Erik Reinertsen

Lesson from my prior software industry experience: Most valuable people have strong technical base, but also deeply understand a business/application domain.

I went into a joint MD/PhD program (latter in Computer Science) with intention of never doing a full medical residency or doing a post-doc or working as a university faculty, because they all sound kind of terrible. (Oops, I ended up doing all of the above.)

I surprised myself liking clinical years (year 3+4 of medical school). No more abstract concepts. Unique intellectual and emotional challenges facing very real patients, families, and ugly diseases that don't cater to textbook answers.

Clinical team dynamics, working together to face down hard, real-life problems and ugly diseases. Exposure to different patient demographics I would never otherwise interact with. Changed my perspective on a lot of social issues.

Wife in same program, and I noticed big difference between coming home with "office" stories about paperwork, experiments, etc. that made my eyes glaze over vs. stories about pregnant woman diagnosed with stomach cancer or dissecting a patient's sarcomARM -> OMG tell me more!

Clinical experience inspires me to ask (research) questions that would never otherwise occur to me. TBD if this makes me any better at producing solutions. And to avoid misunderstanding, I fully respect pure PhDs, who will likely do deeper and better science than I ever will.

Having said all above, I still don't recommend "extra" training to anyone. 15 years until I was paid as much as first software job at 19 years old. >$1M opportunity cost. Better be doing, whatever you're doing, because you like all the steps (it sure doesn't get easier later).