact. The fact that the military can tell you no, the Army, Navy, Air Force can tell you no to your desired specialty. They can't force you into a specialty that you don't want to do, but they can tell you no. And you can go be a GMO flight doc or GMO family practice doc out there. I loved being a flight surgeon. I was getting ready and planning on making it a career. It was going to be hard for my wife because she's a doc and to be able to. Or the need to move around a bunch and have her credentials change and licensing change and all that stuff was going to be a pain, but I loved it. I'm one of the weird people that likes administration. And so my last three years, I was one of the C suiters would be in the normal world. But I really liked that side of things. I liked management. I liked the patient population. As a flight surgeon, you're dealing with healthy people. As soon as you're diagnosed with ms, you can't fly anymore. So I wouldn't see them. As soon as you're diagnosed with diabetes, etc. Like they wouldn't. They wouldn't be flyers. I didn't have to deal with the fit, for sure.

It's like when you're deployed and if nobody's getting shot at, nobody has anything.

Exactly. And from my original goal of being orthopod. Right. That's. That's the orthopod's dream, depending on what you want to do. Like, I want to deal with athletes and put them back to their sport. And so being a flight doc was very, very similar to that, and I really enjoyed it. And so I tell everybody, like, if you are okay not having control of where you're living and being okay delaying the specialty that you want to do, like, there's nothing better than being a flight doc. I've traveled the world. I've flown an F16, and everybody, like, I have awesome selfies of me in the back of an F16 and I've flown it. And everybody wants to see those pictures. And those are stories that most physicians will never have.

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of unique things you can do in the military, for sure. You know, when I signed on for hpsp, I was not aware of the military match and how it worked. I think I figured it out sometime in my first or second year of medical school. I'm hoping that with the Internet being a little more prominent now, that that is not an issue for people signing up for hpsp. Do you think there are still people signing up that don't know about the military match?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, unfortunately. And that is everything, right? I answer the same. The same five questions over and over and over and over again. People are just lazy inherently. And. And they'd rather email you and ask you versus do a quick Google search. And I always say, like, you could have gotten that answer a lot faster if you googled it. And so I think people rely on, unfortunately rely on the recruiters to tell them what the deal is. And the recruiters, unfortunately, are stereotypically don't tell the truth. And they don't.

Yeah. You know, I talk all the time about the conflicts of interest of financial advisors. Those pale in comparison to the conflicts of interest for military recruiters.

Huge. Huge. I'll talk to students and they'll tell me, like, the recruiter told me, I can do any specialty I want. I'm like, no, well, you can apply to any specialty you want. And they say, yeah, and if I don't get a military specialty, then I can go in the civilian world and do that. And I'm like, well, yes, if Right. And, but so they just, the recruiters just aren't completely transparent with the process and my goal with everything that I do is to be as transparent as possible for everything.

I'm not even sure if it's dishonesty among the recruiters so much as it is the fact that they just don't know. You know, they haven't been to college, they haven't been to medical school, they haven't been to residency, they've never been a practicing doc. They don't understand the significance on your career of not matching, which is a very real risk in the military world. In emergency medicine, the year I applied and it's all year and service and specialty specific, but the year I applied to emergency medicine there was a 50% match rate and that included deferrals into the civilian match. I mean that's like trying to get into dermatology in the civilian match. You know, it's just a very competitive match. So I think a lot of people just don't realize when they sign up. Let's move on to medical school hq. What inspired you to start that?

I've always been kind of entrepreneurial. Way back in the day I tried to start a wholesale business like when I was in high school, buying stuff wholesale and selling it on ebay and stuff. And then in undergrad and medical school I'm a self taught computer programmer so I wrote software and sold it to a company during my internship year. So I've always been a builder of things. And when I started my active duty commitment I was a geo bachelor, geographically separated bachelor. My wife was in Boston doing her residency, I was in Dover, Delaware doing my active duty stuff. So I had lots of time at night and I started listening to podcasts and getting into that world and I said and really one of the biggest triggers of it was a young airman came and was like, hey Dr. Gray, what's it like to go to medical school? How do I get into medical school? I'm thinking, I'm interested in it, what should I do? And I sat with him for an hour and a half in my office and talked about it. I'm like oh, I really like talking about this stuff. And I of course remembered my pre med path and terrible pre med advising and I knew of student doctor network and the kind of bad advice that was out there. And so I was like I'm going to start a website and put real articles up and try to interview deans of admissions and talk to the, the real sources instead of just talking about My journey, I'm going to go out and hear other people's journeys and aggregate all that information and go talk to the experts. So that was really the impetus behind it. And it was like I said, it was going to be a fun little side project. I started it in March of 2012 and then realized that I wanted to start a podcast too. And I started that at the end of 2012. And once I started the podcast, kind of the writing side, the article publishing side of things kind of died off. And I've just been podcasting for 289 straight weeks now as we record this for the pre med years, my main podcast.

