Questions to Consider Before Becoming a Medical Student Entrepreneur

Health care expenditures continue to be on the rise. The necessary demand for innovation continues to increase in medicine. More and more medical students are beginning to be interested in becoming entrepreneurs. Here are some questions to reflect upon while making your decision.

Think you can sustain a start-up while being a full time medical student? Think again! Starting a company takes more time than you think. Being stretched thin on money while putting together a start-up, your duties as a founder include the most tedious tasks, which may range from doing your own financial statements for the first time and preparing a memo that you just learned about yesterday. Learning on your own in order to run your business with the very little time you have because you are either studying as first and second year medical students, or catching up on sleep via 15 minute naps in the call-room as a third year medical student. If you think you are lucky being a 4th year medical student while starting your business, good luck trying to schedule conference calls to get more buy-in for your company while scheduling your sub-internships and out-of-state interviews! You barely have time to breathe in medical school, how likely would you have time to grow your business? And seriously, you already get negative financial reward as a medical student, and unless you have funding from angel investors or you are from a wealthy background, you will end up being in an even more negative for working hard on a startup.

What specialty do you want to go into? If you are interested in competitive specialties such as orthopaedic surgery, ophthalmology, and urology, you may need to think again about your path towards entrepreneurship. It may be a different situation if you were to go into primary care specialties such as pediatrics, family medicine, and internal medicine. Yes, medicine has been advancing, and technology has been moving it forward. But, if you really think about it, path towards medicine is still extremely conservative. It is true that all schools, during their interview, emphasize they want some students who are “well-rounded.” However, there are only a countable number of students who actually have other experiences outside of science backgrounds and ridiculous amounts of science pre-requisites. Fortunately for academia and unfortunately for aspiring medical student entrepreneurs, research has been the center for academia, and research is the experience that is more positively recognized by medical schools, and even residencies.

Do you like thinking outside of the box…THAT much? Many medical students don’t have the concept of money (except for the yearly loan statements that you receive and proceed to deleting shortly after looking at that ridiculous amount – yuck!) as they are not exposed to business in medical school. Medical school, in a strange way, confines you. There are many aspects of medicine that people can learn from: clinical medicine, health management, operations, public health, expenditures, reimbursement, policy making, and the list goes on. While many of those aspects will cross path as you go through your medical journey, your responsibility as a medical student is to solely learn the books that are in front of you, and take tests that take hours to prepare for. It does not leave more time for many of you to open up and learn about other aspects of medicine.

Are you willing to take some risk from our low risk path toward being a physician? medical careers are extremely low risk. Medical schools that accepted you are highly unlikely to let you go. Millions of dollars are spent investing on each and every medical student. It is the school’s obligation to make sure the student graduates and gets the MD degree. Unless you have the incredible skill of prescribing the wrong drug to every patient you see, and are extremely unethical, it is very unlikely for you to not have a guaranteed job when you have completed residency training. Being an entrepreneur would be extremely different. From what I know from being in the world of start-ups thus far, I realized that you have to learn how to make decisions rather quickly, pivot and be flexible, be honest with what works and work doesn’t work in your business model. Most importantly, you experience the risk of losing your company as it can get acquired (yay!), or because it failed.

As a budding entrepreneur, I decided to take a risk while pursuing my MPH program in the middle of my medical school journey. I decided to think outside of the box to learn about different sides of healthcare so I can become a better physician leader when I grow up!

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