Does medical residency count as work experience?

[Ubiquitous]

Hello folks,
I am a Psychiatry final year resident currently, and I am planning to take the GMAT next year and apply to 5-6 top b schools in America.
My question is very simple, does post graduation/residency in a specialty count as work experience? I'm already 27 years old mainly due to the long drawn course of medical education as a whole. Will it be too late to apply for an MBA at 28 years of age?

Also, are there any others on the forum who have completed an MBBS or an MD in any specialty and then applied to the top b schools? Does going to med school affect my chances of an mba at a top b school? I was a pretty average medical student, does that also affect my chances, even if I score a 720+ on the GMAT?

[Jim@StratusPrep]

In short, your medical experience can be a HUGE advantage in your application process. I would count the residency as experience, but you can also ask the admissions office directly how it should be considered. 28 is definitely not too old.

One angle that you can use in the application is that you want to work at a biotech startup.

[Ubiquitous]

I actually want to completely switch careers and get into Finance, since that is what I wanted to do when I was in high school...

[Jim@StratusPrep]

I am not saying you can't do that, simply saying use your strengths.

[Ubiquitous]

Thanks a lot Jim. I will be getting in touch with Stratus Prep next year.

[Dina@Fortuna]

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!

[Ubiquitous]

Thanks for the reply Dina.
I have always been excited by the idea of working in finance, and the more I read about careers in hedge funds/PE, the more excited I get about working in one. The honest truth is that I haven't followed my heart till now, but now I want to. I don't know if that is a good enough reason to state.

Also, I'd like to know, are there a lot of doctors who apply to business school after completing their residency, or am I the oddball? What % of B school applicants are doctors, because that could either be a huge advantage, or a huge disadvantage.

[Ubiquitous]

Hi Jim. I'd just like to know whether my current background is realistically good enough to get me into a top b school, provided i manage a 700+ GMAT score :

28/Male/Indian
MBBS, MD Psychiatry
Work Experience : 4 years
Languages : 5 (Hindi, English, Punjabi, Kannada, Marathi)
Done charity work throughout the 3 years of Psychiatry residency
Experience in teaching Undergraduates
Have worked from being an intern upto the senior most resident
Average work hours = 12/day
Average student during MBBS.
Extracurricular : Was the lead singer of my high school choir, have learnt indian classical singing for 5 years, widely traveled all over the world

My choice B schools are Harvard, Tuck, Wharton, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago Booth