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Easy. You just lie on your residency hour logs and say you worked less than you did... like most surgical residents I know did.
For The People Going Into Medicine for the Money.
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Easy. You just lie on your residency hour logs and say you worked less than you did... like most surgical residents I know did.
While I agree you shouldn't go into medicine just to "become rich".
1) 200k is more than enough even with 6 digit loans. This really bothers me as someone who grew up a metropolitan city who's parents made below the middle class and I grew up just fine with everything I needed. Unless you absolutely don't want a mortgage and you plan on being the only income in your family. If you live like a resident for 1-2 years after residency, you'll be more than comfortable for the rest of your career.
2) I'm not in peds, but pediatricians don't start at 150k-160k. Pediatrics is a predominantly a female specialty and a lot of those females work 3-4 days to care for their kids, hence the skewed average.
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Ok that's fine. But comfortable life does not equal lucrative or rich which was the point of contention. And that guy above me seems to think there are no other worthwhile careers that someone can go into to make a decent paycheck besides medicine as you can see from his earlier posts. I find this tunnel vision frustrating and shows a lack of insight into how many varied and good paying careers there are for high achieving people besides medicine.
if you're going in medicine for the money, it's worth it cause of all the secondary benefits on top of the money. The problem is it's tough to go through the whole process with a money mindset, with the late gratification, MCAT/GPA/step, and additional schooling you have to do.
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You’re imagination would run wild in Eastern WA, North Idaho, western Montana. Literally 30% of the cars on the road are big ass trucks.
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What happens to the resident if they refuse to lie on official hours documentation? I feel like I would be that guy.
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Then your program gets put on probation and then everyone is pissed. You're not gonna be that guy. It's pretty much an unwritten rule that you will exceed official hours at times in residency. Especially with documentation and charting that takes place sometimes at home. There are some places that residents exceed work hour restrictions pretty regularly but they are still happier overall then at programs where the residents don't work as much. Go figure.
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But doesn’t the program deserve to be put on probation if they require residents to work more than they legally can? That is literally the reason we have labor laws...
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You don't get it dude. Basically what would happen is that you would just get yelled at for being too slow if you refused to lie on official hours documentation. The program would claim that they adhere to work hour restrictions but you would just get blamed for being inefficient with your time. So most likely you would just get blamed for incompetence instead of the program which is why people just say they are under the hours even if they aren't. A certain amount of work needs to be done and patients always come first-- you're not just gonna leave the hospital because you worked too many hours that day/week if there are people to take care of. Same with attendings-- saw an ER doc stay like 2 hours past his shift once at 3 am to help because the ER was swamped. He wasn't getting paid for that time. He should have been home but he felt bad for the staff. It's not their fault the ER was understaffed, etc. No one just walks out on their team or their patients because of some arbitrary number. That isn't how the real world works or how human beings work. In surgery you often times need to stay late because you need X amount of procedures and surgeries to graduate or be competent in and sometimes those specific cases you need signed off on don't fall on a M-F 9-5 lol. Cmon man.
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Chronically understaffed healthcare setting as an attending =\= encouraging a system that relies upon students as slaves who have literally no leverage
The difference is that an attending can choose to leave their job and has that to fall back on. A resident has nothing to fall back on. Programs should design their practices around meeting guidelines and regulations, not design how they listen to those guidelines and regulations based on their practices.
I totally understand it is not a 9-5, patients are sick whether you are there or not, and there is still always more charting or complications etc. But if the system can rely on attendings, who have the most respective authority and responsibility, to take care of all of these patients on 45-55 hours per week, then what benefit is there to having someone who literally has no say in the matter being forced to work 90? I totally understand I am naive to the ‘what it means to be in the system’ notion, but even from an outsider perspective...that comes off as forced labor and borderline slavery.
This all may just be because I literally JUST read this article a few days ago:
But still...I would love to see a productive counter argument beyond “that’s just the way it is” when study after study shows that patient prognosis does not go down when residents work under 80 hours and neither do clinical skills...
