The admission process is also very geared towards undergrads coming straight out of premed programs. I thought about going to medical school after finishing a biomedical PhD, where I had picked some relevant skills (large animal physiology) and worked on some translational stuff. We even had a semester of neuroanatomy classes with the med students.

However, when I talked to admissions staff, this counted for essentially nothing. My prerequisites were out of date—-I’d have to go take biology and physics (with lab!), even though I’d spent the last 6 years measuring the electrical activity of living brains in living animals. I’d need to volunteer in a hospital for....whatever reason. None of this would have been insurmountable but it would have added another year or two to the process, while making less than a grad student and pushing a real job even further into the future.

This is especially maddening since the NIH is particularly keen on training physician-scientists, but everything seems designed for physician->scientist and not the other way around even though we have a glut of biomedical researchers and not enough doctors!