It's time to dig deep within ourselves and get a little mushy.
I feel, well I know, that I have a passion for both entrepreneurship and medicine. Both passions are very time and labor intensive and to most people seem like two mutually exclusive passions, with no room to pursue both. Ideally, however, I'd be able to mesh the two and pursue an entrepreneurial project with a medical flavor.
I'm at a fork in my life's road right now. Look down one path and you see a long arduous road to M.D.-ship. I feel that being a doctor, you acquire an invaluable ability to help people directly, helping them retain, maintain, and improve the most precious attribute to human nature - life. Everyday, you're helping people grasp and grip onto their last thread. In my opinion, there's great fulfillment found in knowing that you're saving a brother, a son, etc., but it requires roughly a decade or more of your life, depending on specialty. Drive down the alternate path, and you get an exciting adrenaline filled life with extreme highs and extreme lows. You're out on your own leading a team to success during your youthful years. You're on the bleeding edge of tech, steering the ship into newly found waters with the hopes of finding untouched hordes of fish just waiting to get caught. And if you find yourself in dead waters, you refocus, and make way in a new direction full force. But zooming out, in the end, it's just a web page, a new widget, etc. Not to belittle the whole field, because God knows I love it all, but do you find fulfillment in that? Do you feel that you are using your life to fulfill an honorable purpose?
I feel that if I give up medicine, I'd be giving up a chance to truly help people, and have a direct and positive effect on others, yet if I pursue it, I'll be missing out on the young exciting 'I make my own rules' type of entrepreneurial life I've always dreamed of living. Hopefully, I can drill my way down the middle of the fork and forge my own path.
EDIT: I'm not just asking for advice. I'm curious as to find out what people in the tech entrepreneurship field feel towards the purpose they're working to accomplish.
I could paint an equally distorted portrait of both fields: Do you want to be stuck at an HMO, explaining to crabby hypochondriacs that you can't just give them a script for oxycontin based on website printout they are waving in your face? Or would you rather stay up until 4 am every night restarting the server while your business partner tweets about doing shots next to Arrington at 111 Minna?
Anyway, that was mainly an exercise in creative writing. The only real advice I have is that if you have any inclination to do work in a medical related field, it is a good idea to have an MD. I've worked on biomedical software projects and was always just a paid lackey.
I knew a kid in boston in medical school who ran a successful web-based startup part-time while he was in medical school. He was a "kid" too, I believe he was 18 or 19 years old. Thanks for bringing this up, I should see where that guy is now.