Yeah, it's interesting. You got kind of out ahead of the curve of podcasting. There's been this trend, I think, in the online information infopreneur world of moving from blogging to podcasting, maybe even now transitioning a little bit to videocasting, but you got way out ahead of that, whereas I'm kind of behind the curve on it. My podcast came very late in, in our efforts here as far as that goes.

So you're doing it?

Yeah. Is this a. Is this a labor of love for you? Is it a business? Is it both?

It is both. I. So I started it in 2012. I didn't take money out of it until this year, until January 2018. So it's been a labor of love. Yeah, it's been a very big labor of love. All of my decision making, the algorithm that I've gone down, at least for the first couple years while I was still in the Air Force, it was all about just providing value for the audience. And when I left active duty and went full time with it, my wife, as a neurologist working at a good organization, getting good pay, she could cover the bills. I didn't have to make money. And so again, all of my decision making was and still is around what can I add? What can I do next to provide value? Not the question that most people who are starting out in this world, the question that they ask themselves is how can I make money right now? And so I think because of that, because it's been a labor of love, I think it's grown to the level that it's grown because there's a lot of authenticity behind what I'm doing. And I think my audience realizes that I'm not just out there to make a quick buck off of them.

So I mean, what is the business here? I look at your website here@medicalschoolhq.net and it looks like you do some pre med advising, you do some interview prep and some one on one application prep and personal statement editing. Is that essentially what the business is?

That's the bulk of it right now and that's unfortunately all one on one time for the most part. I have digital products and other like I have a mock interview platform that I think is an amazing platform that I don't really advertise or promote very well because I'm too busy with my four podcasts a week and everything else that I'm doing to really get everything else streamlined behind it. But right now it's a lot of the consulting, mostly non traditional students. So students who are changing careers and don't have a pre med advisor, they seem to find me and reach out to me. And the majority of my audience on my podcasts are non traditional students.

Now you have, I mean, you got the podcast. Have you monetized those? Are there ads on the podcast or are they just completely informational?

They are for the most part completely informational. So I have a kind of an interesting setup. So when I started it was just the one podcast. And then I went to a conference podcast movement, kind of similar to fincon, different niche. And I listened to NPR and WNYC and listened to how they cross promote shows. And I left that in 2015. This is right when I went full time entrepreneur and I said, I need more podcasts. So I went to an organization called Old Premeds which is strictly for non traditional pre med students. I said, hey, you have a form on your website. Let's answer questions, right? You have the content ready. Let's take a question and answer on a podcast. I now own that website and have kind of rolled it into medical school headquarters. I went to an MCAT test prep company. I said, hey, you have contents, you have QBanks, you have tests. Let's answer questions on a podcast. And so I've monetized in one way with the test prep company. I'm a big affiliate of theirs and if you Google promo code for their company, like I'm number one. And so that has skyrocketed my affiliate commissions with them, which is awesome. But other than that, I have some random advertising, like recently a new university or a new medical school opened up and they reached out to me, which I was flattered. They said, hey, you're big in this space. We want to get the word out that we're opening and accepting applications. And so it was kind of sponsored content where I did a podcast episode with them. And I did some emails and some social media posts and then they reached out to me again recently to do that some more. It's something that I don't do enough. And I'm actually very envious of your stuff and how well you do that. I mean, my, my website gets 130, 140,000 visits a month and I have a strong email list of 10,000 people and great social media presence. And I don't advertise and monetize those products separately. I could just advertise my own stuff, which has kind of been my thinking all along as to why I don't do other advertising. But I don't see why there's a reason to do one or the other.

Now let's talk about the stuff on here that's basically free to anybody, including the listeners of this podcast. You have six podcasts, right?

Yeah, five active ones and then one that was started prematurely. It was for usmle and Comlex, but the company that I was going to do it with kind of backed out at the last minute. So I have the Metaed Media Network. I have the Pre Med years, the old Pre Meds podcast, the MCAT podcast, Specialty Stories, and then I have ask Dr. Gray, which is a pseudo daily podcast as well. And then I have the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine is on my network and that's a cross promotional thing. I'm in talks with an application service, one of the big application services for medical school. They have a podcast and we're in talks about them joining my network. Again, it just has a cross promotional thing. So lots of podcasts on the network and always looking to add more.

