Will I Ever Graduate?

I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever actually finish school…  When I’m asked what it is that I want to do with my life, I can answer with confidence that I want to be involved in the healthcare business - in particular, making sure that effective, equitable, and efficient healthcare is available to as many people around the world as possible.  When I’m asked how I plan to get there, I can again answer that I need to understand economics (check), business (check-ish), medicine (working on that), health policy (not yet).

And that’s when it dawns on me that I really need to spend some time in the health policy arena and follow up with some serious business training.  So here’s the timeline I’m looking at:

2 years of medical school left
+ min. 3 years of residency
+ 1 year of health policy internship
+ 2 years of business school

= 8 years of schooling and training remaining.

That has me wrapping up somewhere in my 34th year of life.  I started school when I was 7.  Minus the year I took off after college, I will have been in school for over 25 years.

Sheesh.  No wonder health care in America is screwed up.  From the looks of it, one has to spend half his life just getting qualified to do something about it.  Between politician, doctor, and businessman, it seems like you can reasonably be two of the three, but not all three unless, like me, you want to be a professional student.