Interview Answer to Why you want to be a doctor

[shindotp]

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Exactly what difference does your "intent" and "goals" make to the people you help? The only difference the whole "helping at a personal level" makes is that it makes YOU feel better, which is ironically quite selfish.

Warren Buffet helped the world MUCH more than any practicing physician ever will. Sure his intent was to make money, but his investments and his company created jobs to millions of people (who would have alternatively ended up in worse jobs).

The effect is more important than the cause. Is Fleming's work less significant because he accidentally discovered penicillin instead of actively seeking it?

 

[airplanes]

Exactly what difference does your "intent" and "goals" make to the people you help? The only difference the whole "helping at a personal level" makes is that it makes YOU feel better, which is ironically quite selfish.

Warren Buffet helped the world MUCH more than any practicing physician ever will. Sure his intent was to make money, but his investments and his company created jobs to millions of people (who would have alternatively ended up in worse jobs).

The effect is more important than the cause. Is Fleming's work less significant because he accidentally discovered penicillin instead of actively seeking it?

How could you possibly know that?

What's sobering to me is the thought of an IMF economist having the power to change millions of lives, for better or worse.

 

[Retsage]

Exactly what difference does your "intent" and "goals" make to the people you help? The only difference the whole "helping at a personal level" makes is that it makes YOU feel better, which is ironically quite selfish.

Warren Buffet helped the world MUCH more than any practicing physician ever will. Sure his intent was to make money, but his investments and his company created jobs to millions of people (who would have alternatively ended up in worse jobs).

The effect is more important than the cause. Is Fleming's work less significant because he accidentally discovered penicillin instead of actively seeking it?

Warren Buffet's jobs provided money for a lot of people who then went on to use that money to drink excessively, become alcoholics, beat their children, and kill themselves. So Buffet did a lot of bad as well.

Preposterous, I agree. Likewise, Fuld of Lehman Brothers and Hank Paulson are not evil men, though their actions led to an acute amount of misery, home foreclosures, and probably social upheavals that will leave millions in the developing world dead.

We can not judge on the end-result alone. We can judge on that combined with the intent. Medicine is a career where compassion and wanting to help others is a necessity for being a worthwhile clinician. This is not true for most jobs. That's what differentiates the profession from most others. You need a certain level of idealism to want to pursue medicine. This doesn't exist in most other professions or jobs.

 

[2013 Hopeful]

At an interview, when I told them my reason for wanting to be a doc, he basically told me "thats what everyone says, you're going to need to come up with something better"... What a punk

 

[kingofthehill]

At an interview, when I told them my reason for wanting to be a doc, he basically told me "thats what everyone says, you're going to need to come up with something better"... What a punk

Yeah seriously this question is just ridiculous. There really aren't more than three or four big reasons one might want to become a doctor that I can think of, yet we're still expected to come up with a unique and fresh take on the matter. But whatever, I'm over it.

 

[majahops]

My answer to this question, when asked, was:

"I've given a great deal of thought to this question and each time I am able to bullet point out about 50 reasons before I stop and re-realize that the question I wonder is not 'why I want to be a doctor,' but 'why in the world I'd want to be anything else, knowing that the profession of physician exists'"

... It was both true and dramatic. I love when that happens.

 

[Jolie South]

Let's try to offer constructive advice and refrain from posting if that's not possible.

This thread will be closed if we can't get back on topic.

 

[Kaustikos]

^
Sex. Did that cause a fuse in your brain to blow? Poor thing.





3.5-5 years? Until your PI decides he can get a few more papers out of you and that goes to 5-7 years. And then it's part of the rat-race. Publish or die is the name of the game, both in your PhD and, if you do well enough there, your post-doc. Working for a pharmaceutical is no different. You discover something and do good research, you make money (though definitely not $80-120k starting, unless you're coming from a top, top, top-tier school). You have a bad stretch where nothing productive happens, and you get cut. Need to start looking somewhere else, and explaining why you had an unproductive few years. Could be career-ending, or maybe you'll get lucky and bounce back. Who knows?

That's the attractive feature of medicine. The salaries are high (on average, highest paid professional group), and the job security is there. A doctor is a doctor is a doctor. Unless you break the law, you will not lose your job. You may not work in your preferred locale or your preferred field, but you will still manage to bring home a solid $150-200k per year, no matter what. That simply doesn't exist in other fields.

Given the fact that you're not paying tuition in graduate school and making an annual stipend of 25-30k, I'd gladly work through it for 3-5 years. And, yes, I agree you can get caught in those dilemmas, but that doesn't happen to everyone. It happens to people that don't know what they want to do in graduate school or don't have any idea of hte reputation of the school they're applying to. Doing your homework and figuring out the statistics of each school is all that's required to figure out which schools are where you should be applying to.

And don't speak about pharmaceuticals, because you obviously have no clear insight into the field as evidecned by what you just said. If you're entering pharmaceuticals with a masters/phd and you're not starting at 80k, you FAIL. It's just like a physician starting out at a hospital for something under 100k, as you put it.

