This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Sofia Noori, Current doctor, formerly on admissions at UCSF Almost all of the regrets I’ve seen my classmates and I suffer from have to do with opportunity cost, the idea that because we committed to this life-long journey of medicine, we have lost potential benefits from other life choices. The opportunity cost of going to medical school is HUGE, because the average medical student is usually pretty smart and hardworking, and could have done a bunch of other cool things with their lives if they had wanted to. Below I list a few regrets in no specific order: Not enjoying their free time enough, or not taking more of it. A lot of the answers already here reflect that many students wish they had taken a “gap year” or some free time before starting, or that they had enjoyed the extra hours they had as a student before residency. I don’t think I understood what “busy” truly meant until I started working in a hospital. Nowadays, the time that I get to spend just lounging on a couch is magical to me and I cherish it dearly. The potential earnings that they gave up. People think that being a medical student means being a future rich person. Again, the average medical student is pretty smart and hard-working, and could have become an engineer or financial analyst if he/she had wanted to. Those are also 6-figure paying jobs, but they do not require an advanced degree with $150,000 in debt and >3 years of residency. The financial sacrifice of medical school is huge, and it is likely the worst financial choice that a medical student ever makes. Burning out and wishing you thought this through more. Feeling tired of your work is common in any industry, but there is something much more disheartening about it in medicine. Just imagine sacrificing your 20s and your finances to help heal people, only to find yourself exhausted and disillusioned with the entire thing. This kind of burn out can trigger a life crisis in students who discover that they worked their whole lives for something they may not actually enjoy doing. Source
