I wouldn't take it to heart because the ones giving bad/mean/negative advice often don't know what they are talking about. My first thread here, everyone bashed me when I did absolutely nothing wrong. Stating how they hated my choice of schools, when hey, I liked the curriculum and the standards to become licensed are set by a professional. I didn't set the standards, so if you don't like the program or how someone else does things, that's not their problem lol.
Things change, and the entire education game is changing rapidly. This is a good thing, since education was limited to just upper middle class before, but it does mean more competition. Those who are already established and practicing in their field (often the ones giving advice here), are EXTREMELY threatened by the future competition so they try to bully away newbies with questions. That's what I've noticed here. I thought this would be a good forum for advice, but its really clear that a good 25% of the forum are people who are unhappy with their jobs (less $$$) or unhappy with future competition entering their industry, so they try to scare them away (which doesn't work). Ironically, all it does is push their future competition to work harder lol.
You have to remember that these people giving advice on this forum are NOT the ones who make decisions about who is let into programs circa 2014+ (things were very different even just 5 years ago), and these people are NOT the ones making future business decisions for yourself (you will likely be self-employed). So take everything they say with a grain of salt because they really aren't the best people to seek advice from. They likely entered their/your industry pre-recession and pre-social media (which was JUST 5 years ago), when the job market was massively different.
There are a lot of helpful people though! I lurked for years before I joined. A lot of the good advice seems to be in posts that are years old now though.
As kras said, maybe what you're saying is true of the Psych forum. I'm not a regular reader of that forum, nor am I a psychologist, so I don't know the ins and outs of their training system. But for sure what you're saying is *not* true of this board, nor of the other medicine-oriented forums.
First off, my hospital is hiring, and I already feel grossly overworked after being here just two weeks. So if you want to go to med school, complete a residency, and take some of my shifts so that I can have more time off, not only will I *not* feel threatened by you, I'll even forward your CV to the right people and do what I can to help roll out the red carpet for you. At this point, I value my time more than I value earning even more money.
Speaking of which, I'm not unhappy with my salary, not by any stretch of the imagination, especially if we include my benefits, and especially since I get paid overtime and extra for working nights, which is making me seriously consider becoming a nocturnist (where I only work nights). If I were in private practice, I could make up to 50% more than I'm making as an academic physician. But I digress.
Third, if you're a premed, the people who are ahead of you here are indeed some of the very people who will be making admissions decisions for you. I have four years of adcom experience. I'm currently a new assistant prof at a university with a med school, and I may well end up serving on the adcom again at some point.
Finally, nor, if you go into medicine, are you likely to be self-employed. I am a salaried employee of the university and the state of Florida. In private practice, many of my colleagues are either hospital employees or work for large corporations that have contracts to staff hospitals or clinics. These models are becoming more common for physicians, not less. The days of the self-employed GP who has his own office are numbered.
I'm sorry if you've had an unpleasant experience on one of our forums, but I do feel it's important to point out for the sake of other noobs/premeds that what you're saying here is not the case when it comes to medicine.
