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Comment by falsenine | Hacker News Reader

Definitely going to check this out, especially as someone applying to medical school. Came upon the same problem with Anki, it's great for memorization but challenging to make a ton of cards.

An aside question: For incoming med students interested in tech, would it be worthwhile to learn programming? I know it would be great for research. But as someone who is unsure about becoming a clinician scientist, it might be a waste of time to learn programming concurrently during med school.

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I agree with "automate the boring stuff with python." It's actually the first book I used to learn Python.

I think it would be good if you learn it prior to going in. You just won't have time to do any programming learning in med school. Med school is more than a full time job by itself.

You may have more time, once in practice. I recall a couple of decades ago, it seemed every doctor in the country was learning to program, so he could automate his office. But, it turned out that was taken over by large corporations (as usual!) capitalizing on the need to integrate patient records with big hospitals and insurance systems.

I have time now :), in residency! And I should have more time as I go further in training!

Interesting, I always thought that residency got busier than med school, I guess it depends on residency type (e.g., surgical, radiology(?), etc). As a resident, do you see any startup opportunities within medicine? For example, I've seen some companies being started around machine learning in say, rad onc or radiology. Wondering how often findings from academic university research laboratories get translated into companies. Of course, there is the occasional biotech startup from wet labs.

I have many friends who are doctors and the one thing nearly all of them agree on regardless of age, school, or specialty, is that you really don't have time to do anything in med school other than go to med school. Especially something that takes blocks of time as large as programming.

I've heard this as well. Even undergrad was kind of busy for me. Would definitely be better to learn programming before med school.

I would say some programming skill is useful for anyone in the modern world, but I would just learn some Python and data manipulation tools. Something like Automate the Boring Stuff with Python would be good.

Thanks for the reference.

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