Don’t Go Pre-Med: My Advice to a Yale Student Worried About Her Future
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
These people are idiots. The path to a successful career in medicine is a long and difficult one. There is no such thing as normal hours, you will be working almost all the hours there are. On top of that you will be poor until your 30s, at which point you will still have a staggering amount of debt. A career as a medical doctor is a calling. If you do it for other reasons (such as it being "safe") you will burn out.
Luckily, she has found she likes the job, but that wasn't her initial reason.
I attended Yale and it feels like everyone is pre-med or trying to get into finance (consulting or investment banking). You sort of feel out of the loop if you're not doing these things (I was one of the dozen computer science majors in my year).
A lot of these people don't see the problems until it's too late. The perception by society is that being a doctor is a stable well-paying job -- most people don't take into consideration, like you said, all the tuition costs, and years spent in school.
If you go to Yale, you're expected to achieve great things -- that's just the societal pressure. Not everyone deals with it well. So some hide in the "safety" of what society expects, rather than pursuing their dreams. These people would be too embarrassed to pursue their dreams, if it meant say, being unemployed for years or working a minimum wage job. I suppose that's more of a pride issue, but sometimes it's borne of a want to please others (while unfortunately forgetting about self)
That said, she's not even at the school yet -- she'll probably change her mind when she gets there. Plenty of people do once they're given a chance to think for themselves in a new environment. But plenty of people also ending up burning out because they've pursued pre-med or finance without it really being their calling, or love.
But yeah, I'm a CS major at Yale too (sophomore), and I almost went the finance route. Over the summer I realized that doing something interesting >> any amount of money. A lot of kids here are pre-meds or future IB/consultants, but there are also a lot of kids who aren't and do all sorts of awesome things.
This year, there's also a much bigger interest in startups. Yale Hackers, HackYale, more speakers/tech-talks, YEI coding workshops, and a lot of other things point to people working on cool projects and doing what they like.
Feel free to contact me if you have questions about startup/Yale/CS stuff
You can find me at victor.cheng@paperg.com
Medical specialities in which "normal hours" exist include, but are not limited to, general practice, dermatology and radiology
Similarly, investment banking doesn't have to be a calling at all because the investment/payoff ratio is so good, and things like being an astronaut or a opera singer need to be "vocational" for anyone to choose them.
A mediocre doctor can throw a dart at a map and still make $150K-200K per year. In fact, with the strange renumeration structure of modern medicine, a doctor in the sticks can make more money than a doctor in a desired suburb.
Worst case scenario in medicine is working as a GP in Montana for "only" $150K a year.
Worst case scenario in investment banking is you are out on your ass in 2 years with skills applicable nowhere outside of downtown Manhattan.
Lawyers 44-173K (Imputed median 108k) General Surgeon 225K Paediatrician, General 95K Family Physician 164K
For various "Physician" categories the median goes from 118 to 217K. (All salary data taken from payscale.com)
This neglects the fact that most people who finish medical school get fulltime permanent jobs as doctors, while getting a J.D. is a disastrously bad idea unless you can get into a T14 school, and not actually a good idea unless you can get into a T6[0]
[0]http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/ written by a law school professor
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/10/depth-and-breadth-of-misl... evidence that newly qualified lawyers aren't getting paid much, even if they've got jobs
If you take Operating Systems and Compilers in the same quarter, you're just not going to be able to get as much out of them as you would if you took them during separate quarters.
Even if you manage to avoid schedule overload, it still means that you're only just finishing the basic curriculum tree near the end of your senior year. That's too late to start doing independent projects with faculty, which are really the easiest way to both give you a better-looking resume and to find out what the graduate school experience is like.
I see this frequently with the students at the UofC, which actively encourages students to do nothing but general distro courses their first year. That said, I'm also a little jealous! By the time I took freshman physics as a senior, I was far too busy with research to care about anything more than a passing grade, and I probably missed out on some fun party tricks.
Students don't start taking specialized courses in their major until second year (they don't even have a major first year), when they take those alongside the required sophomore math and sophomore physics.