Yes, there’s that moment when you realize “What?? Not all equations can be integrated analytically?” That is like the moment when you realize that your parents have (or had) sex. The universe changes and you’re not sure if what you thought you always knew was true is in fact true. You try and imagine what that might mean, and you’re almost afraid you might be able to.
And it prepares you for that moment when you realize “What? Not all random processes have a stable variance?” Which is similarly upsetting. Like discovering your parner is bi yet she never invited you for a threesome with her hot friend.
It is. The central premise in that was MBA or business school versus entrepreneurship (the trades was something Greenie latched onto) and the fact that MBA types can only see a handful of viable options whereas in reality there are many within the business umbrella. I also repeated probably two dozen times over the course of the discussion that there are other considerations besides NPV (which favored the trades). To that point, I make more than some of my medschool route friends now and spent a hell of a lot less on education (1 year masters) but als make massively less than some of my friends who are entrepreneurs (who in turn spent less on education). Sadly, you’re still an incapable of digesting a nuanced point.
I simply meant from an interest point of view. Working with top doctors to resolve my daughter’s hip made me appreciate how much value a good doctor adds to people’s lives. Particularly, when I realized that the average doctors are probably idiots with a lot of education.
Medicine is pretty interesting. But I don’t think I would have been able to do it since I am very squeamish around blood and particularly exposed organs and bones.
My dad was too - maybe it’s genetic. I’m told that he was planning to do medicine at one point but they opened up a corpse and my dad 6’4" fainted. The bang was loud, and he decided to do something more mathematical.
^ This was my issue too (my Dad has it as well). But I figure with more discipline I could have stuck it out and made my way into the non-surgical / research field.
Wrong side of the bed this morning? Just an innocent inquiry. Most thinkers don’t go into medicine unfortunately. It’s the rote types. I, too, with hindsight, should have given it serious consideration. Shockingly, I altered my dad’s heart surgery to lower his risk. I had the head of cardiology apologizing for not recognizing a safer way as I had. Simply procedure people. Weren’t using their horsepower.
^My bad. But yes, I agree with what you’re saying. There’s a shortage of thinkers in the field. Finding a good doctor really changes the whole process.
For every MD out there there are dozens who didn’t get to the Med School. My ex was an MD so I kind of know what miserable lives they have. You just see the tip of the Iceberg.I can elaborate for an hour why medicine does not have the expected value people think it has.
The research side is different though, our neighbour is a researcher at NIH and she is nothing like a doctor, pretty much like a scientist should look like.
Two of my exes went the nurse anesthetist route. Each make about $130-140k out of school which basically required undergrad in nursing, 2-4 years work experience then 2 years of masters program. There’s very little wage dispersion and high demand with limited long term appreciation, but that kind of nearly garunteed salary given limited school expenses is pretty good.
Yeah, SCB doesn’t have a clue. The risk adjusted return has been off the charts in the USA. MD income is severely under-reported as well. I love how the supposedly poor $200K internist lives in a $2MM home. Oh," forgot to mention I own my clinic and choose to take most of my compensation in ways other than “salary.” My MD clients are all closer to seven figures than five figures if we’re sharing anecdotes. And all have had 12 weeks vacay since they were in their late twenties.
And between 40% and 50% of applicants get into a US med school, even with the severe artificial bottleneck which is American medical education. We should be in the streets. An absolute travesty.
Yeah, it’s hard to argue with doctor being one of the best possible jobs in any industry. High paying, can’t be laid off or outsourced, commands respect among the unwashed…
I’ll be posting a new thread to answer that question.
As for majoring in mathematics, it helps to be very good at mathematics (duh!), though I have known some people who have done it without much in the way of natural ability.
Mathematics always came quite easy to me. I think that if you wanted to nail down one skill that accounts for that, it would be strong spatial visualization: can you look at a system (say, a vector space, or an integral domain) and visualize how the parts have to work together to achieve a particular goal (e.g., meeting the definition of a vector space, or an integral domain)?
High verbal intelligence is also quite useful. As is a natural curiosity about how things work.
When I was 15 I learned calculus from my dad’s college calculus textbook because of an offhand comment my dad made while we were flushing the radiator on the car. (“See how the level in the funnel drops slower near the top, but faster near the bottom? If you knew calculus, you could compute how fast it is dropping at any point in the funnel.”)
My father passed away a little over a year ago, and my brother sent me most of the books he had on his bookshelf, including that calculus text, and, frankly, the best trigonometry textbook I’ve ever seen.
The only thing I have to gauge myself is calc 1, the school I attend is pretty known in the U.S for it’s mathematics program.The problem is I have to decide pretty quickly what major I want to apply to.What should I do ?
