Advising Highschoolers and Undergrads on Medicine

If you're in high school or undergrad and interested in medicine, it's not hard to find opinions on whether you should pursue becoming a physician. Parents will weigh in, mentors will weigh in, classmates and friends will weigh in. Critically, physicians have their own views on whether prospective medical students should become doctors, and they tend to share those opinions, liberally. It is not difficult to find those viewpoints online or in print.

And those viewpoints are diverse. Very diverse. On one hand, which gets promoted by universities and physician organizations, you have the physicians who feel that medicine is a wonderfully unique career, that they derive immense satisfaction from, which is worth considering and striving for. On the other hand, which more frequently comes up in anecdotes of prospective medical students who have asked physicians they know about the field, is the notion that medicine will suck your life away with all its demands on your time and energy, and thus should be avoided like the plague.

So what's a potential future physician to think? Is medicine an incomparable opportunity for success, or a dangerous trap leading to unhappiness?

It'd like to come out and say the truth in somewhere in the middle, but I'd say it's more like it's both at once. It's undeniable that medicine provides many opportunities - both personal and professional - that are not easy to come by in other fields. Already, I've had the chance to see and to do and to experience more than I likely would had I stayed in my previous career. I have new perspectives I never would have experienced in any other profession. Yet, I've also had to give up a lot of things I care about to continue on in medicine, more than once going through long periods of exhaustion or being overwhelming, experiencing despair bordering on depression.

My expectations for life have been revised upwards in many ways, while being simultaneously revised down in many other aspects.

That may sound bleak, but I don't view it that way. Life is about making choices, and those choices come with consequences, both good and bad. We can't take advantage of every opportunity - our time and energy are limited. Going into medicine was a choice that has had some positives, some negatives. Some of these trade-offs I was aware of heading into medical school. Others I knew about, but failed to fully appreciate. Still others seemingly came out of nowhere.

When a physician gives a judgment on their satisfaction with their career, or their views on medicine as a vocation in general, they tend to be giving a summary opinion on those trade-offs, perhaps highlighting the good or bad aspects that matter to them the most in forming that opinion. Yet its digging into the trade-offs that the answer becomes clear and each person will place different value on the pros and cons of the profession. To make matters more confusing, as people grow over time and experience new elements of the profession, their viewpoints will change - my own verdict as to whether going into medicine was the right choice or not has jumped around multiple times and continues to do so, even after 4 years of medical school.

So, should a student considering medicine take the plunge? Maybe. It depends on a number of factors, including current situation in life, career alternatives, life goals or priorities, and personality. Making any career choice is too complex to put into a binary "yes-or-no" answer and apply it to everyone. That's doubly true for medicine, a field with significant sunk costs and limited opportunities to smoothly transfer to another career (especially early on). Sorting through the meaningful considerations is well beyond the scope of a single blog post, and should ideally involve an active conversation rather than passive reading.

However, recognizing that not everyone has a physician they can talk to in-depth about all aspects of medicine, I think it's worth having some general information available on what a student can expect from a career in medicine. Over the next little while in a series of posts, I would like to explore some of these factors in greater detail. I can't provide a full weighing of preferences, but perhaps I can provide some context.