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So many of our healthcare institutions are run from a corporate rather than healthcare mindset. Almost every place I shadowed or worked in clinically was understaffed in some way, with the administration trading employee well-being for fatter financial margins. Look at entry-level turnover: when I was a CNA, I semi-regularly broke 80 hours a week as well, as did many of my co-workers because the schedulers just couldn't staff the floors. The difference is that CNAs have almost no reason to maintain employer loyalty, and so unlike residents they had the option to leave. And they did too. Employee turnover rate was around 10% a month.
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If anyone in their right mind would go through the hell of medical training and not have money as part of the goal (part of) then they are crazy. Its one of the things that keeps me going through the misery of non stop studying. Like heck im grinding 24/7 and have zero life rn but in the end my investment will be rewarded with saving lives and a high income (youre pretty much guaranteed to find a job as a doctor no matter what specialty somewhere for 225K+). That is a lot more than most would make 10 years after undergrad and not going to med school. You think med students would put themselves through hell to make 100K per year? Id bet not many would. Money is a factor it just isnt the only factor. In the end the job security of a physician is one of the highest of any profession out there.
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@mcat_taker High achieving people are not guaranteed varied and good paying careers. A law student who attended a t-14 law school is not guaranteed to a job at big law and even if they do get placement will have to run a rat race for partnership track at big law firm. This means that their competition is often against other promising t-14 grads for one coveted partnership position. The worst part about not making partnership isn't that your competitor got the spot or that they are still keeping the position as a metaphorical carrot on the stick. It is that your replacement is a young, fresh, new-grad from a T-14 law school who has a fresh pair of legs and is waiting at the starting line.
Notably, this analogy is flawed in the sense that big law is a zero-sum game. There are alternative considerations to this. If you are a rainmaker and can bring in new accounts and new business creating your own ledger then you are guaranteed a position, if they are foolish enough not to offer a partnership then they will literally be losing money on the table that they didn't work for in order to secure. However, such individuals are the exception to the rule rather than the rule itself. Most people are locked in a zero-sum arrangement when it comes to climbing a big law institution for big law monies.
In financial sectors, a similar principle applies with desks being responsible for specific investments such as options, swaps, futures, CDOs, or other forms of derivatives (Khan Academy has an interesting series on this). However, at banks like Goldman these desks are tenuous based on whether they are generating income. If the flow isn't coming, then these desks are downsized to single digit staffers and then canned if the added value is nebulous (Why I Left Goldman Sachs). This type of management is what often drives financial greed and manipulation within the market as having too much financial surplus is never a bad thing, but driving a deficit is most certainly a very bad thing.
Lastly, another sector that often gets talked about on SDN is tech with respect to programming. Gaming companies like Activision Blizzard and Midway Games - Warner Bros have recently become scrutinized and criticized for crunch by overworking their employees at 60 to 70 hour work weeks for months (non-compensated overtime) in order to deliver a finished product by the assigned deadline. However, this is a very real thing when any team is expected to deliver a finalized product and QA finds bugs or simply put the product is not ready for publication. If a team isn't able to materialize on the product they've been working on for months then there is a strong likelihood it dissolved. Sometimes team members are absorbed into other teams, however this occurs at companies like Facebook with such high friction that anecdotally it is entirely possible to be forced to transfer to four different teams in the span of six to eight months. Each transfer forces the software developer to have to be adaptable and fit the role in the team that is needed, but reported work culture currently at Facebook has been reported to be so vicious (Team Blind) that it's more of a writing on the wall once you begin to get tossed around that you are going to find yourself tossed out sooner rather than later.
The golden goose for these varied and good paying careers is the same direction as the initial premise of this thread... it's money and value generation. The lawyer who can be a rainmaker, the financial desks or analysts who can produce winners, and the programmers who can design in-house code (rather than paying licensure fees to use an outside party's code) or an app that can be utilized (added user functionality and potential for monetization). Being able to be creative and generate income from places that have yet to be explored is not a concept that has to be tied down to a profession, but these conversations often devolve into X occupation makes Y salary, but medicine is bad because of Z debt. There is something wrong with a physician who can't use a $200,000 income to make appropriate wealth investments so they no longer have to work as a physician twenty years down the road in order to still make a living. Medicine enjoys the benefit that sick people are going to end up in the hospital and physicians don't have to worry about securing their clientele. The "eat-what-you-kill" model is a large non-consideration factor and it plays into one of a multitude of factors as to why someone who is intelligent enough to become a physician would not have necessarily made any ground in any other job sector that requires you to have an innate business sense when it comes to professional standards of practice.
