Help me pick a career!!!

Graduate School
1

<p>I've actually been thinking about this for a long time but I still can't make up my mind. Pre-Med and a doctor or international diplomacy and work at the UN or economics/finance on wall street or something?
here's my weigh in:</p>

<p>Doctors get the prestige, big bucks, and being regarded as "heroes" to humanity, and I'd feel good doing it but it's at least 10 years of schooling, long hours, hard classes(ORGANIC CHEMISTRY!!!), malpractice suits, cut-throat med school admissions, and I'm not sure I'd have the drive after all this. </p>

<p>Diplomacy/internation relations has always interested me, you get to travel, make a difference on a larger scale, a lot of different oppurtunities, long hours but not as much as medicine, and I'd feel secure and happy too. But, I've also heard there's a lot of competition, not so hot pay, and I'm unfamiliar with the different career paths you can take.</p>

<p>In economics I'm hoping to work on wall street and great pay but I'm really unfamiliar with the career paths, it's very competitive and idk, but it might get boring after a while and I've never like the whole "cubicle/office" environment- i'm more of an outside person.</p>

<p>Anyway, when I chose colleges I didn't focus too much on careers since I'm still so indecisive but I've been accepted at Brown, Georgetown, Emory, Rice, Notre Dame, Wesleyan, Vassar, Williams and Vanderbilt</p>

<p>Can anyone give me their opinion or help me out on what career or direction to go? thanks!</p>

2

<p>It doesn't matter which undergrad you pick - they're all good. Both careers you mention will need graduate school, so you don't have to start matching career interests to your undergrad - match it to your grad.</p>

<p>For med, you don't need to have any particular major - Several people in my husband's med school class (UChicago) majored in history, communications, etc. You just have to take some prerequisite science classes, which you can knock off in your junior-senior year, although I recommnend starting them your soph year to determine if this is a route you want to take. If you don't like the science, don't be a doctor. If you like the science, intern at a hospital doing something that will allow you to see the ins and outs of being a doctor - it's far more than science, and you don't want to embark on 4 yrs of med school and decide partway through that this isn't what you want.</p>

<p>International relations is another totally different career path. BTW, if you get into the diplomacy side of it, the hours are worse than doctor hours and the competition is even more cutthroat. Try the foreign service exam if you don't believe me.</p>

<p>Both these careers require incredible dedication, and I don't think you can actually decided upon either of these until you've spent some time in college. From your post, it's clear you have no real idea what you want to do yet, and that's OK. You think you've been thinking about it "for a long time," but people who are far older than you haven't necessarily decided upon their paths, either. Don't push yourself to pick right now, or even choose anything based upon careers you admit you know little about. An uninformed decision won't help you at all, and you'll likely end up feeling trapped. Look at college as an opportunity to learn about yourself, not as a means to a career end.</p>

<p>On a bit of a tangent, why are all these people entering college determined to pick a career RIGHT NOW? This is the gazillionth post of this nature. I mean, if you know what you want to do, that's great, but likely you don't, not at 18. Just go to college, experiment, learn new stuff, and worry about choosing a career path in a year or two. Trust me - you all won't be at a disadvantage. There's such a thing as overplanning.</p>

3

<p>if you cannot decide, go to a school with more options, one that will offer you opportunities to study any of these options you mentioned - once there, do some research, work in different places (like a hospital), go to their career center, read on career paths in international relations or economics (there are books written on this you know, so you don't need to just wonder how it goes, you can read about it)</p>

<p>It is not crucial to know in your 1st year of college what you want to focus on. A few people have a very clear career plan, generally because they have a true passion for something or other. Majority of freshmen are very vague on what they want to do. If you want to be ahead of the game, you generally need to decide upon a career by the beginning of your 2nd year and start planning out the details. This is because some of the professional and graduate school examinations are given during or at the end of your 3rd year of study. Therefore, you want to have 2 full years to prepare for them: your sophomore and junior years. </p>

<p>If you have a good conception of your future from the very start, it gives you a competitive edge over others also because you can focus on taking your major classes in the first 3 years of college, to prepare for graduate examinations, and then take the general requirement classes your senior year, when you're already filing applications and getting accepted. This is risky if you're not sure you can pass the GE's your senior year, but GE's are usually the simplest classes you can take. It also has disadvantage in that GE's tend to boost GPA. If you're take tougher classes that are relevant to your major those first 3 years your GPA might be lower. Generally people who cannot decide on a career by the end of their 2nd years are in a bit of a rut because for 2 years they take the GE classes, various pre-requisites, and classes from different departments to help them decide. By the time of graduate examinations they might not have taken the material covered on the exam, because they spend so much time exploring options rather than focusing on their subject, and have to study for it on their own.</p>

<p>PS if you think organic chemistry is a hard class, then perhaps going through medical schools is not for you ... because i've taught it to pre-meds and generally whoever struggles through it has the most trouble getting accepted anywhere - med schools require that pre-meds take the very basic o-chem in college, and if they can't master that very basic chemistry, chances are they also struggle in physics and biology and consequently on the MCAT ... as far as "heroes" to humanity go, those are only the good doctors who have solid common sense, good memory, much experience, sympathy and desire to help, which, according to my observations, applies to 1 in five doctors you meet</p>