Coming late to medicine: The nontraditional path

With one career under the belt, these teachers, artists and actors decided it was time to go to medical school.

By Bonnie Booth, AMNews correspondent. Jan. 15, 2007.

Jim Johnson, MD, credits his 13-year career as a graphic designer with making organic chemistry class much more enjoyable the second time around. It gave him the skills to form a picture of a molecule in his head.

Dr. Johnson, now in his third year of an anesthesiology residency at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., was premed in college but he didn't enjoy the classes -- especially organic chemistry. Instead, he decided to tap into the other side of his brain and give marketing a try. He was successful and even ran his own firm for eight years. Dr. Johnson, though, heard a nagging voice in the back of his head.

"I wanted to do more to help humanity," he said. "I didn't want to keep selling stuff to people that they didn't really need."

There are careers that are easier to get to than medicine in which he also could have made an impact on humanity. But Dr. Johnson decided to give medicine another go.

"The funniest thing is that a big portion of the reason I chose medicine is that I wanted the challenge," he said. "This was the most challenging, therefore the most interesting."

When Dr. Johnson entered the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine in 2000 at the age of 36, he joined a small group of "nontraditional" students seeking a career change. In his class of 175, there was also a 56-year-old man, a 63-year-old woman and a couple of guys who were just a bit older than him. Nationwide, only 1% of the students who entered medical school that year were 36 or older, a number that holds steady today.