That being said, medicine is a stable career, but it's not as stable as being your own boss with full control over stable investments. I wouldn't expect any physician in their 60s or 70s to enjoy treating an IVDU/CIWA/stroke frequent flyer who presents with the same symptoms because they can't kick their substance abuse habit. Burnout is particular high for physicians who are forced to be face-to-face with such encounters as the norm rather than the exception. I think that House of God written by Stephen Bergman is representative of how an asset can be created from a profound sense of misery. Bergman could have likely quit medicine based on profits from his novel, but he genuinely enjoys the writing process. A lot of people are quick to discount the idea that such a novel is a classic and could never be replicated, but at some point I'm curious when such people realize that their life can have purpose and that they aren't stuck doing residency in Man's 4th best hospital.
Notably, this analogy is flawed in the sense that big law is a zero-sum game. There are alternative considerations to this. If you are a rainmaker and can bring in new accounts and new business creating your own ledger then you are guaranteed a position, if they are foolish enough not to offer a partnership then they will literally be losing money on the table that they didn't work for in order to secure. However, such individuals are the exception to the rule rather than the rule itself. Most people are locked in a zero-sum arrangement when it comes to climbing a big law institution for big law monies.
In financial sectors, a similar principle applies with desks being responsible for specific investments such as options, swaps, futures, CDOs, or other forms of derivatives (Khan Academy has an interesting series on this). However, at banks like Goldman these desks are tenuous based on whether they are generating income. If the flow isn't coming, then these desks are downsized to single digit staffers and then canned if the added value is nebulous (Why I Left Goldman Sachs). This type of management is what often drives financial greed and manipulation within the market as having too much financial surplus is never a bad thing, but driving a deficit is most certainly a very bad thing.
Lastly, another sector that often gets talked about on SDN is tech with respect to programming. Gaming companies like Activision Blizzard and Midway Games - Warner Bros have recently become scrutinized and criticized for crunch by overworking their employees at 60 to 70 hour work weeks for months (non-compensated overtime) in order to deliver a finished product by the assigned deadline. However, this is a very real thing when any team is expected to deliver a finalized product and QA finds bugs or simply put the product is not ready for publication. If a team isn't able to materialize on the product they've been working on for months then there is a strong likelihood it dissolved. Sometimes team members are absorbed into other teams, however this occurs at companies like Facebook with such high friction that anecdotally it is entirely possible to be forced to transfer to four different teams in the span of six to eight months. Each transfer forces the software developer to have to be adaptable and fit the role in the team that is needed, but reported work culture currently at Facebook has been reported to be so vicious (Team Blind) that it's more of a writing on the wall once you begin to get tossed around that you are going to find yourself tossed out sooner rather than later.
The golden goose for these varied and good paying careers is the same direction as the initial premise of this thread... it's money and value generation. The lawyer who can be a rainmaker, the financial desks or analysts who can produce winners, and the programmers who can design in-house code (rather than paying licensure fees to use an outside party's code) or an app that can be utilized (added user functionality and potential for monetization). Being able to be creative and generate income from places that have yet to be explored is not a concept that has to be tied down to a profession, but these conversations often devolve into X occupation makes Y salary, but medicine is bad because of Z debt. There is something wrong with a physician who can't use a $200,000 income to make appropriate wealth investments so they no longer have to work as a physician twenty years down the road in order to still make a living. Medicine enjoys the benefit that sick people are going to end up in the hospital and physicians don't have to worry about securing their clientele. The "eat-what-you-kill" model is a large non-consideration factor and it plays into one of a multitude of factors as to why someone who is intelligent enough to become a physician would not have necessarily made any ground in any other job sector that requires you to have an innate business sense when it comes to professional standards of practice.
