One piece of advice that I heard over and over when debating whether to go to medical school was, "if you think you can be happy doing something else, do not go into medicine." Overall, I think this is good advice and should be pondered when considering any career path. Unfortunately, the nature of choosing a career is that we make decisions based on the information we have available. In some cases this may be sufficient to make an informed decision, and in other cases it may not be. Looking back on my medical school experience I can now see that I wrote off entire specialties based on bad encounters on the wards that may or may not have been representative of what life would really have been like as that type of specialist. The same thing can apply when deciding whether to go to medical school. Your sources of information will run the range from physicians gung-ho to bitter and jaded, so try to get a variety of people to talk to.

In deciding to go to medical school I definitely thought about all of the other career paths I had thought about doing. Now that I am done with medical school, I have spent some time talking with friends who have taken those alternative paths and it is clear that the other paths all have their pros and cons as well and that,like with medical school, it is easy to fall into them without getting sufficient information about what life on the other side of the training is really like. When I look at what my alternatives could have been, it looks like going to medical school has left me in a decent position and I do not regret not pursuing any of the other paths.

I considered the PhD route in both the humanities and in the biological sciences. It seemed very appealing intellectually and would have been supported financially meaning little to no debt at the end. But the costs were also there, namely the lack of jobs, especially in the humanities which meant having to move anywhere if you were lucky enough to land an academic job with tenure. In the sciences it seemed like doing years of low-paying post-doc work after the PhD was becoming the norm as drying up grant funding made academic jobs harder to come by. I never had much interest in industry jobs and heard government positions have also been slashed. So this route seemed to make little sense for me. My friends who chose to go the PhD route all seem to have mixed feelings--excitement about the work and research they do, but tons of stress about their financial futures and the job market.

Then there was the law school option which I have discussed in the past. Suffice it to say that I am glad I did not go to law school. I tried working the corporate job but knew within a few weeks it was not for me. My friends who went the corporate route have been unhappy for the most part. Their comfortable salaries do not seem to make up for mindless, unfulfilling work, office drama, and general corporate b.s. Those who did have "fun" jobs at tech companies have generally been laid off with the crashing economy. Government work also seemed like corporate work with more bureaucracy, better benefits, and lower pay. Some of it was fulfilling, some of it was not.

So overall, they all have their pros and cons. Medical school and being a physician is not perfect, but clearly neither are any of the other things I considered. Think long and hard and pick a field that will annoy you the least and leave you the most fulfilled at the end of the day. In the end, medicine, like everything else, is a job for most people. Hopefully, it will be a stimulating job with a comfortable salary. If you can find that elsewhere, you might not want to go to medical school.