Med School or Finance
Hey wso,
I am at a crossroads. I graduated in 2021 with a degree in econ, and have some experience to my name mostly in the form of a year-long internship at a small M&A boutique (they had made it clear from the beginning that they were not looking to hire full time). In summer ‘22 I started seriously considering a career in medicine. I was attracted by the unique nature of the work, and I have always had an interest in science. I proceeded to take pre-req courses at a community college for the next two semesters, while shadowing physicians and asking them about their input on the future of the industry. The answers I received where overwhelmingly negative. Physicians and surgeons would go as far as to say that they were discouraging their own children from pursuing a career in medicine.
In parallel, I was still subconsciously “plugged in” to the finance world. My free time was filled by finance podcasts, WSJ, reading earnings reports, and keeping up with IB/PE news. It wasn’t intentional, I’m just passionate about the industry.
This leads me to now. I don’t know whether I should pursue an MSF and fully dedicate myself to finance or go the other way and continue towards med school.
My main goals (aside from the classic answers: autonomy, success) include the desire to own/invest in a business, and generate wealth for me and my family.
Would appreciate any input you can provide. Thanks.
Finance
Why so?
cuz you literally just told us abt all the existing groundwork you've already done for finance, whereas you've barely had any exposure to med and all those guys just told you not to go into it lmao
don't do med
Why do you say so?
Only worth it if you're super passionate about it and actually enjoy helping patients. If you just find it interesting there are plenty of other interesting things which pay more earlier. Also completely pigeon holed and very difficult to exit into other things. Imagine if you started in IB but you could only do IB for rest of your career with no exit opps.
Source: me who left medicine for finance
I have friends who wanted to do med just for the sake of being a respected gentlemen in society. From where I come from Drs are looked up to regardless of their competency. All I have to say is remember that you're working hours will be atleast 15 hrs till mid 30 if you want to be successful.
What part of medicine are you interested in?
I am very interested in the surgery paths, orthopaedic surgery specifically. My grandfather was an ortho surgeon, and i played many sports in hs which resulted in regular ortho visits.
The competitiveness of surgery means I need to plan for a fallback, but I would prefer to be in a speciality that is more procedure-based rather than managing patient illness through testing/medication.
Dental school is an option.
Oh ok surgeon - yeah that path is challenging. Dental school? Really.
I’d look into the growing robotics industry for assisted surgery and see where you see that going. Source, I interviewed with Intuitive to sell their Da Vinci. Medtronic I believe is catching up as well. Seems like the world of surgery is making a shift toward robotics which doesn’t mean no Surgeon but different approaches in the sense of robotic assistance.
I assume it's extraordinarily competitive to go the surgery route as the demand for surgery residencies vastly exceeds the supply. So, you'd need to make sure you go to a prestigious med school and perform toward the top of your class.
Seems like you kind of answered your own question a bit here
"My main goals (aside from the classic answers: autonomy, success) include the desire to own/invest in a business, and generate wealth for me and my family" - you can do this if you take risk as a medical doctor and open a private practice. A cousin of mine did this and ended up selling to a PE firm and just works part time now (had to sell for health reasons).
I would seriously consider medicine. With the rise of AI and continued advancement I see more and more of the basic finance grunt work being eliminated or severely reduced. Medicine also a practical skill that's transferable to many places. A broken bone is a broken bone doesn't matter where it is in the world. Revenue however, ask 3 different people you'll probably get 3 different answers. Nobody, other than the pretentious hardo on this forum, gives a fuck if you can use excel w/o mouse or if you can do mental calc of IRR to multiple. If you're worried about money. I haven't seen a poor doctor yet. Plenty of struggling analyst on this forum complaining about subpar bonus, hours, stupid/insane bosses, etc. All high level finance is just follow the herd. You do what your boss tells you, your boss listens to the likes of Jaime Dimon & others, they do what these TV talking heads say. There is no real thinking involved, unless you really like rearranging that logo for the hundredth time or changing that perpetuity rate from 3.0% to 3.25%. Just my $0.02
You're not wrong. I worked in clinical trials before and meet a lot of doctors who went towards clinical development or PV area. Six figure salary plus good hours/WLB without the stress of seeing patients.
I’ve worked in clinical trials as well in neuroscience. We had two neurologists and a psychiatrist who sat next to me and it was pretty laid back work and hours.
Do you like hospitals, do you like dealing with the general public/patient population on some level? Are you okay with treating crazy ass people, some of which will want you to write pain meds and if you don’t will stalk you? Something to think about, medicine, absent path and rads can have a lot of patient interaction that can be mostly good but also very bad.