That being said, medicine is a stable career, but it's not as stable as being your own boss with full control over stable investments. I wouldn't expect any physician in their 60s or 70s to enjoy treating an IVDU/CIWA/stroke frequent flyer who presents with the same symptoms because they can't kick their substance abuse habit. Burnout is particular high for physicians who are forced to be face-to-face with such encounters as the norm rather than the exception. I think that House of God written by Stephen Bergman is representative of how an asset can be created from a profound sense of misery. Bergman could have likely quit medicine based on profits from his novel, but he genuinely enjoys the writing process. A lot of people are quick to discount the idea that such a novel is a classic and could never be replicated, but at some point I'm curious when such people realize that their life can have purpose and that they aren't stuck doing residency in Man's 4th best hospital.
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Most attendings work 50-60 hours a week according to the AMA. That’s where the problem is I think. Patients have to be seen. Working 90 hours for 3-7 years is more doable than working 70 for the rest of your life IMO. I’m just not sure what a better option is... there are just too many sick people in this country
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Post 115 by Select All That Apply is absolutely spot on. Every time I see someone post on SDN that he or she could have gone into investment banking as an alternative to medicine, I laugh out loud. I Banking is not a career like school administration. It's a knife fight.
The practice of law is a soul crushing experience. When I was a lawyer my skin crawled. It's awful. You are surrounded by sociopaths.
If you like the subject matter of medicine and you get into medical school, take the deal even though the hours are long and the tuition is a rip off.. The grass is brown on the other side.
The practice of law is a soul crushing experience. When I was a lawyer my skin crawled. It's awful. You are surrounded by sociopaths.
If you like the subject matter of medicine and you get into medical school, take the deal even though the hours are long and the tuition is a rip off.. The grass is brown on the other side.
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Good to have people with experience in the other fields people always say are so lucrative on this thread. Would you not recommend law to someone - who could go to law school - if they were only in it for the money though? Do you find the pay:hrs:education-investment better in medicine?
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Generally, I would only recommend law school to someone who can get into a top 50 law school, get merit aid and have some undergraduate degree like engineering, nursing, accounting or computer science to make the future lawyer more attractive in a niche legal market. It might be wise to go to a law school in the 51-100 range if substantial merit aid is offered, the student is absolutely compelled to go out of intellectual curiosity and the student has sound reasons to believe that it could help in a non legal career. If the best someone can do is some expensive 100-200 level school, forget it.
There are about 15,000 decent law jobs (i.e. where the young lawyer acquires salable skills and has a shot at making money long term) for new graduates every year and there were 38,000 people who entered law school in the fall of 2018. In fact the situation is so bad the administration at some law schools have published phony employment figures.
"The US News Ranking Effect," an excerpt from Failing Law Schools
At the University of Illinois law school, a first tier school currently ranked 41st, admissions data were falsified for six years to make the school look better:
U of Illinois Law School Admits To Six Years of False LSAT/GPA Data
The ABA Journal is read by half of the nation's 1 million lawyers every month. It covers the trends, people and finances of the legal profession from Wall Street to Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.
www.abajournal.com
I will repeat myself. The training in medicine is expensive and arduous. However, if you want and can do it, it's a much better path than law school.
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Very interesting points and thanks for the response. Although there is still some eat what you kill mentality even in medicine. At the end of the day your employers feel pressure to justify your salary and you need to generate revenue as a physician for them. I saw this time and again on my FM rotation where primary care doctors squeeze patients into 15 minute appointment blocks because they need to see X amount of patients to justify what they are being paid as part of their contract. This results in harried visits, stress, and anger especially when patients show up late and then everyone is behind schedule. You bill for everything you do. You need to justify what you are being paid whether that is in clinic or in the hospital.
Agreed though with your point that "someone intelligent enough to become a physician would not have necessarily made ground in any other solid job sector" because by and large most medical students are well suited to being good medical doctors but not for much else that would generate that sort of income. Yes an intelligent and creative person can make a lot of money by having good ideas and generating value in LOTS of different sectors. It's not a zero sum game between law, engineering, medicine, and investment baking. However lots of the medical students I interact with on a day to day basis are wonderful smart caring people but have neither the creativity, or the quantitative skills to make inroads in those fields, or really any business sense at all. There's a reason they say doctors are terrible with their money. It's probably because they were in school for half their life. Hell I would bet 90% of my class probably has no idea how taxes are paid or how the stock market works or about anything going on in the world outside of the hospital bubble.
