Need advice- help!!!!

[medskoolmathguy]

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Ok- so here is my dilemma. I am 28 years old. I have a wife and a 1.5 year old daughter. I currently work in the accounting field, in a stable position with prospects of moving up where I am at. I have been 2 years in this field after spending 4 years in civil engineering until I got tired of it. I received a bachelor’s degree in math from a CA school in 2005.

Given these circumstances, I am at a crossroads. I will be 30 in a couple of years but cannot see myself doing accounting for a very long time. I consider myself a very smart person ( I was the valedictorian of my high school class) and think I can do some more challenging that can help more people other than the number crunching I do with accounting.

I would like to either go to grad school to get my phd in math/physics or pursue medical school. With the amount of work needed and the job prospects I would see as a physics phd, I am afraid that I will be so much in debt and have missed out on my daughter’s upbringing and be making what I make now to start off as a professor 5 years down the line and $100k in debt!

Whenever I interact with somebody personally and are able to help them, I feel a total sense of reward. This is what has attracted me to the medical field, because I feel that there is no other profession that lets you do what a doctor does on a daily basis. Plus, although its not the most important thing, I’ll know that the loans and the amounts of studying will result in a good financia reward as a doctor.

If I do physics/math, I feel that there will be no personal connection and although I will like the number crunching/analytical part of my job, I will be lacking the most important thing which are the personal connections that a doctor has with his/her patients.

So what does everybody think? Should I stay in accounting even though I know I won’t be doing it for long, or should I pursue physics or medicine now while I am still young and 4 years out of college?


THANKS!!!!

 

[bellakk]

I would like to either go to grad school to get my phd in math/physics or pursue medical school. With the amount of work needed and the job prospects I would see as a physics phd, I am afraid that I will be so much in debt and have missed out on my daughter’s upbringing and be making what I make now to start off as a professor 5 years down the line and $100k in debt!

1) you do understand that as a med student and resident you will miss out on even more of your daughter's upbringing that you would as a phd student? you will also probably have more than 100K in debt depending on where you go to med school

2) career changes dont look so hot on med school apps. You knew you wanted to be a civil engineer and then changed your mind. You knew you wanted to be an accountant and then changed your mind. How do you know half way through med school you wont change your mind? Even if you didn't "know" you wanted to be an engineer/accountant, it still looks bad that you got the job even though you werent planning on sticking with it.

I dont mean to sound harsh, but admission committees will ask these questions.

That being said, if you really want to be a doctor, go for it. Seems like you are just looking for justification, but no one can make that call but you.

You have along, time consuming, diffucult and expensive journey ahead of you, but better to start the quest now at 28 then when you're 35!

 

[clausewitz2]

Physicsguy would be even better as a responder to this, but some points to keep in mind about grad school:

1) For crunchy fields like math/physics, you do not pay tuition, and they pay you a stipend (usually dependent on being a research or teaching assistant). In most science and math programs, if they cannot fund you, they will not admit you. This stipend is not very much money (somewhere between 18 and 30,000 dollars a year), but it beats the hell out of having to pay for grad school.

2)Oh, and if any grad program is willing to admit you on a tuition-paying basis, don't do it. It's a trap. a Ph.D. is not like an M.D. in the sense that if you don't f*ck up your MD and manage to overcome the obstacles in your way, you will probably end up employed and making a reasonable amount of money. There is no guarantee whatsoever that you will find any academic job with a Ph.D., let alone a tenure-track position. This is becoming especially true as the federal stimulus money starts to dry up and universities cut back on searches. Maybe the situation will be different in 5-6 years, but don't count on it.

3) I understand the wanting to have personal contacts that are meaningful, but don't underestimate the value you can derive from having intense conversations every day with very intelligent people. While I know that there are plenty of brilliant people in medicine, I get the impression that the culture is very different (apart from academic medicine, obviously).

4) Double-agree with bellak. Being a graduate student gives you much more flexible hours. As long as work gets done, it often doesn't matter when it gets done. So you can take your kids to their thing in the late afternoon or morning, so long as you're willing to go back to the lab afterwards and finish running whatever experiment you're doing/ stay up later than normal working on your proof or what have you.

 

[J ROD]

Honestly, I think you are not ready to decide to be a MD. You are still here and there. Think it over more and shadow maybe. I think MD now would be a career change down the road again.....you sound more like the PhD to me. I think you like the idea of MD more than the lifestyle of MD. Lastly, I am a little older than you and can say that now is the time to make that "final" career decision so that you can work that 30-35yrs in the profession and build retirement, etc.

 

[clausewitz2]

Yeah, to further expand on J DUB's point, you will likely be better served as a Ph.D. One of the great things about the academic career path is that once you finish whatever coursework your doctoral program requires, you basically end up only working on stuff that you find interesting. And if after five or six years of doing your Ph.D. you decide you don't like the field you picked, then you get a postdoc in a field you find more interesting and make a lateral move.

This seems to be particularly easy for physics types, since they can bring mad quantitative skills to other disciplines. A little harder moving up the matho-crunch gradient, as it were. That may suit you better - not everyone is really all about picking a narrow little thing and doing it forever. Being a professor lets you have intellectual ADD.

 

[dotdash]

You sound a bit as if you are casting around for what to do next. The best advice I ever heard was "don't get a PhD unless you cannot live without studying [your field]" It's a long, hard slog and you will not be successful unless it's something you absolutely love.

You don't have to go to grad school to find something that will challenge and fulfill you, but you do have to know yourself. There are some great career counselors out there (and DIYers like What color is your parachute). You have skills that should transfer to many jobs and I bet you can move in the direction of the perfect job for you if you can just figure out what that is.