I have plenty of friends that make well over 100k per year as bankers, and many more that are engineers making 60k per year with a BS. My friends from my master's program are making 70-80 k/year but you know what? Those jobs like banking, consulting, engineering etc. would bore me to death and they will wake up in 15 years, during an economic downturn, out of a job, and then realize when they take a job for half of what they were making, that the only reason they were at all happy was because of the amount of money that they were making.
Exactly.
Perhaps it's nice to see friends making $80k/yr and having their weekends free, their jobs carries with it its own problem. Most of my engineering friends will max out at $100k in the next ten years (as engineers tend to peak at about 40). They work a lot of hours during rev cycles. They deal with paperwork (heck, I have spend DAYS just one paperwork when I was finishing up a project back when I was a lowly programmer).
They have nice cars (lexus/BMWs) but they also have debt from that car, and monthly payment for the next five years. I'm hardly jealous they drive nicer cars since anyone with a decent credit rating can get a car loans these days....
Some of my engineering friends will move into management, many will probably shuffle into other careers. Few expect to hit the $200k. So I'm baffled when I keep hearing about people who claim all their friends from college with their BS are hitting the $200k jackpot. I'm sure some will, but law and med schools still have the highest percentage of students making $200k than students coming out of undergrad.
I mean, financially, it's probably better to take a job and invest early (I did take a finance class
😉 ) but doctors aren't starving. I grew up around a lot of physicians, and even though they've warned about the long hours/loss of autonomy, few ever said that they were not financially comfortable, so I'm not too worried about the money aspect.
Second (and most important) please don't have the absolute misconception that business is some easy world that your beer drinking college buddies stumbled into success with. Business is like anything else in life ... hardwork, talent, *** kissing, and dedication. So please, don't pretend that medicine is the only career that requires paying your dues. Lastly, why don't you drop everything tomorrow and try to start a career on wall street ?? Maybe I-Banking? All stuff that is super easy and you don't have to be extremely talented, top notch ivy leage MBA material to do.
Ditto.
I have one friend who is trying to hit that CEO lotto and it is HARD WORK. He works 80 hours/week FOR YEARS with no guarantee that he'll ever get to be VP (although I'm sure he'll go places). I have another friend who did the 70hr/wk gig for a year to be rewarded with the title of 'group leader' at the end of it (no pay increase).
She's in year 5 at the same company, cutting back to 50-60 hrs/week, and been promoted to a project manager meaning she gets paid $80k/yr. Not too bad but hardly something to be envious about.
Business is all about taking risks. You work hard, and sometimes there's a light at the end of the tunnel, sometimes not. Not even an ivy MBA can save you from that. A few years ago, my friend got an acceptance letter to go to MIT Sloan School of Business (then #4 Bschool) but he decided against it because there were not guarantee he'll get a better position than had he not gone and blown $100k (two years tuition at ivy league bschool) once he graduated.
So I'm often puzzled by the attitude on these boards that "if I wanted to, I could have gone into business and made millions". As if there are a dozen of these million-dollar jobs lying around begging to be taken by former premed/medical students.
🙄
I'm with Jolie and Gutshot. Work a FT job in another field and medicine won't look quite as bad.
I third that. I worked in IT as a programmer. Alot of complaints about medicine can be reiterated in the IT world (long hours/low respect/loss of autonomy-no-wait-we-never-had-any!). I would also add outsourcing to India and being replaced by someone who can work for 1/5th your salary as one more complaint.
Btw, anyone ever see "Office Space"? Where the boss asks the main character to come into work on the weekends? I had that happen a few times. I was called back to work on quite a few occasions after I left work. I've been called to get my *** back to work on a nice Saturday because something I wrote broke and they needed to get it working again, but oh, too bad I already had plans to go out with friends.
I've also been told I had mandatory Saturdays on one project I worked on (they paid for lunch though---how nice!). My friend who works in defense contractor says they have mandatory 60 hour work weeks when the cycle is peaking. My mom, when she is busy in research, has regularly put in 12 hour work days plus weekends.
Long hours and loss of autonomy isn't just a problem in the a medical field, it's a problem for most salaried, white collar workers. Doctors are just in the unenviable position of having invested too much into their careers to walk away. Most of my friends can leave their careers and do something else. Hence, doctors, I think, are a bit more disgruntled because they have those ugly golden handcuffs to tend to.
One last thing, my parents are researchers at BigPharm. Their complain about the horrible field of research, how their stuff is getting outsourced
🙂scared
🙂, how their pay is minuscule compared to the education they have, their lack of autonomy (bschoolers with barely a BS dictate their research), the long hours (sometimes 12 hour days), and they get paid half of what the average doctor gets paid.
To them, it's better to go to med school than stay in research. They can't imagine doing research if they had to do it all over again.
But you know what? One person's trash is another person treasure.
I've researched careers in law as well as other healthcare professions and I've thought about business, there are complaints in almost every field. People complain about pay/hours, the stress, the 'having to listen to other people', the lack of respect.
Are all these jobs just horrible? No. The problem is that there are no perfect jobs. The naive person is one who thinks there must be a mystical pot of gold at the end of the tunnel where you will find a job where you answer to no one, you get paid a lot of money and your work is always interesting.
The sad truth is all jobs will eventually feel like a job after your first six months (that's why it's called "work" and not "play"). But you hope to still derive a sense of satisfaction from it, and occasionally, to make a difference. The key is to find something that will mesh with your personality and your taste. And there is not magically job that will satisfy everyone.
So, with that in mind, after doing some reflecting and research on my own, I decided to do the med school gig, and thus far, I'm been pretty happy with the whole medicine thing. I know my medical days will be monotonous, my boss will be a bastard with a bright smile, my colleagues will aggravate me, and the pay will never seem enough, but I think i will still be happier at the end of the day with my current choice than at my old job. But maybe I won't. However, I don't want to spend the rest of my life always wondering. So here I am.
