The advice zone

I am a third year medical student. One of my tutors has offered me a DPhil studentship in his laboratory. I am interested in the work and I would like to do research, but I am not sure which area of clinical medicine I want to go into. Should I do the DPhil now or wait until I have done my clinical years at medical school?

The main consideration should be whether you have a great desire to do the PhD on offer. If it is an area that really interests you and that you are excited about then you should pursue it now. If you are thinking about it just to get the qualification, then you should wait until you have done a bit more medicine to be able to decide which area you want to study in depth. Other things you should consider are that you will leave your classmates and that you will remain as a student (with all of the financial implications of that) for a few more years. Often if you are a postgraduate you can more easily get funding for a PhD. One other advantage of doing it now is that if you are older (and wiser) when …