I want to become a neurosurgoen in the future

Neurosurgery is a fantastic career. While the path to get here is challenging, demands hard work and long hours it is immensely fulfilling. The best advice is to work hard throughout school and follow your passions both inside and outside the classroom. Neurosurgeons had to do very well in school to get into residency and medical school but so have to be well rounded, mature and have good social skills to deal with critically and often urgently ill patients and their families.

To become a neurosurgeon you will need to do well in college and complete your bachelors degree. During college, you can explore medicine through volunteering and interest groups to make sure becoming a medical Doctor is what you want to do versus a dentist, pharmacist, optometrist, psychologist or one of the other equally fulfilling health professions. To become a neurosurgeon you will need to apply to and be accepted into medical school. The hard work continues there as most neurosurgeons perform well above the average in medical school graduating high in their class to be considered competitive. If you haven’t been lured into medicine or general surgery or radiology, then you apply for Neurosurgery residency. Residency is a 7 year apprenticeship in brain and spine surgery to teach you to to evaluate and care for patients needing a neurosurgeon in your community.

College and medical school can be expensive, with the average medical student graduating with over $100,000 of debt for medical school alone. That said, doctors are paid well and there are many ways to help defer the costs: financial aid, scholarships, service programs, loan forgiveness programs for working in areas that desperately need doctors, hospitals that help pay your loans when your hired, etc. The important thing to know is that almost everyone looking at medical school is intimidated by the cost at first, but there are many ways to pay the debt down quickly. The banks happily give medical students the large amounts f debt because there’s such a good track record of physicians paying off their debt on time.

Personally, I came out of a rural public high school in Wisconsin (33 kids in my senior class) and went to the University of Chicago for college. About 80% of my college was covered by scholarships, 10% loans, and 10% working during college. <span style="color: rgb(93, 103, 106);">Almost everyone takes on debt to pay for medical school, for most it’s in loans but for me it was in service. </span>I went to medical school in Wisconsin and signed up for a program where the government pays for medical school in exchange for me serving as a doctor in the military for several years.