So how does somebody tell which podcast they should be listening to? I mean, who's the Pre Med Years.

For if you're Pre med, It's everything. Pre Med, right? Everything from applications to MCAT to general medical discussions. Every Pre Med should be listening to the Pre Med years.

Okay, how about the MCAT podcast? When do you listen to that? While you're studying for the mcat?

Yes, studying for it. Before you're studying for it. If you haven't taken the MCAT yet or you're in the process of retaking it, that is for you.

Okay, how about the old Pre Meds podcast? How old do you have to be to get some value out of this?

That is the question, right? That's always the like not the best branding old Pre Med. Well, I'm not old, but I am non traditional. That's for you. So the old Pre Med Podcast is for anybody non traditional. And the majority of people asking questions on there are in their 20s and 30s saying, hey, I'm, I'm changing careers or, hey, I just graduated undergrad, but I was a business major and I finally realized I want to be a doctor. Now what. What do I do to. To. To get to where I want to go?

Okay, how about Specialty Stories? Who's that for?

That's for everybody. It's funny, I've had the most random people reach out to me who listen to specialty specialty stories. Non medical people, admin. People at hospitals going, I listen to specialty stories. It's amazing to hear about all these different stories and all these different, different specialties who I interact with every day. I didn't know anything about their job. So that's kind of pre meds to medical students and anybody else who's just interested in medicine.

So those four are all weekly podcasts, right?

They are weekly Specialty Stories is the one podcast that I have not been able to keep up every week. The other three, I've done every week since I've started them.

Okay, and then what's the difference between those and the Ask Dr. Gray Q&A?

Yeah, the Ask Dr. Gray one is actually a Facebook Live that I do. So I go on Facebook Live when I'm home in my studio. And my original format of that was to take an interesting discussion that I had with a call with a student or something that came up in my Facebook group and then answer it on the podcast and talk about it and then interact and answer questions that came in through comments. And I changed that recently to actually having a live call with a student. So it's almost like a 15 minute, 10, 15 minute coaching call with a student. They're calling and asking a question saying, hey, here's what I'm struggling with. What do you suggest? And I'm recording that for Facebook Live and then putting that out as a podcast.

Very cool. You also look like you have a forum up there on the site.

I finally put a forum out there. Yep.

Yeah. One part of it is much bigger than the rest.

The non traditional side is pretty big.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. And that's because it was that. That was the old, old pre meds form. So I shut down the separate website for old pre meds last year and rolled that into my site.

You can tell that one part's much, much bigger than everything else there. Very cool. Well, let me ask you a few other questions here. What is your message for an undergrad who thinks medicine might Be a good career. Just somebody that's kind of has some interest there. You know, it almost seemed when I was a freshman in college that half my dorm was interested in going to medical school. What kind of advice do you have for those people?

Keep exploring. Keep exploring. Because I think a lot of early students, they're either enamored with their doctors. Right. The typical story of my doctor saved me, and I want to be like him or her. They see the lifestyle of a physician. Maybe there's a physician living outside of his or her means in the neighborhood, and they, oh, I want to drive a Mercedes like that doctor. Or they like Grey's Anatomy or whatever the TV show of the day is. And medicine is hard, and medicine sucks in a lot of ways. But if it's what you're supposed to do after you've explored it and asked the right questions and gone in and been around patients and been around physicians and can see that it's right for you, then keep going full steam ahead.

And how about somebody that's maybe a little further on, They've decided, okay, medicine's my thing. I'm a, I'm a sophomore, I'm a junior. You know, I'm set on medicine. I'm gonna do what I can to get into medical school. What advice do you give to them?

Keep exploring. Because that.

Even then, huh?

Yeah. The consistency is important. So a lot of students I see, they'll. They'll apply to medical school and they won't get in, and I'll look at their application. Like, why you haven't shadowed in like three years? Well, I got 100 hours my freshman year. I didn't think I needed anymore. What you're telling to the admissions committee is you just weren't that excited to be around physicians, to spend time around them. So keep exploring, keep asking questions, keep doing all of that. And know that the MCAT is super important and know that you don't have to be perfect. I think too many students try to be perfect and too many people give up on their dream because they get a C in organic chemistry and their pre med advisor tells them there's no way they can get into med school now.