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Yes, there was an article recently I forget if in WSJ or NYT that talked about how doctors are easily taken advantage of because they will work long hours without equivalent compensation because of a moral obligation to their patients. This is not seen in other fields. Many employers, when assessing their margins and trying to stay profitable will take advantage of this by for example hiring fewer doctors because they expect this guilt to an extent.
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Except hospitals do rely on those long hours to function. The residents are there in house 24/7 and the attending aren't. And there are arguments that the more handovers that occurs the more medical errors there are. It depends who you ask-- I've talked to older surgeons that trained before work hour restrictions existed and they believe that they came out superiorly trained because they had those hours. At the end of the day no one wants to prolong residency yet there are certain skills and expectations that need to be met. In surgery there are lots of programs that are graduating residents that just don't have the skills when they graduate. OB is an example I can think of right now-- It is a real issue that OB residents are graduating with poorer surgical skills in lots of programs. Some of that is due to fewer of certain procedures being done like vag hysterectomies. But the volume just isn't there in basic stuff you would have had no issues with in the past like lap hysts, open hysts. I had an attending told me she graduated with like 80 vag hysts and now most residencies require like 13 minimum to be met. This is just one example and a lot of that is associated with work hour restrictions.
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So to be honest, I have experienced this as a medical scribe when it came to charting billing. Anyone who works at Scribe America knows the last lecture on how to chart at a Level 5 versus a Level 4 for hospital reimbursement and how it's important for you to support the clinician who you are tagging on along for in their service. Also RVU incentives (positive reinforcement) and visits from HR (disincentives) are things that happen in health networks in order to maximize the almighty dollar. People similarly working in the OR know that at the end of a procedure, everything used during the procedure that was used gets accounted for in order to ensure appropriate reimbursement. There is no real method of completely abstracting monetary considerations from hospital healthcare, however physicians who work in major hospital networks don't need to worry about keeping a rolodex, taking their clients out drinking, or performing a lot of other social functions in order to keep one foot in the game at all times.
Let's say that you are in a toxic FM work environment where you are being pushed to your limits. If you can grind out a decent amount of time your current practice and hunt for other job offers, then there is no need for you to drastically reinvent yourself. Looking for shop though in some of the other fields that pay out at $200,000 requires a bit more investment. For instance, if you are looking to transition into another career at FAANG (due to including Apple in this example) then your skill set in Javascript/PHP full stack development may not be what these companies are currently hiring for at the moment. If I'm not mistaken, companies like Apple were using objective-C for app development, but transitioned into relying more on Swift for app development within the past year. This means that if you're looking for the next rung on the ladder as a programmer, you have to show that you can be flexible and relevant. The best way to show this is usually keeping a github account to show that you are working on the newest language and are actually thinking two steps ahead at how to integrate something in Swift into Apple's current software ecosystem. On the other hand, looking at a company like Google would be looking for something similar in a potential hire, but perhaps with Golang. Again these are just considerations to get introductory interviews. If you're looking for another shop as an FM doc, then all this upfront work is usually not necessary. There is no need to review B&B or type a dissertation on what FM means to you and even then I would argue that these requirements are far less than what is required to transition to another career within tech.
I type this as an N=1 example because there were no other pre-meds in my CS 101 or 102 classes for Introduction to Java and Data Structures respectively. I will also share that as someone with no programming experience before CS 101, that it was arguably one of the hardest classes I had ever taken and as an introduction course was even more difficult to me than Biochemistry. I will also type that it was one of the greatest life challenges as I barely passed both classes by the skin of my teeth. I don't associate premeds with having a lack of versatile skill set to a deficit within the premeds themselves, but due to the nature of the educational system. Premeds who are successful as medical students realize that the curriculum and the credits they take are fundamentally a game of optimization where if they can spent the least amount of time to get the best grades, then they will be better off when it comes to application. This often rules out experimentation and trying out different courses for the hell of it. Taking that biostatistics class instead of taking Calculus 2 if you are weak in conceptual mathematics is the right decision and shows highl self awareness as well as respect for the game, but at the same time you can't construct a reality in which you went on to become an engineer and made lots of money.
