
Don’t Go Pre-Med: My Advice to a Yale Student Worried About Her Future - ph0rque
http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/10/12/dont-go-pre-med-my-advice-to-a-yale-student-worried-about-her-future/
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naner
_Most of the people around me seem to think that the safest route for me is to
go pre-med, because it is a well-defined path that leads to a stable career._

These people are idiots. The path to a successful career in medicine is a long
and difficult one. There is no such thing as normal hours, you will be working
almost all the hours there are. On top of that you will be poor until your
30s, at which point you will still have a staggering amount of debt. A career
as a medical doctor is a calling. If you do it for other reasons (such as it
being "safe") you will burn out.

~~~
asianexpress
I definitely agree with what you say about medicine. It's not always that
simple though -- some people really feel parental pressure on their lives. And
it's not just parental pressure, it's peer pressure too. On top of societal
pressure.

I attended Yale and it feels like everyone is pre-med or trying to get into
finance (consulting or investment banking). You sort of feel out of the loop
if you're not doing these things (I was one of the dozen computer science
majors in my year).

A lot of these people don't see the problems until it's too late. The
perception by society is that being a doctor is a stable well-paying job --
most people don't take into consideration, like you said, all the tuition
costs, and years spent in school.

If you go to Yale, you're expected to achieve great things -- that's just the
societal pressure. Not everyone deals with it well. So some hide in the
"safety" of what society expects, rather than pursuing their dreams. These
people would be too embarrassed to pursue their dreams, if it meant say, being
unemployed for years or working a minimum wage job. I suppose that's more of a
pride issue, but sometimes it's borne of a want to please others (while
unfortunately forgetting about self)

That said, she's not even at the school yet -- she'll probably change her mind
when she gets there. Plenty of people do once they're given a chance to think
for themselves in a new environment. But plenty of people also ending up
burning out because they've pursued pre-med or finance without it really being
their calling, or love.

~~~
BlackJack
I think she's already here since the article says "Earlier this fall."

But yeah, I'm a CS major at Yale too (sophomore), and I almost went the
finance route. Over the summer I realized that doing something interesting >>
any amount of money. A lot of kids here are pre-meds or future IB/consultants,
but there are also a lot of kids who aren't and do all sorts of awesome
things.

This year, there's also a much bigger interest in startups. Yale Hackers,
HackYale, more speakers/tech-talks, YEI coding workshops, and a lot of other
things point to people working on cool projects and doing what they like.

~~~
asianexpress
Ah nice! Yeah, I'm a part of PaperG which was part of the beginning of YEI (I
think they say we're the first funded startup to come out of it). It's really
awesome how things have grown in the last couple of years. I was pretty
excited when I heard about HackYale -- something that should have been done
long ago.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions about startup/Yale/CS stuff

~~~
BlackJack
What's your e-mail? It would be great if there was a better network for Yale
students to talk to alumni. We have that career network but search is terrible
unless you're looking for people in big companies. Actually, this gives me an
idea... :)

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asianexpress
Haha, indeed -- the Yale alumni database is super useful, but of course, you
won't have access to that quite yet. YEI is helpful for tapping part of the
network, but you're right, there's no real good way to do it.

You can find me at victor.cheng@paperg.com

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larsberg
The only sad thing about the advice to take "core" requirements during your
first year and then do your major in your second to fourth years is that it
hurts CS majors (and presumably others) who then end up forced to take
multiple heavy systems courses in a single quarter, usually due to pre-reqs or
every-other-year offerings.

If you take Operating Systems and Compilers in the same quarter, you're just
not going to be able to get as much out of them as you would if you took them
during separate quarters.

Even if you manage to avoid schedule overload, it still means that you're only
just finishing the basic curriculum tree near the end of your senior year.
That's too late to start doing independent projects with faculty, which are
really the easiest way to both give you a better-looking resume and to find
out what the graduate school experience is like.

I see this frequently with the students at the UofC, which actively encourages
students to do nothing but general distro courses their first year. That said,
I'm also a little jealous! By the time I took freshman physics as a senior, I
was far too busy with research to care about anything more than a passing
grade, and I probably missed out on some fun party tricks.

~~~
tzs
I like Caltech's approach where freshman year is pretty much the same for
everyone, except for humanities and social science where the requirement is
just a certain number of units rather than specific classes. Everyone takes
freshman math, freshman physics, general chemistry and lab, and biology
freshman year (except those few who place out of them).

Students don't start taking specialized courses in their major until second
year (they don't even have a major first year), when they take those alongside
the required sophomore math and sophomore physics.

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civilian
No. This girl shouldn't be figuring out what to major in, she should be trying
to figure out what she wants to do out of college, and be majoring in whatever
gives her the best leverage for that. (This is not a 1:1 mapping of Business &
Admin -> Business & Admin. Taking a hard major is also good for impressing
people in the field you want to go into.)