Anyways, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Job security aside, the salary of a physician isn't going ot be what it used to be. Stop assuming that the lifestyle of a physician is glamerous and still netting 150-200k every year with no decline (Not pointing to you Retsage).

But why medicine? Nurses

 

[Kaustikos]

We can not judge on the end-result alone. We can judge on that combined with the intent. Medicine is a career where compassion and wanting to help others is a necessity for being a worthwhile clinician. This is not true for most jobs. That's what differentiates the profession from most others. You need a certain level of idealism to want to pursue medicine. This doesn't exist in most other professions or jobs.

They exist, but the pay isn't nearly there. Suffice it to say, there are hundreds of thousands of "jobs" that people could do that require the compassion and level of idealism of medicine but don't pay you diddly.

 

[shindotp]

How could you possibly know that?

What's sobering to me is the thought of an IMF economist having the power to change millions of lives, for better or worse.

They chose their jobs for a reason: it was a better option for them than other jobs. Granted there are some who would have somehow ended up in better positions, but those would be in the minority. Overall, Warren Buffet did a huge favor to the US.

And again, yeah some people used the money they earned for "bad" (uhh I guess they could have used the money to beat their children... 😵), but there's a reason it's generally considered a GOOD thing when the economy is doing well. Because lives are overall better when the economy is doing well.

 

[DOquestions]

Warren Buffet's jobs provided money for a lot of people who then went on to use that money to drink excessively, become alcoholics, beat their children, and kill themselves. So Buffet did a lot of bad as well.

Preposterous, I agree. Likewise, Fuld of Lehman Brothers and Hank Paulson are not evil men, though their actions led to an acute amount of misery, home foreclosures, and probably social upheavals that will leave millions in the developing world dead.

We can not judge on the end-result alone. We can judge on that combined with the intent. Medicine is a career where compassion and wanting to help others is a necessity for being a worthwhile clinician. This is not true for most jobs. That's what differentiates the profession from most others. You need a certain level of idealism to want to pursue medicine. This doesn't exist in most other professions or jobs.

Boy are you going to be in for a rude awakening when reality hits.

Have fun treating all of those drug addict seekers you will be seeing your whole career.

Warren is one of the most respect persons in society. A hell of a lot more respected than your doctor ass will most likely ever be.

 

[eotaxin2000]

Hi everyone, I would just like to correct a statistical error I see in this forum whereby people are claiming that a PhD takes 3.5-5 years of graduate school. Wrong. As a PhD myself who knows hundreds of other recent PhDs the average is 5-7 years. In fact, I know of no PhD in the biological sciences, i.e. biochemistry, genetics, etc., who graduated in 3.5 years, only one who did it in 4 years, and even several who did it in 8 years and these were full time students. The Ph.D. is a freakin hard degree and the hardest thing I ever did. Do not be under any illusions. I should clarify that I did know some M.D./Ph.D. students who graduated with the PhD part of their degree in 3.5 years but that's because they let these types off a lot easier than a straight PhD. I just wanted to set the record straight so that people actually know the reality of what they would be putting themselves through if they chose the PhD route. I had 3 M.D./Ph.D. students in my lab and all 3 said the PhD part of the training was much harder. Not to put down the med students but the reasoning is that med school relies on shear volume of info and test-taking whereas a PhD relies on the more difficult area of innovating and discovering something new. It's much harder to make a discovery, especially several of importance than it is to regurgitate already known knowledge.

 

[eotaxin2000]

Hi everyone, I would just like to correct a statistical error I see in this forum whereby people are claiming that a PhD takes 3.5-5 years of graduate school. Wrong. As a PhD myself who knows hundreds of other recent PhDs the average is 5-7 years. In fact, I know of no PhD in the biological sciences, i.e. biochemistry, genetics, etc., who graduated in 3.5 years, only one who did it in 4 years, and even several who did it in 8 years and these were full time students. The Ph.D. is a freakin hard degree and the hardest thing I ever did. Do not be under any illusions. I should clarify that I did know some M.D./Ph.D. students who graduated with the PhD part of their degree in 3.5 years but that's because they let these types off a lot easier than a straight PhD. I just wanted to set the record straight so that people actually know the reality of what they would be putting themselves through if they chose the PhD route. I had 3 M.D./Ph.D. students in my lab and all 3 said the PhD part of the training was much harder. Not to put down the med students but the reasoning is that med school relies on shear volume of info and test-taking whereas a PhD relies on the more difficult area of innovating and discovering something new. It's much harder to make a discovery, especially several of importance than it is to regurgitate already known knowledge.

