I think it’s easy for this to be a fulfilling career if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t get early filtered out.
Plus you are the only profession that can legally write prescriptions and do some services.
The power of the medical cartels has intangible benefits too.
The salaries look nice when they're windowed to a single year. Career earnings, it's good but not that great compared to tech - especially when you consider the hours and stress.
* 4 years of med school - $0 income - $40k+ of tuition
* 3+ years of residency, minimum (4+ for most fields, even more for surgery) - $60k/year
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If my wife had gone straight into tech, we'd have been better off financially until our 50's. 30 years is a long, long time to break even.
We are in a strange time when software engineer salaries can even be comparable to those of doctors. Rest assured that sooner or later tech workers will be middle-class schlubs like pretty much every other type of engineer.
500k in costs before your first year of big earnings.
You said 30 years. I'm counting 2.
Disingenuous.
Missing interest - unless you really want to fuck yourself in the short term. 160k of tuition costs more like $300k with the standard payment play. Good luck if you have undergrad debt. Could easily add $500k more to your debt load.
> 80k x 4 = 320k lost wages.
Try a number closer to $400k. Also a good portion of MD's take a gap year for research either during med school or before residency. Potentially adds a year.
> 30k x 3 Delta wages.
3 years is for family medicine, most other specialities are 4 years - so add a year. Surgery is more like 8 years.
This wage delta is more on the order of $80k to $100k+ per year. I have friends who are closer to $150k+ per year wage gap compared to their MD spouses.
For my wife and I this number will be $400k.
$300k + $400k + $400k = $1.1m+ difference.
> You said 30 years. I'm counting 2.
You're counting two because you're only looking at salary and not the salary difference. I'm counting 15 at minimum on a pure salary income.
My wife is also working 80/hours week. I'm working 40. It will take into our 50's before my wife makes more on a per hour basis than I do. If I worked 80 hours per week, my wife would never catch up.
Family med say $120k starting, Internal med $200k
Each extra $25-50k is like another year of training at $50k.
At least in Canada anyway.
And often get their liability insurance paid for too.
For the Medscape study, I would say it's good to see the numbers are better in the private practice world, nationwide. But - most MD's will be presumably internal medicine and you'd have to look at the breakdown. The low end jobs in primary care, public health, etc start at $200k, and most folks who aren't surgeons or ophalmologists or dermatologists are in the low-mid $200's. That's assuming you graduate from residency in your late 20's or early 30's w/ the $350-500k in debt or whatever it is these days, unless you took the National Health Services or DoD scholarships, whereupon you then owe them 4-8 years of your life...
Additionally, the bay area in the US is essentially the only place in the world you can make that kind of money in tech.
One example: do a comparatively easier 4-yr undergrad in business and start with a bank straight out of school (they scoop up lots of new grads willing to move around). In the same ~15 years you can move into a senior position in finance or M&A and make comparable money. It's not easy or guaranteed but IMO easier...
It's a ten-year commitment, roughly, to become a practicing ER doc. And in today's industry, you'll spend the overwhelming majority of your time doing documentation on shit that should've been seen by a PCP, not an emergency department. And definitely not treating emergencies. You'll be lucky if you see one or two a day in a major ED; in smaller ED's, even one a week is optimistic.
If you want to jump in with eyes wide open, more power to you. Most days, I can't tell you whether I regret my move or not.
That said, most ED’s are not like that, and an awful lot of emergency medicine is ‘just’ careful assessment and reassurance, so I’d agree that if you don’t like the process of seeing and helping high and low acuity patients, it’s a bad career choice.
If anyone wants to chat about the pro’s and con’s of EM and career changing, happy to chat, contact info in profile
Although he did a full 5yr EM residency, in Canada you can work EM with a 2 year FP residency and another year as an FP specializing in EM.
Sooo, 10 at the most, but could be done in 6.
The tech industry saved many lives during this pandemic. Compliance with social distancing standards would be way lower if people had nothing to do at home but watch TV. Even social media is showing its bright side. People are using it in more positive ways, connecting with each other and largely sharing quality information regarding Coronavirus. Life would have come to a halt without modern internet technology, almost warranting a calendar pause until the pandemic passes.
That being said, there's a lot of variability in the social value of tech industry jobs. At risk of being pedantic - you can net society more social good if you transition to a higher social value job within the same industry. It takes many years to become a doctor, and many people compete for that career so you wouldn't expand the supply of medical labor. Moreover, medical industry cronyism plays a part in bankrupting America with little to show for it. You should do what you want ultimately. I've just seen some people self-flagellate when they're actually doing really good things for society.
And outside of that (i.e. big tech) there's plenty to invent and contribute in countless ways. Medical equipment, niche technology products, innovative and useful consumer technologies, the warriors we don't hear about improving industrial processes and everyday stuff, etc.
I have younger friends looking to enter the game industry. I tell them: make sure you don't land somewhere that makes you start hating what you loved just so you can tell yourself you make games (having addiction-machine mobile games in mind). Better work anywhere else and wait for the opportunity to do it right, I believe.
Selling your soul is always a choice... and it's not an easily replaceable good.
By all means pursue things elsewhere, but not because you think there are no opportunities in tech.