For me, the only place I hate more than the airport is the hospital or the doctors office. I hate the lights, the people, the stupid protocol. I worked at a doctors office for years in highschool in an internal medicine practice and that was a big part of me deciding f this.
I studied chemical and biomolecular engineering and graduated 2nd in my engineering class, I did so in case I wanted to go into medicine. By the time I was finishing undergrad, I knew medicine was something I could excel in but I really didn’t want to spend 4 years memorizing material like a donkey to get there and I just didn’t want to deal with sick people.
you should boil this down to your fundamental likes and dislikes because it’s a long road either way.
I will say - while I was grinding in industry, my Med school peers were actually having a pretty good time. It didn’t seem nearly as miserable for them as some would have you think, they had a good group to hang with and commiserate and of course girls start gearing up and want to marry an MD, but the sheer number of years followed by residency and then potentially fellowship are taxing.
one of my best friends became an Ortho, his loan payment is $4800/mo as he is trying to knock that shit out in under ten years. He’s not very happy about that as you can imagine.
For context I’m a physician planning on a career change after training.
Your main goals are to own a business and generate wealth. Even ignoring that your interest in medicine seems fleeting at best, and that others in real life have told you not to do it, your stated goals are those of a businessman/financier, not a physician. You should become a physician because you like the humanitarian idea of helping the sick, and also like human physiology. Trying to calculate and make decisions on marginal differences of perceived “probable” financial paths is incredibly foolish.
The path in medicine is incredibly long. I’m in year 9 of this shit post-undergrad. I have consistently worked long ass hours including frequent nights and weekends and still have almost 2 years to go. My reward thus far has been a hefty student loan package and now make about $70k a year. Sorry but that’s absurd and anyone remotely motivated by money should take the path of many of my non-med friends who are now light years ahead of me financially.
I will ultimately get compensated well but making up the lost ground is enormous. The ceiling is also much lower. You would have to be delusional to do med school on a whim.
What is your specialty?
The 'passion' for medical school/sciences on the clinical level ultimately becomes patient billing/coding and making sure insurance pays out what they're supposed to or being able to get approved for a procedure. I worked at a hospital before, and many of the doctors I worked with wished they'd gone into something different. The amount of codes I ran with them was quite insane too.
So you are going thru a fellowship only to change at the end? Odd
My parents and brothers are doctors and they all strongly encouraged me not to follow suit.
Insurance costs, insurance risk mitigation procedures, an influx of foreign doctors, and a disruption of traditional care architecture (robotics, AI, corporate owned urgent care, lack of cost controls, unchecked litigation, etc) have stripped most joy and margins out of the profession and most general practitioners were struggling to make any meaningful money.
My parents make less now, by a considerable margin than they did 20 years ago, my brother went into plastic surgery (about a 12 year track, and is making decent money doing mostly Botox and nose jobs), my other brother became a professor, and said he will never go back to practicing medicine.
IB
IB has changed dramatically in the last 15-20 years.
Technology has gotten much better, and I suspect AI will drastically accelerate this, and less and less people are required for more deal throughput. There are more boutiques than ever nipping at margins, and there are less exit opportunities than ever before.
I got into Med school and chose finance, my rational was (NPV) make more now, instead of investing 8 years, hopefully rise up the ranks or exit and continue to outpace what I would have made in medicine, then retire well before most medical specialists (they usually hit their high earning power much later, and thus tend to work well past standard retirement age).
I think the opportunities in IB will be fewer and further between going forward, with exits to asset management shops and corp fin becoming more common.
Medicine will take at least 10 years (med school, residency, specialization, etc) to start seeing meaningful money. There is a risk AI and robotics will drastically change medicine and the insurance and expenses will continue to rise.
IB / Finance will continued to be volatile, but still presents better near/short term income potential.
I like the idea of medicine, because no one can ever take that away, it is a useful applicable skill, you can practice your entire life, and if you choose the right track you can do really well.
I like IB/Fin because of the near term income, the potential for exits, and the energy and intellectual stimulation of the "space".
If I had 15 years back, I think I would have probably still done finance.
I would add that I do know a lot of MBA/JDs in the VC and PE space, and they do very well and are happy, but it is minimum a 5-6 year road.
Side note:
My parents think being a PA (Physicians Assistant) is the best job in medicine now $175-250k in large markets. Low/no liability, all the knowledge, all the respect, great hours, strong, tremendous demand.
