Medical Resident | UCLA Med School (2024)

FAQs

How long does med school residency take? ›

How long is medical school? Medical school takes 4 years to complete, but to become a doctor you'll also spend 3–7 years in residency.

A residency program is an essential step in furthering medical education and training after completing medical school. During this phase, newly graduated doctors, referred to as residents, gain hands-on experience in their chosen specialty through clinical practice.

Is medical residency hard? While every resident physician will handle their experiences differently, most agree that medical residency is a challenging stage of a physician's training. “I expected residency to be grueling, and it was that and more,” says Dr. Barbara Bergin, Texas-based orthopedic surgeon.

The first key difference between medical school and residency is right there in the name. In medical school, you are in school. You're a student paying tuition to earn your MD. In residency, you're working a job.

Wondering what the shortest residency with the highest pay is? It's emergency medicine, followed by obstetrics-gynecology. Physicians in these roles earn around $270,000 annually.

Once students graduate from medical school, they move on to residency programs. The average medical resident age of first-years, also known as interns, is typically around 29 to 30 years.

A resident doctor is a medical school graduate and doctor in training who's taking part in a graduate medical education (GME) program. Health care facilities commonly refer to resident doctors as "residents" and first-year residents as "interns".

Residents will be involved in your operation

Residents are always supervised while doing a procedure. Patient safety is always the number one priority. You should know that residents typically practice surgical skills in a simulation lab many times before performing them on a person.

Because we used to be “residents” at the hospital, residents used to practically live at the hospital. So grateful times are changing and this isn't considered normal anymore.

Easiest Doctor to Become: Family Doctor

The simple answer is that it takes the least amount of time. After your four years at medical school, (or a 3-year medical school) you can do a three-year family medicine residency, pass your board exams, and that's it, you're a doctor!

How much free time do you have in residency? ›

In residency, you'll be working long hours and won't have much free time to see your loved ones or to do the things you enjoy. Also, most residency programs only have two to three weeks of vacation during intern year, and requesting that time off is also less straightforward than in other professions.

Retention rates range from 27.2% in Wyoming to 77.7% in California.

2 | Are Residents Doctors? Although a resident has completed medical school and received a degree, they are still considered doctors in training. Once they complete their residency training and become board-certified, they are considered a fully credentialed doctor.

To summarize, a resident (doctor) is someone who has completed medical school but has not completed residency, while an attending doctor is a fully licensed doctor who was completed residency and is licensed and board certified in their medical specialty.

Medical school prepares you to be a physician and gives you comprehensive, general medicine experience. After medical school you will need to apply and match to a residency program in which you learn your chosen medical specialty such as Family Medicine, Pediatrics, OB/GYN, General Surgery, Pediatrics, and more.

The average length of residency training is about four and a half years. The shortest residency training programs are three years and the longest are seven.

The easiest way to become a doctor is to enroll in an accelerated BS/MD or combined BS/MD program, which streamlines undergraduate and medical school education into approximately six to seven years.

In summary, the longest residency, without including any additional research years or further fellowship, is neurosurgery (7 years) and the shortest are for 3 years with family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, and emergency medicine (depending on the program).