I similarly think that working in the healthcare field is a heavy taxation on the mind and a burden on the body. There is immensely high liability and currently we face a patient population that that comes in with polytrauma, polysusbstance abuse, multiple system failure, and always with a significant psychiatric history to top the cake. In the most sincere way possible, this is one of the hardest times to be a physician. I understand that there were a myriad of complex issues that faced healthcare workers in the past, but failing to admit that this is one of the most socially complex and nuanced times to be a clinician and achieve patient satisfaction while providing consistent medical care is doing the current generation of physicians a huge disservice. Thinking about side-hustling, buying out properties, or applying for an S Corp all take a second seat to self-care and maintaining a healthy mental state to survive the slog of another shift. It only takes one mistake in the eyes of a patient to end up in a malpractice suit which will emotionally add another layer of burden. The complexity of the work itself can be seen as rewarding, but it can also detract from being in a state of mind that is required to make investments with aforementioned money.
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I actually did not know that specific figure. I think that this sum could be better distributed.
Going to grad school is actually cheap - when you're comparing it to going to med school. It's only costly if you're including opportunity costs, which is not typically done in standard accounting. You get a stipend for going to grad school and while it's not a whole lot, it's enough to cover cost of living at least. Not saying you're going to be eating out every week and going to Broadway shows, but it's enough.
That first sentence is not true on multiple counts. First, PhD students don't get master's degrees beforehand. You do get a "complimentary" master's after you pass qualifying exams but once people find out that it's because you didn't finish your PhD, it's useless. And it's a very small field. You can't really capitalize on that master's. Second, you should not be doing several post-doc fellowships. Perhaps this is true in biology or in another field but I know for a fact it's not true in chemistry and really shouldn't be true in other fields. If you think about the purpose of a post-doc fellowship in the first place, it doesn't make much sense to do multiple.
CidHighwind
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Who told you grad school is cheap? They only pay you for PhDs in STEM fields, everyone else (including lawyers and MBAs) have to pay for theirs, and tuition at the “good ones” is 50k+. Also you’d be surprised at the number of people doing multiple post docs to get hired for a tenured track.
Uhh, personal experience of going through grad school? When normal people say "grad school" they mean schools leading to awarding of the PhD. I'm not sure how PhDs in non-STEM fields work but I believe they are also funded positions. JD and MBA programs are what people typically call "professional" schools, as is med school. Professional schools obviously are not funded.
Maybe multiple post-docs for a tenure-track position at a prestigious university. What's important for post-doc fellowships is to 1) show that you are productive and 2) secure grant money. Doing multiple post-docs doesn't help you if you're not productive and/or can't secure money. Doing a single post-doc where you're productive and working for the right person can secure you a job in chemistry. Where that job is will depend on the impact of your work.
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Person with a humanities PhD and Master's degree here: when people say grad school, and when universities refer to graduate programs, they are referring to Master's and Doctoral work. For example, most people call their time as a Master's student being a "grad student" whereas my colleagues and I usually called ourselves "doctoral students" during our PhD work.
Master's degrees are always unfunded, though some programs have generous scholarships, and MANY, MANY fields require Master's degrees before PhD work. Yes, you end up earning another MA (and an MPhil after comprehensive exams at many schools), but the advanced course work of a Master's is still necessary for all PhD programs in my field and in many other humanities fields.
Multiple post-docs is also a norm in the humanities where tenure track positions are incredibly hard to come by. It's pretty typical for most humanities PhDs to do 1-3 post-docs before bouncing around adjunct positions for 5-10 years before coming anywhere close to even a backdoor tenure track.
So no, grad school isn't "cheap" for most people. My Master's program cost $45k a year plus living expenses, all of which bought me a ticket to a PhD program that rewarded me with a stipend of basically minimum wage. While STEM fields often work very differently, the majority of academia isn't STEM.
