The Application Process

Hello Ubiquitous. Congratulations on getting close to completing your residency! To answer your questions, YES, your residency work certainly counts as full-time work experience and at age 28 you will not be considered too old to apply to full-time MBA programs.

One of the first questions that will come up, however, is why did you go through all the rigorous work of med school and then a specialized residency if you now want to work in finance? It will be important to have good reasons for this and to show how your medical background will be useful to what you plan to do in the future. There's no single right answer for this and it will probably take some time thinking about why you've made the decisions you have, what's driving you to pursue an MBA, and why you are now embarking on a new career path.

In many business fields, having a medical background will be a huge advantage and something that will make you stand out from many others. In the executive MBA program where I worked at NYU Stern, each year we had several physicians in each class and a number of them were able to make successful transitions into different fields (some into VC finance firms that invested in medical device companies, some in management consulting within healthcare divisions, and others in other financial roles). The key will be how you leverage your background in both the b-school application process and then during the job interview process during and after b-school. Hope this is helpful and happy to discuss in more detail if you like!