Personally, I believe I can do far more good writing and pushing public policy than any amount of code. That is "operating at scale".
With that said, here is my example: Medicare For All would save us $450 billion, and avoid 68k preventable deaths, every single year. I find it a stretch to suggest that ambitious goals such as that "lack imagination". Such impact is simply not obtainable with tech or NGOs alone. Even Bill Gates has needed roughly $50 billion to drive forward his foundation's humanitarian efforts (but admittedly, is very efficient, with estimates of having saved ~122 million lives through their work).
To stay with your examples, some of the Gate's foundation efforts have largely been tech efforts, some haven't. Some of the things I mentioned off-the-top have potential to reach 10s to 100s of millions of people. MFA is a big $ number partially because the US healthcare system is expensive and inefficient, so that draws focus on $ saved ... other efforts may focus on lives impacted at much lower $ impacts.
Most public policy work isn't as big as MFA either.
I'm not saying policy work isn't important or impactful. I'm rejecting the idea that you (generic 'you') can't have similar effect in technology to what you might be able to achieve in policy; especially the idea that this is so clearly true that the "right" thing to do is quit technology to go into policy. Even assuming you can be as effective in policy work as you are in tech work, which isn't a given.
I doubt anything at all comes close in leverage. Maybe having mountains of money or being POTUS.
How do you think a doctor feels when he sees some fat patient going into the donut shop (or all you can eat buffet) after he told them to go on a diet and lose weight. (is this worse than the person who dies of bad genes caused heart attack despite talking their medications, exercising and eating well - another thing doctors see)
I enrolled in a premedical postbaccalaureate program, and over the course of two years of night classes finished all of the prerequisites required by most allopathic medical schools. I worked by butt off to finish with a 4.0 GPA and place in the 96th percentile on the MCAT (good enough to not be ruled out because of my MCAT score). I also volunteered at a memory care hospice on weekends during this period and ended up with 100 hours of clinical experience. I had some additional clinical exposure working on medical device projects as an engineering student.
I applied to 27 schools and was invited for two interviews. Of those two, I was waitlisted by one and rejected by the other. I didn't end up clearing the waitlist. So what went wrong? I can't say for certain, but I suspect these were contributing factors:
* My undergraduate engineering school GPA was 3.3 and my graduate school engineering GPA was 3.4. These are reasonable by engineering school standards but borderline for medical school. * I only had 100 clinical hours. Many applicants have hundreds or even thousands of hours of clinical experience when they apply. I was 31 when I started the postbac program and decided to keep my full time job in order to save up money. The opportunity cost of each hour of clinical experience was higher at this age compared to a typical undergrad. In hindsight I should have at least devoted my weekends to gaining clinical experience the moment I decided to go this route. * One of my recommendation letter writers was late. My application wasn't processed until all recommendation letters were in. I wasn't eligible for consideration until later admissions rounds. * I didn't stand out. To be clear this isn't a requirement, but schools like to build a diverse and interesting class, so standing out in some way can be helpful. I struggle to decide if this was something beyond my control or if it represents a personal failure.
To return to my initial point, it is doable. In an alternate universe in which my recommendation letters made it in earlier, or I slept better before the MCAT and got an extra point, perhaps I would have been invited for one or two more interviews. If the interview -> admission invite conversion rate is 20%, that boosts the odds of admission from 36% to 59%. (I haven't ruled out applying again, but I would need to enroll in classes for at least another year in order to get new faculty recommendation letters. Unfortunately it isn't safe to volunteer at the hospice right now due to COVID-19).
If you read about this CEO and are thinking about making the switch be very realistic with your chances, particularly about your GPA like parent post said. Without a 3.7+ you're going to have a tough time, and there's no guarantee that you won't spend 2+ years and get rejected. You'll have to overperform on the MCAT. Expect bias against your work experience (only software really). Whenever I said I used to be a software engineer you could see the light leave some of the interviewers eyes... Though if you're FAANG or another name-brand company I wouldn't expect the same.
Versus people working here having their per unit value of work cut by Medicare to 62% of what it was in 1998: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/17/opinion/sunday/17...
Have got to say though software/data skills have been super useful for research projects, which are the fun part of medical school vs the absolute grind of pounding facts in.
I've thought about doing this myself. I'm curious, what made you want to switch (from software engineering I'm assuming?) to medicine?
A good friend of mine actually had a great career in software but decided that to become a nurse in the time he has left on earth. He and his wife both decided to go to nursing school and were definitely the oldest students. They are both now nurses and seem very happy.
I’m a resident in Australia. 11 years at university (took some side tracks), $70k in debt for the whole time, now gone, and we are paid between $70-110k a year as interns.
Although our training pathways are longer because we are required to do 2 generalist years
I think one could study at much lower cost in China, Russia, Eastern and Central Europe. They have now courses in English, and have become the new hub for medical education.
Cost is cheaper, yes. Quality varies a lot across the country. Some countries are doing better than others. But medical degree is still not easily convertible, so if you study outside the US, but practice here, it's not simple. Language is not the main issue, different approaches, different standards, etc.
https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/kwo/spr07/alumni/mckim....
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/ceo-quietly-sells-compan...