training

If you want to be an MD/PhD student, you have to get really used to feeling inadequate.  As a mathematical biology student, it's an almost daily feeling.  Your biologist friends know literature and experiments in exquisite detail; your mathematics friends can prove circles around you.  Your medical school friends are off to the hospital, then residency and (in my case) becoming attending physicians beginning next year.  You don't quite belong anywhere and often wonder if you'll end up being a jack of all trades, master of none.

So at the mathematical biology conference I attended last month, it was really nice to meet other students in mathematical biology - mostly in applied mathematics training programs.  My program tends to be light on coursework with a lot of encouragement to jump into research as soon as possible.  I tend to feel rather guilty or behind the curve because I spent a year doing almost entirely coursework.  Yet after speaking with the other students, it seems on right on track - and they spend two to three years doing full-time coursework before qualifying exams.  Many of the other students came from non-mathematics backgrounds so it was nice to hear that I wasn't the only one who sometimes felt a bit out of place.  It was also great to meet other students intent on synthesizing and strengthening their area of weakness! 

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What I've concluded after talking to a large number of students is that everyone is going to start with some kind of deficit.  It is easier to learn biology that mathematics, but that having been said, even with an undergraduate degree in biology, two years of (admittedly mostly mathematical) biology research, two years of medical school, and two graduate courses in biology, I'm only now starting to feel that I am beginning to have some depth in my biological knowledge.  I would not give up the courses in biochemistry and cell and molecular biology because I really like knowing the chemical structures for DNA and other common molecules - although I can no longer write them out as I did as an undergrad, the chemical structures look like old friends when I see them again in talks. 

I think it would have been really nice to undergraduate exposure to real analysis and basics of proof-writing.  While perhaps that is unnecessary for most actual applications, the math courses I've taken have been very heavy on the theoretical aspect.  I would have had a much easier time if I'd had a more rigorous undergraduate education.  I would also have liked to take more courses in physics, partially because I think that learning quantum mechanics and relatively would be pretty cool, but also because having a facility in basic modeling methods would have been really useful.

I talked to our program director today about my coursework, and he again affirmed my choice to do more coursework in mathematics.  It was really encouraging, as I sometimes feel a bit like an oddball in my choice to pursue medicine and mathematics; the whole endeavor, while great in theory, seems significantly more difficult in practice.  You're positioning yourself to do some interesting research in the future, he told me.  It was encouraging, because everyone else seems to be asking, What do mathematics and medicine have to do with each other?

Everything, actually.  But it's going to take time to learn enough to see the connections.