You know, the pre med advisor, my undergraduate, had that reputation of telling people they can't do it to the point where there were a lot of people who I think went to medical school just to prove him wrong. Yeah, I'm not even sure they were interested in medicine really. They just wanted to prove him wrong, that they could do it.

I have a podcast I did. It's titled something along the lines of your pre med advisor isn't there to tell you no or something like that. And I've had a couple pre med advisors reach out to me and say thank you for that episode. I'm like, oh, like, thank God you're not mad at me for saying that. And too many pre med advisors out there think that they are the gatekeeper and they're not. They're not the gatekeeper. The admissions committees are the gatekeepers. But the pre med advisor is there to help you figure out the path that you need to take, not tell you no.

So what I mean, the biggest question any pre med has is how can I get into medical school? Has that changed in the last 10 or 20 years? Is it really the same thing we were doing 15 years ago to try to get into medical school, or is it different now?

You know, it's funny, I look at the students who I work with now and I'm like, there's no way I would get into med school. Like, the things that kids are doing these days, quote unquote, kids that they're doing is amazing. It's phenomenal what they're doing. The resources, resources that they have available to them in the grand scheme of things, they're doing the same things, right? They're shadowing, they're getting clinical experience, they're being good human beings, they're getting good grades and good MCAT scores. All of that is the same. I think the difference is that back in, back in the day, when we got into med school, it was a little bit more stat heavy and less everything else. And now it's who are you as a person? This quote unquote holistic review of applications. They want to see that you've lived a life. There's the age is skewing a little bit higher now because just non traditional students or students who have taken a gap year or two are bringing a little bit more to the table for med schools.

Do you worry that that focus on holistic, you know, the entire picture of the person is leading to problems down the road of people that can't hack it academically that then have trouble passing their, you know, board exams, that have trouble, you know, becoming board certified down the road?

I don't think so. Because there's still some minimum requirements, right? They're not accepting somebody with a 2.5 GPA and a 10 percentile MCAT score. You still have to maintain some semblance of, of academic rigor in your, your undergrad And MCAT scores. So, so that still has to be there. But you don't need to get maybe a 90 90th percentile in your MCAT. They'll settle for an 80th percentile. Right. So it's, it's going down a little bit. They're more open to looking at more people. So obviously the biggest determinant is what are patient outcomes in the future. And that's just too hard of a study to figure out. But that would be the gold standard.

Yeah, that one's never going to happen, I don't think.

Yeah.

So what advice do you have for a non traditional applicant?

Oh, have fun. Go out there and figure out what you want to do. I think a lot of non traditional applicants think that they are at a disadvantage because of their non traditional path and it couldn't be the furthest thing from the truth. They, because of their non traditional journey, because they've spent time outside of school, they have assets that they can bring to a class. And when a medical school admissions committee is looking at who they want to accept, they're looking at building a small little community of 100 people, 200 people, whatever the class size is, and they want people from all walks of life to be part of that community because that's what shows how students flourish in a, in a school.

Now you kind of strike me as perhaps the most positive person about a career in medicine of anyone I've ever met.

You know, but I did say it sucked earlier. You did, you did.

Which I was actually surprised to hear. But pre meds, they run into docs all the time who are warning them away from medicine. They're hearing horror stories about increasing student loan burdens, increasing hassles, decreasing incomes. Why are you so almost unabashedly positive about a career in medicine?

By comparison, yeah, there are people out there that like are jumping on the physician suicide train and obviously it's at a higher rate than other fields in the general population. I think there's a lot of fear mongering. That's obviously what bleeds leads in the news world. Medicine has its issues. Our healthcare system in this country is terrible. Our, our, our. I think our training is pretty weird with waking up at 5 o', clock, 4, 4 o', clock, 3 o' clock in the morning to go round on patients and wake them up. Like, wait, don't you know that sleep is good for healing? At the end of the day though, medicine is about that connection with the patient and that will never change, ever. Right. It may change in Some respects with our knowledge base and what we have to know. But that one on one empathy and relationship that you're building with the patient will never change. Because a patient will never want to interact with a computer, to go down an algorithm with a computer. They'll be perfectly fine talking to you and then you interacting with that computer to figure out a diagnosis and what the next steps are. But what happens behind that closed door, no matter what the insurance system looks like, what our healthcare system looks like, no matter who the administration is, no matter what setting you're in, what happens behind that closed door is one of the most precious things. And what drew me to medicine, I mean, I always joke that I wanted to cut people, but really it's that connection with the patient and being there for them. And it's super cliche as to why people want to be physicians, but it's an amazing relationship that you have with people. And that's why I'm unabashedly pro medicine. Yes, I am completely transparent that there are a lot of issues. I don't try to sugarcoat those. But I still think it's an amazing career if. And it's a big if. If you are doing it for the right reasons.