 

[eotaxin2000]

Hi everyone, I would just like to correct a statistical error I see in this forum whereby people are claiming that a PhD takes 3.5-5 years of graduate school. Wrong. As a PhD myself who knows hundreds of other recent PhDs the average is 5-7 years. In fact, I know of no PhD in the biological sciences, i.e. biochemistry, genetics, etc., who graduated in 3.5 years, only one who did it in 4 years, and even several who did it in 8 years and these were full time students. The Ph.D. is a freakin hard degree and the hardest thing I ever did. Do not be under any illusions. I should clarify that I did know some M.D./Ph.D. students who graduated with the PhD part of their degree in 3.5 years but that's because they let these types off a lot easier than a straight PhD. I just wanted to set the record straight so that people actually know the reality of what they would be putting themselves through if they chose the PhD route. I had 3 M.D./Ph.D. students in my lab and all 3 said the PhD part of the training was much harder. Not to put down the med students but the reasoning is that med school relies on shear volume of info and test-taking whereas a PhD relies on the more difficult area of innovating and discovering something new. It's much harder to make a discovery, especially several of importance than it is to regurgitate already known knowledge.

 

[eotaxin2000]

Hi everyone, I would just like to correct a statistical error I see in this forum whereby people are claiming that a PhD takes 3.5-5 years of graduate school. Wrong. As a PhD myself who knows hundreds of other recent PhDs the average is 5-7 years. In fact, I know of no PhD in the biological sciences, i.e. biochemistry, genetics, etc., who graduated in 3.5 years, only one who did it in 4 years, and even several who did it in 8 years and these were full time students. The Ph.D. is a freakin hard degree and the hardest thing I ever did. Do not be under any illusions. I should clarify that I did know some M.D./Ph.D. students who graduated with the PhD part of their degree in 3.5 years but that's because they let these types off a lot easier than a straight PhD. I just wanted to set the record straight so that people actually know the reality of what they would be putting themselves through if they chose the PhD route. I had 3 M.D./Ph.D. students in my lab and all 3 said the PhD part of the training was much harder. Not to put down the med students but the reasoning is that med school relies on shear volume of info and test-taking whereas a PhD relies on the more difficult area of innovating and discovering something new. It's much harder to make a discovery, especially several of importance than it is to regurgitate already known knowledge.

 

[binko]

If you want to make good money, become a garbage collector. I hear they get paid awesomely for working very short hours.

I want to become a doctor because I want to go on medical mission trips, particularly to Muslim countries where a male OB/GYN would be pretty useless due to women not being willing to discuss any private matters with or be seen without a headscarf by any male not directly related to them.

To put it more broadly for the adcoms, I'll probably talk about how I am a strong supporter of feminism but wanted to do something more "hands-on" (no pun intended) than becoming a professional activist like a lot of my peers at Oberlin chose to do. A lot of them are doing awesome things now with their paths such as getting a masters in nonprofit administration, but any nonprofit organization depends not only on good administration to keep it running, but also on the low-level (I use that term in the programming sense, not as a judgement of worth), hands-on participants to actually deliver the necessary services.

It has also been my dream for many years to travel to Palestine. I have considered things like Birthright Unplugged, but in the end you're still just a step above being a tourist of others' misery, being helpless to do anything other than try to learn from what you see and not be a bigot in general (which is probably a moot point already if you're willing to pay $300 plus airfare just to hang out with one of the world's poorest and most frustrated populations).

In short, being a physician confers immense power to actually DO something for people. I am sick of feeling powerless when I hear about people suffering, and I want some of this power for myself. I measure my worth as a person partly by how much of my resources I redirect into helping others. This doesn't include only financial resources, but also resources of intellect and enthusiasm. I seem to have been blessed with more, and more durable, idealism than most people I meet and I feel an obligation to follow that idealism as far as humanly possible.

I think the more I write about this the less comprehensible it becomes. Feel free to critique because I want to try to convey some of this in my PS and it doesn't really seem to be coming together, as you can see. 😎

 

[circulus vitios]

Exactly what difference does your "intent" and "goals" make to the people you help? The only difference the whole "helping at a personal level" makes is that it makes YOU feel better, which is ironically quite selfish.

How dare I live my life like I want to.

 

[circulus vitios]

If you want to make good money, become a garbage collector. I hear they get paid awesomely for working very short hours.

You've never actually seen a garbage man work, have you?

 

[BlueElmo]

I want to become a doctor so I can help people. Good enough?

 

[binko]

You've never actually seen a garbage man work, have you?

Funny story: when my brother was little (about 6 maybe) he was OBSESSED with the garbage collectors. He'd go sit by the curb next to the trash on trash day waiting for them to come so he could watch them. Being slightly older, I was sent along to sit with him and make sure he didn't run in traffic or something. One day, the garbage man looked at him and said "Hey kid, if you play your cards right, you could be doing this someday!" My brother was completely ecstatic.

Fin.

 

[shindotp]

How dare I live my life like I want to.

Go ahead and live like you want. Just don't act like you're doing someone else a favor for it.

 

[GH253]

the content....it's an amalgam of everything that i like