Business Plan

Mission Statement:

Making Your Premed Rounds is a website that seeks to provide high school and college students interested in medicine with a guide for how to enter a career in medicine that does the following:

1.  Consolidates premedical requirements and advice

2.  Directs students interested in certain fields of medicine to accessible sources of information for those fields

3.  Encourages other premedical students to get engaged with changing developments in their prospective medical careers

4.  Gets premedical students thinking about how medicine as a field is changing

 

Opportunity

This website will provide information for premedical students, both declared and undeclared, to help them plan their entry into a career in medicine. However, for the sake of this website, a premedical student could be in high school or college, and may not even be an official “premed.”  They simply have to be interested in medicine.  The size of this population is hard to measure, since this is a number that fluctuates according to personal interest.  Still, last year there were 40,000 applicants to medical school according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).  This number only represents the last generation of premedical students who were prepared to enter medical school.  It reflects a much larger population that is still in high school or college and planning to apply in later years.  Furthermore, the number of applicants has been rising for the past five years and is sure to increase in the future.  There is a growing demand for doctors due to the needs of an aging population and millions of uninsured people who would gain coverage under a universal healthcare coverage being pushed by the president.  Part of increasing the supply of doctors to meet this demand will include stimulating student interest for careers in medicine, and the kind of information this website provides will help turn this interest into actionable planning. 

 

Offerings

Premedical students will need resources regarding the following two things as they begin planning:

        How to figure out what kind of doctor they want to be

       How to design an education path that matches their interests

To assist with point 1, information about the following will be provided:

 

Career paths   

List medical specialties 

    Surgical 

    Internal Medicine 

    Diagnostic Specialties

    Neurology 

List interdisciplinary fields 

Typical work schedules, pros, and cons for each specialty/field

Each specialty/field connected to external resources for more information

Future scope

Healthcare

    Current problems

    Rising costs, number of uninsured, disincentives for preventative measures

    Possible solutions

    Health informatics

Human Genome Project

    Explanation of project completed in 2003

    Pharmacogenomics and gene-specified treatment

Stem Cell Research

    Regenerative medicine possibilities 

To assist with point 2, information about the following will be provided:

 

Undergraduate

    General course requirements

    Majoring in things other than biology or chemistry to fit your interests

    Extracurricular opportunities

    Finding research opportunities

    Summer opportunities

    Finding scholarships

Preparing for medical school

    Choosing a medical school

    General timeline for application process

    Practice MCAT testing, mock interviews

    Forums for general and school-specific advice

   Wiki pages for viewers to update

 

Post-undergraduate

Alternative paths

    Opportunities for "taking a year off" experiences

Potential degrees to aim for depending on career interests

               MD, PhD, MBA

 

Qualifications

I am a premedical student and current freshman in college.  I am personally involved and interacting with a lot of the information I am giving my audience, and will remain so for at least 3 more years.  Furthermore, I am involved with two separate premedical organizations on my campus, the Stanford Black Premedical Organization and the Stanford American Medical Students Association Undergraduate Chapter.  Through these organizations I am exposed to new information for premedical students, and different issues that premedical students other than myself face.  Also, the members of these two organizations can serve as an initial population of customers to use the website.  Many of them have connections to other premedical students in their classes, and they could act as a portal for outreach to a larger audience.

 

Start up Costs--$160

Start up costs will mostly consist of a time investment from me.  This website will simply link and chunk information that is already available from various sources, including already obtained handbooks and websites from premedical organizations.  Resources beyond premedical organizations will have to be obtained for the Career Path and Future Scope sections.  This means a large amount of information seeking and organizing, which constitutes a time investment worth about $8 an hour and will take about 20 hours.  The website will be created using free website maker webs.com.    

 

Future Costs

As time progresses and additional information flows into the website, it may become necessary to increase the bandwidth provided by webs.com, which would require a $20 per year starting fee and a $50 per year investment.  It may become necessary to pay leading officers of premedical organizations to promote the website, by directing members of their groups to this website and updating the website.  Compensation for these individuals would most likely be in the form of a one-time, $15 payment.  It will also become very costly for me to personally update this website frequently, so it is crucial that other people become involved in this process.  On the other hand, a lot of the premedical requirements and information about medical careers will remain pretty constant within generations.  This information is pretty self-sustaining.

 

Sources of income

Like most other premedical websites, this website can obtain revenue from mcat test preparation advertisements.  It could also charge $10 fees to advertise events premedical organizations are trying to promote.  Donations, particularly from student premedical organizations receiving money from the university, will also be encouraged.  Once members of these organizations become involved in some aspect of the website, it will become beneficial for them to donate a small portion of their allotted funds, about $20, to help keep the website alive.  

 

Competition

This website faces competition with other premedical websites.  A common source of information about medical school is the AAMC’s website.  However, although a lot of good information is available about medical colleges, it does not point you directly to premedical requirements and it outsources you from its website before providing basic information.  Many premedical websites made by student groups, like the one provided by the Stanford Premedical Association, only emphasize undergraduate requirements without information about careers in medicine.  Studentdoc.com is one website that does an excellent job of providing resources for both finding out what different careers in medicine look like and designing an education path.  It has resources for student loans, forums for communication amongst premedical students, future scopes for specific medical careers, and nicely incorporates the website premedguide.com for more specific premedical advice.  It does, however, lack a future scope for larger issues within the medical field and there is no conversation about alternative paths to medicine.  The absence of the future scope for larger issues within the medical field may discourage students who are interested in medicine, but see their desired careers as biologists or chemists moreso than doctors.  The future scope component will show how the work of biologists and chemists is crucial to the future success of the medical field.  The alternative paths section is needed to keep students who are interested in medicine, but not interested in the typical premedical track.  These may include people who want to be premedical, but also have interests in creative writing.  It is important for them to know that not only is it possible for them to take classes in creative writing while fulfilling premedical requirements, it actually makes them more competitive as an applicant. 

 

Legal issues and other difficulties

This website will use a lot of information pulled from other websites and organizations.  I will hopefully avoid legal trouble by sourcing information and linking visitors to the websites and organizations used.  I will also remain non-profit. Keeping information updated is time-consuming, so for the most part site users will have to go to links provided for the most updated information.