8 Year Med School Programs: The Insider Story

8 year med school programs, where you go straight through and do your undergrad and medical school at the same school all as part of one program, are becoming more and more popular.

I completed an 8 year program at Brown University. So in high school, I applied to Brown, and there were a couple of boxes at the tail end of the application asking about my academic interests. I checked the "Medicine" box and wrote a short essay about medicine, believing that the more essays I wrote, the better chance I had of getting into Brown.

Ultimately, I was accepted to their eight year program, which I didn’t even realize until I was already at Brown. There are a lot of pros and cons to eight year programs, but whether they’re appropriate depends a lot on the individual program, and the individual candidate.

The Pros

If you’re even considering applying to an eight year program, that’s a good sign. It means that you’re ambitious enough to have ideas about what you want to do pretty early on.

Separately, one of the best parts about the 8-year program, at Brown at least, is that we did not have to take the MCAT. Being able to skip out on the MCAT not only makes your undergraduate experience much more enjoyable, but it also allows you to take a broad spectrum of classes. Normally you have to take a lot of Biology and Organic Chemistry in order to develop a sufficient understanding of science to excel on the MCAT. So with the eight year program, at Brown at least, you’re able to avoid this MCAT Straitjacket.

Additionally, with the program at Brown at least, there were no special requirements beyond taking basic pre-med classes. We were able to study any major, and obtain a very broad education prior to medical school. So, in a lot of ways, the program was very liberating, and allowed me to focus less on medicine as an undergraduate than I would have had to at a different school. For example, I studied computer science as an undergraduate, which I may have not been able to do without the eight year program, and which has been useful at different points throughout my career.

The Cons

When you apply to an 8 year med school program, you’re usually only 16 or 17 years old. And its very difficult to know that early on what you want to do with your life. Consider when you go to college, how many times you change your mind, and how many times you think about doing something different. College tends to be a time when people explore a lot of things and really figure themselves out. So with the eight year programs there is a bit of risk of forcing yourself to make your mind up before you know what you want to do.

There are definitely some major benefits to an eight year medical school program, but it is also important to think long and hard about why you want to be a doctor before committing to one, and to understand some of the risks of trying to force yourself to make up your mind too early.