The Truth: More School is Hard to Swallow

<h1>An MBA helped get me beyond the clinic. This does not mean it is the only way, and it definitely does not mean it is the best way.</h1> This is, by far, the most common question I get across all healthcare professions — MDs, Nurses, PT/OT/Athletic Trainers, even personal trainers. In fact, there are several permutations of this question: MBA, Coding Boot Camp, Ph.D…the list goes on. For me, the MBA was a means to get into the healthcare innovation ecosystem at the University of Oxford during a period of time when TONs of financial and human resources were being dumped into a singular goal: <a href="https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020/astrazeneca-and-oxford-university-announce-landmark-agreement-for-covid-19-vaccine.html#" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">accelerating medical innovation</a> to scrape the world out of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m going to be 100% honest with you — after 9 years of school (undergraduate, graduate, residency, and fellowship), more school was the last thing I wanted to think about. On top of the incredible amount of student debt needed to enter clinical practice, taking two years off (the standard for US business schools) AND introducing additional debt was, literally, the most unappealing thing I could think of. I’m going to take a step back from my specific circumstance and be objective: the math in 2020 came out to nearly $400,000 in overall costs to attend a US business school — two years of tuition, two years of living expenses, and two years of foregone salary. Just let that sink in — $400,000 on top of what was already spent for medical training. Why on earth would anyone even consider this, especially those of us that are less risk-tolerant (a hallmark of a good clinician, by the way — “do no harm”.) <a href="https://blog.nextdegree.org/the-truth-more-school-is-hard-to-swallow-5cf2f4ce291a">Website</a>