You know, it's interesting, I had Dyke Drummond. I don't know if you know who he, he is. He does a lot of talking about, yeah, he does a lot of talking about burnout. And he came and spoke to our physician group and a lot of my partners are like, why is somebody who isn't practicing anymore teaching us about burnout? Why, why should we believe him at all? So I'm going to kind of ask you the same question. Why should people listen to you about medicine and how to get into medical school if you're not currently practicing medicine?

Well, I don't talk about medicine really. On my podcast, I talk about how to get into med school. And so you don't need to practice medicine. I've been through the process, but my goal from day one, I mentioned that I never wanted to talk about me and my journey. And so it comes up. Obviously people want to hear about my journey, but when I give advice. A couple weeks ago, I had the director of admissions for the University of Illinois College of Medicine, right. So she's got three campuses, they get thousands upon thousands of applications. And I sat down with her for an hour on the podcast and we went step by step how they in their admissions committee review an application and determine who to send secondaries to, who to interview, how to review their interviews, etc. So I am out there every day interacting with these people, gathering the real information, the right information to then turn around and, and package it in a podcast for students so I don't have to be on an admissions committee for that. I do teach at the University of Colorado School of Medicine here. I've talked to their dean of admissions about potentially being on an admissions committee there. But I'm happy doing what I'm doing, having the conversations with lots of people, lots of admissions committee members about their processes so I can help students from around the country.

Now, what advice do you have? Since this is a, you know, financial podcast, we ought to probably talk about some financial stuff. But what advice do you have to a pre med with no family resources, no working spouse, no rich parents to assist them in paying for medical school? What do you tell those folks?

Look at HBSP as one thing, obviously. No, no the pros and cons for that. I do a lot of financial advisors on my podcast. I've had you on the podcast before. I, I think, unfortunately, a lot of students don't go into medicine, people who are going to be amazing physicians, and I think it affects lower socioeconomic students even more. They look at that price tag and they say, no way. There, there are resources out there, federal resources for right now, other resources out there to help pay back loans. But I think the biggest thing as you go through the process, if this is what you're going to do, the biggest thing to, to know and to do is to live well, well, well within your means and not go, okay, I'm an attending now. Time for my Mercedes, time for my boat, time for my big house, and then pay the minimum on student loans.

I mean, what do you think about somebody that's looking at it and going, well, you know, my desired specialty might only make a couple hundred thousand dollars when I get out. And if I add all this up, I'm going to have $600,000, which is when I leave medical school. Is that reasonable for them to say, you know what? That is not a wise investment for me. I am barred from doing this financially unless I basically want to live like a resident the rest of my life. Yeah, I mean, how do you, how do you balance that if your dream is medicine and you realize that that is the financial reality of it?

Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. There's what's financially smart and what is just meant for you to do as a living for your career.

Let's talk about military medicine. You mentioned hpsp you want to talk about some of the various military options to pay for medical school and their pluses and minuses?

Yeah. So HPSP is typically a one for one commitment. So I signed up before medical school. I think you did as well. And it's one for one. So four years of med school, four years of payback. You can do a three year scholarship and do three years. You can do a two year scholarship and owe three years. So the two year scholarship is not really worth the money because you still have all the debts and then you still owe three years and you're not making much money as a military doc. So that's one option and it's a great option. You can go to any medical school, any accredited medical school in the US and get that scholarship. Each branch does 150 scholarships, I think a year. The Air Force is the most competitive because it's the best service by far. The bias there at all. None. None. The other option is going, going to uses, right. The University, United States. What is it?

Uniform, uniformed, Health services, something. Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, it's usually.

We all know.

Yeah, yeah. So that's the military medical school and that's a great option because you get paid to go to medical school. Right. You're, I think an E4, E5, something like that as you go through medical school, pay wise and it's a little bit different. You owe more time, commitment wise. You owe seven years I think is the commitment for, for usis. But it's, it's another option. You again, you can choose between the three branches and typically residencies are a little bit easier to get out of usis. You have more exposure to the program directors for the military matches. And so you get, you get that connection that networking a little bit earlier. Outside of that, once you're a resident, you can sign up for the reserves and have some repayment options there as well. And some reserves. I've seen reservists go through medical school on reserve scholarships as well. So there's an option there as well.