As the younger sibling of someone who's a vascular surgeon, Medicine is ONLY worth it if you're in it for something other than just the money. Yea you're guaranteed half a million every year or two after you become a doctor, but thats after 8 years of extra schooling (undergrad and med, 9 if you take a gap year which a lot of people do) and keep in mind that's all unpaid. Then you have 3-5 years of residency, where you'll make chump change. You won't break into that golden pot of money until you're in your 30s. I'd recommend you do it only if u feel you have a true passion for medicine and you're okay with the struggle that comes with pursuing this
Med
I am writing this because this exact decision was present in my life - and I made the wrong choice.
My family are all in the medical field (all doctors pretty much) and I dropped out of pre-med early on to focus on finance.
Despite the family connection/network I thought finance would be the right way forward, it wasn't. Career progression was fast initially, but slowed down to a crawl in my late 20s. There was no useful connection that would push me past other candidates, and there weren't that many roles to begin with.
If I had chosen medicine, my family network alone would have helped so much get into the right places at the right time.
You should do what you're interested in and stop looking for validation on the internet from strangers who don’t care about you.
Just do MB- MBA after IB jump into PE for healthcare and tech. Healthcare is one of any country's most profitable economic sectors, especially biotech and pharmaceutical. If it a not medical school, just get a master's in healthcare-related. Their numbers exist opp in healthcare, I have a friend who nurses anesthesiology and makes more than 200k on an annual salary. But stop shadowing, and get more experience in IB and finance-related opportunities, medical school is not going anywhere. Worst case scenario, you will cap an annual salary between 100k to 200k!
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**Community College is a big taboo, especially in the states.**
Did you just stutter?
..
What percent of finance people actually get to the point that they are making $200-400k? It seems like you have to have a pretty high position to make that kind of income
..
If you put a bunch of successful people in a room and talk to all of them about their path to success, the thing they’ll have in common is that they have passion for their work.
Don’t choose a career for money because the people at the top of almost every field are rich. Choose the field you’ll excel in.
Very true
What were the doctors telling you when discouraging you about the future?
I think I’m your guy for this question.
I actually did a year of medical school and deferred and am now in a full-time investment banking role.
I could write a book on why I left medicine, but the major conclusions I came to were as follows:
Medicine really is a labour of love. I know many who stayed who would shit on paediatrics because they don’t make enough, they were in it for the wrong reasons.
Canada, eh? The system for doctors is very different there.
Yup.
You can make more in the US though you do so by operating as a businessman masked as a doctor (owning clinics and the like).
med student here - do finance. Doesn't make much sense for you to switch rn.
Medicine and finance - they are both work. I wouldn't go so far as to say "one is more rewarding". & you seem more interested in finance. The rewarding/altruistic parts of medicine is balanced out by the negatives - unruly/disrespectful patients, per rectal exam, dirty hospital + adverse working conditions, sticking needles/tubes in people, fixed pay, less glamorous career re. no flights/dinners/network of rich people. More importantly you seem more interested in finance - the most important factor - and:
"Interest in science" & "attracted by unique nature of the work" are objectively bad reasons to do medicine. A terrible reason is the "rise of AI". Good luck explaining that one to adcoms. A good reason: "Can't imagine doing anything else". "A deep desire to serve". "A passion for X aspect of clinical medicine i.e. psychiatry/a passion for clinical trial/research".
You are underestimating how difficult medical school is and how difficult residency is. Many burn out but are forced to keep working or they will be unemployed. You can't just "leave medicine" like "leaving IBD". It is leagues away from business school. I went to the UK for an intercalated degree. I probably had 10-20x more working hours in medical school, with 2x-3x harder concepts.
Why do so many doctors say "they can't imagine doing anything else"? Probably NOT because they are getting up on their high horse. The reality is medicine is super, super rigid and you will NEVER be able to leave once you get in. The people that do leave, become "medical writers" or "wellness coaches". That's a hard no from me. 0.01% go to McK's healthcare practice in the US. Every single skill you learn is not transferable in any way, so zero flexibility. So saying that is our way of coping, that it's unlikely that we would ever get to experience another profession.
Try finance. If you hate it, then could consider med school. But could consider other paths in business as well.
To illustrate my point - a lot of people in finance want to retire early (by 40/before doctors) before they even start working. I never really understood that because wanting to retire early implies that you don't like your job/you don't like working. Working for the sake of retirement is not the way to go.
Doctors (at least the ones who went into it with a good reason) never talk about that. In fact many doctors are still plugging away at 60/70/80. Their mindset is "why would I retire"? They have a decently rewarding job, nice salary, but most importantly get to impact lives/help people. Not a bad way to spend one's time. Does that make sense?
Hopefully, no matter which path you choose you could approach it with this mindset of abundance - the work is meaningful, I have an impact, I use my professional knowledge to help others, I enjoy going to work. I'm in no rush to retire
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