Not only you have to be smart to accomplish for these professions, you will need lots of money from your parents or yourself to pay off the tuition cost for school. So, does one have to be rich enough to become a doctor, lawyer or pharmacist? What do you think?
The short answer is no. YOu can be poor and change your socioeconomic status by heading into these professions.
However, you’re smart to ask this question now, because with good planning you will end up with manageable debt and a rewarding career.
It looks like you want to go into pharmacy. I’m not familiar with that career path, but I am familiar with law and others on this forum are familiar with medicine.
What I gather about medicine a good plan of action, in order to minimize debt, is to 1) attend the cheapest / best school you can for undergrad to do your premed. The idea here is to get your premed courses in for as little debt as possible in order to leave room for med school debt. Get As in your premed classes. 2) Study like the Dickens for your MCATs. 3) do volunteering in clinics and/or research. Your undergrad school should provide you with counseling about the premed track. Look at the premed section of this website and post a question there about the best track, or look at the threads already there, for more information.
For law–law salaries are bimodal, meaning the clump around two areas: $70K and $160K starting.
- Any job out of college between BA and law school is great. However, a paralegal position in any firm is a great way to earn a living between undergrad and law school. You see what the job is like, you get recommendations, and you earn a decent salary for an undergrad. Law Schools will believe that you want to do that job. However, the range of jobs between undergrad and law school is wide. Practically job track plus great LSAT and GPA will help you land a good law school.
- if you go to law school to rise out of poverty, then you need to go to a top law school, like the top 14, whether you choose the lower range of salary or higher. To rise from poverty, most people aim for the higher grouping, but you don’t necessarily have to, as you’ll see below.
- To get into the top schools, you need high GPA (3.7 or 3.8 range), LSAt above like 172 and something in your resume that speaks to the law school. Like, engineering, or arts law, or public interest work, or Japan (for JET teaching for example) and become an area-law specialist. Or financie or SOMETHING.
- Once you get into Top Law school, spend the first year acing your 1L classes which suck. They just do. They are high stress and you just have to get through them. 1L summer go do something interesting that’s not necessarily what you want to do after Law School. LIke if you want to do corporate, do a public interest post in like LIthuania or something. This is your experimental summer and it’s okay. Or you can combine that with your eventual specialty by doing say a research project on M&A in Lithuania, if you eventually want to do M&A You will have something to discuss in your interviews.
- 2L year: Get to the head of the school clubs and orgs. Leadership roles. Also get to meet all of the recruiters coming to campus. Get their cards and contact them for interviews at appropriate date.
- 2L summer get that firm position or internship that leads to your post-grad employment in a corporate firm (if corporate is what you want)
- 3L year – graduate and start working. Live small and pay off school loans. Move on from there to the career path of your choice. Hopefully in Law School you studied various career tracks and options in addition to your classes.
- Corporate firms of Big Law require huge commitments of time and energy (24-7-365) which is why they pay well. If you're not willing to do that for at least the first two years to pay of your loans, then choose the public interest track. This is the lower-salary grouping. Moving from that track into higher salaries is also possible. However try to find a school with an excellent loan-forgiveness program if you go into public service or government work.
If you go into corporate, get some sort of specialty and then after two years go into in-house counsel. Or stay on the partner track.
Not necessarily, but it makes more sense. Taking lots and lots of loans is a flat out bad idea. The military is a great option many people overlook.
I would talk to people in those professions and ask them to be frank.
Yes, the military will pay for it all. I admit I would be too chicken to go into the military, but for those who think they can handle the possibility of going to war, the military has a lot of great benefits. Not that you will ever see combat, but I think you have to be willing to face it if it happens.
I grew up poor in a housing project. In 1983, I came out of law school with $28K in debt. I have been told that equals more than $100K in today’s money. I struggled for several years to pay the loans off, but I was earning decent (not great) money. I certainly don’t regret doing what I had to do to get a law degree. I attended a commuter college and took a chance on a brand new, unaccredited law school because it offered me the best scholarship. I made sure before I enrolled that I could take the bar exam in my state even if the school was still unaccredited when I graduated as I wasn’t concerned about practicing anywhere else.
Obviously, as a student at a brand new law school, I was not on the white shoe firm track. I went into personal injury work and found that I love it. I make decent money, have a pension and a retirement account and have been able to raise my family while having a manageable work life balance.
Re: military
Good option if you want to enter the military and are eligible (70% of young Americans are not eligible for various reasons).
But you do have to realize that you could be required to participate in military action that you may not agree with.
I’m a lawyer. You certainly do NOT have to be intelligent to be a lawyer. You just have to work hard to be successful.
Nor do you have to pay much- or anything; scholarships are available for both college and law school. You should pay substantial tuition only for a top-tier law school, and those law schools open plenty of doors for $180,000/year starting salaries.
@ucbalumnus that 70% may be a bit misleading. Here are the main causes: “The ineligible typically includes those who are obese, those who lack a high school diploma or a GED, convicted felons, those taking prescription drugs for ADHD and those with certain tattoos and ear gauges”
A prospective Doctor/Lawyer/Pharmacist would certainly have a high school diploma and not be convicted felon. Besides, a military physician/pharmacist is far more likely to end up on a base in the US or a friendly country (Japan, Germany, Korea, etc) then someplace like Afghanistan and will not see front line combat regardless.
http://time.com/2938158/youth-fail-to-qualify-military-service/