What about the, are they still doing the FAP program, the financial assistance program where they give you a bunch of money as a resident in exchange for a commitment.

Yeah, so that was one of the last things I mentioned. So as a resident you can sign up. I didn't name it by name. So the FAP is something you can do. You're a resident, you're kind of in a reserve status and they pay you some money.

In a lot of ways it's not so much A scholarship as it is a contract, you get some of your money up front and then you're paid less later. But I think over the years, particularly as the price of tuition has skyrocketed, that the HPSP scholarship has become a little bit more attractive than perhaps it used to be. I mean, the Air Force got me for a song. I mean, I think tuition at the University of Utah, the year I started was $10,000 a year for in state. But now, you know, his tuition is four and five times as high at a lot of places. Places. It's getting to be a much better financial deal. If you had somebody that was really not super interested in military medicine but just looking for a way to pay for medical school, do you think it makes sense for them to go into the military to pay for medical school for the four years or whatever it takes to pay for it, even with a plan to get out and no real desire to serve in the military?

Not at all. Not. Not at all. There are too many negatives for somebody who doesn't want to be in the military just to take the money. Number one, obviously, not being able to match in what you want to match in not being able to live where you want to live. If you meet your future spouse in medical school like I did, and they're in training and you go off to some other place, there are a lot of negative aspects to being in the military that a student shouldn't be thinking about. Just the money and if they don't want to serve at all.

But as the price increases, doesn't 4 years of misery in the military beat 15 years of living like a resident?

I don't know, Jim, you tell me. Did you ever work next to miserable physicians?

I certainly did, and they were not having a good time.

Yeah, no doubt about it. Four years of misery is not worth it.

All right, let's talk about some misunderstandings out there. What are the biggest misunderstandings out there about premeds, medical school, school and a.

Career in medicine that you see misunderstandings around? What?

I mean, just in general, the themes you keep seeing, you know, pre meds coming to you with that is just totally wrong. Needs to be corrected.

Number one, that you have to be a perfect student. I think too many students give up on their dream because they got to see, like I said, an orgo or a D or an F or whatever, and so they give up on the dream. You don't have to be perfect. You have to obviously show competence. And if you have failed, you need to fix that course Correct, as I call it on my podcast. So that's really a big thing. Another thing is a lot of people don't understand the application process to medical school. They think, oh, it's like college. You just, you apply to a bunch of schools and you get in somewhere, it's really easy. And as long as you apply by the deadline, you'll be good. Right. And I have this argument all the time with, with deans of admissions and other people, like, why is there a deadline in the medical school application process when the likelihood of somebody being accepted if they applied at the deadline is about 0.1%? It's a rolling admissions application. The sooner you apply, the better your chances are. And it's just not a transparent process from the schools, from the application services. And I think it does everybody a disservice. So that's, that's a huge misunderstanding out there in the pre med world. From the med school side of things. I had this going into it, and I hope students, I'm sure students still have this thought going into it is like, for me, I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon, so studying histology, studying biochemistry, et cetera just wasn't worthwhile. And I come to learn now that I'm older and wiser. Like, everything that you're doing, it's there for a purpose. And as we go further along in this technology world that we're going to live in with Watson next to us, and we're able to plug in information into Watson, we don't need to know as much information in our head to be recalled immediately. But what medical school really teaches you is just how to learn and how to aggregate information and how to think critically, to know what questions to ask next. And I think I didn't take advantage of med school enough in that respect. And I thought I was just there to memorize everything, unfortunately.

Very nice. Well, I sure appreciate you being here. Let me give you a chance to distribute some final words of wisdom. What else would you like our listeners to know before you go?

So obviously the majority of listeners being in the financial world, maybe they're already physicians trying to learn how to make money. But really, I think as you go down this process and you interact with premeds and other students who are potentially interested in medicine, it's to try to remember why you went into this originally. And maybe you're not making as much money as you thought, and maybe you're not living in as big of a house or driving the best car that you want, but try to remember that at the end of the day it really is that connection with the patient. And as long as you're open and honest about that kind of stuff with a pre med and not trying to steer him or her away from medicine, I think you're doing the future patients a good service by keeping people in the field and point them to the pre med years.

Thank you very much. TheMedicalSchoolHQ.net is where you can learn more about Dr. Ryan Gray and his work. You can check out his podcast there. You can check out the free forums if you want to hire him to assist you in getting into medical school. That is also a service he offers. Thank you very much for being on the podcast.

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Sam.