CidHighwind
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I love how condescending that person was being, then you drop this huge truth bomb and they scatter into the abyss.
In the sciences, we called ourselves graduate students on the PhD track. My PhD institution didn't have a huge number of science students doing just a master's. However, we never heard the professional school students refer to themselves as "grad students." Law students called themselves "law students." Med students called themselves "med students." Now that I'm a med student, I also call myself a med student. I don't call myself a grad student. This was the issue with the poster I was responding to.
Interesting that master's degrees are pre-reqs for PhD in the humanities. Not so in the sciences where my PhD is in.
Which leads to my next point, which is that while grad school isn't "cheap" for humanities students, it is funded for science students because most of us are getting PhDs and not master's as terminal degrees. The stipend was around $30k when I started grad school. That was enough to scrape by where I was. You weren't making money but you weren't shelling out $45k a year either. Differences between STEM and non-STEM are well taken.
Although the "majority" of academia isn't STEM, we're talking about going to grad school. As you can see yourself from the data (https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17306/static/report/nsf17306.pdf), STEM fields make up the majority of doctoral degrees awarded. Given, this doesn't account for master's degrees, but you would have to invoke quiet the imbalance in master's programs to make the case that the majority of grad students aren't STEM students.
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Have you considered the alternative dx of some people having many commitments that don't involve constantly being on SDN?
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deleted936268
This is interesting wonder what people think 3 years later
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Threads like this come up all the time.
As long as there are lifestyle-friendly, high income specialties with humane training, medicine for the money can still make sense.
Might not make sense if you end up in peds, PCP, or hospitalist work. Might not be worth it for the surgeon/proceduralist lifestyles. But if you're going after something like ROAD specialties, it's very hard to beat. You work reasonable hours as a resident and starting in your early 30s you can make 400k+ with a secure, ethical, interesting job.
Comp sci and finance hopefuls, even from t20 colleges, are not guaranteed anything remotely close to that package.
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GI too 500K-1M+ but you have to go through three years of IM. Allergy as well ~350-450K+ with an amazing lifestyle but also have to go through IM.
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Very much seconding this. As a mediocre comp sci grad, it would take me many many years to reach 200k, and I highly doubt I could exceed that very much. Not to mention the inherent risks of becoming not desirable for hire past a certain age, it just wasn't a workplace I wanted to enter.
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Most CS grads are not making anywhere near 200k. It is possible if you work for amazon, microsoft, google, etc. but those positions are very competitive. I recently graduated from a flagship state school and I'd say most of my CS peers are making somewhere in the 70-100k range.
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Although I agree that pursuing medicine solely for the money (and for no other reason) catapults one down an ethical rabbit hole, it's not necessarily the worst financial move if one plays their cards right. Minimal/no debt in ortho/derm/plastics/nsgy is a much different ballgame than 500K debt in say, peds infectious disease at an academic center in an HCOL area. 'Grass is greener' tech argument works in the latter case, but certainly not in the former. As an aside, I think money is a bit too stigmatized in our profession. Money is an important consideration in choosing any career, and medicine is no exception. When it becomes the ONLY consideration is when it becomes an issue. I imagine all of us went into this profession knowing & expecting that there would be financial rewards for what we go through, but there are also several other factors (job satisfaction & genuine interest among others) that also needed to have been addressed to seal the deal. Working resident hours in ibanking after a few years can net you 5x, even 10x what the highest paying specialties do. Would never do it even if I were fast-tracked to managing director with no debt because it is simply uninteresting.
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Can’t you go through peds for allergy as well?
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You can! Which is actually a hack because AI is unique in that once you are boarded in AI you are trained to see adults and kids regardless of whether you did IM or peds. So for those who are dead set on AI id probably go Peds lmao the residence training is a little less grueling imo. Also coming out of a peds residency you can almost double your income by doing an Allergy fellowship which is only an extra 2 years
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Medicine also isn’t cyclical for the most part. I was watching an interview with the president of Evercore (investment bank) and he said that deal flow was already starting to slow (due to the recent increase in volatility). If this remains true, current bankers will get terrible bonuses and may even get fired depending upon how bad things get.
