Career Options

Here's a blog post I've written mainly to bounce the ideas off my parents, but I'll share it with you guys too, and so if any of you have advice, I'm all ears.


My favorite secular author is Malcolm Gladwell.* He once wrote about the characteristics that are true of fulfilling careers. In fulfilling careers, you find three commonalities: autonomy, complexity, and performance-reward synchronization. Autonomy is how much you get to be your own boss, so entrepreneurs score highly, but café employees that are even told how to greet their customers don't get to enjoy much autonomy. For complexity, an entrepreneur may need to be skilled in totally separate areas, while an assembly line worker may have to screw a thousand bolts in the same spot every day. Lastly, a salesman may make more money for every single bit of success, but most people on wages or salaries might be paid at the same rate regardless of how good they are at their job.

I want a good career, and I'm considering three options. It's not about the money, but money is a consideration, and it often goes hand in hand with the top-tier careers I'd want because capitalism rewards high-demand services.



Med School

Med School is four years. The first two are non-clinical, and the last two are clinical. The average med school student graduates with a debt of $157,000. After med school, graduates have five years of residency. During residency, they make about $40,000 / year and will work 80 hours per week. After five years, they become an attending physician. A doctor that does general or family practice makes $150,000-$250,000 per year. Doctors who specialize make more, so at the other end of the spectrum, a brain surgeon makes $600,000 per year. If I became a doctor, I would want to be a brain surgeon. I think I would enjoy it the most because it's the most challenging and interesting.

I did not know that OHSU is ranked so highly nationally. Every year, they have about 5,000 applicants; they interview 600 of them; and they admit 155.

The main deterrent for me wanting to become a doctor is the residency phase. If I work 80 hrs/wk, I would either become insane or depressed. I would much rather have a family and get to spend a lot of time with them. And still have time for reading, music, and sports. And I'm not sure I'd enjoy doing surgery enough to justify that kind of hell. And I'd be 34 before I finally have it made.



Business School.

Business school is only two years, and the subject matter is much easier, which I have mixed feelings about because I want to be challenged, but I don't want to have to work too hard either.

I would need a few years work experience to get in, so I would have to work as an engineer for a while. It wouldn't be bad, but it wouldn't be super exciting either.

The stereotype about finance guys is that they're slaves to money and want to chase pies in the sky.
“Just do what you would enjoy.”
“What if what you enjoy is money?”
“Then study finance.”
As for the pie-in-sky mentality, business deals are volatile and uncertain. You can become salaried if you become a workaholic slave to an investment firm instead of going it alone, but that doesn't seem much better. I might as well be a medical resident.

I might enjoy finance, but the biggest problem with this career path is that it has the lowest social utility. Playing with stocks, bonds, private equity, and real estate doesn't really improve society all that much. I want to mainly work for my own enjoyment anyway, but why choose business when I can enjoy something more technical with more barriers to entry.

This is also the broadest option for me because business has so many fields. I could choose get an MBA in finance, Masters in Real Estate, or a Masters in Engineering Management (and be a higher-up at a company). I'm not sure which one I'd choose.



Masters in Biomedical Engineering

Think Luke Skywalker's robotic hand in Star Wars. Or Will Smith's robotic hand in I, Robot. Every time I see a person missing a limb, I feel the injustice of it and I think it'd be so awesome to restore their capabilities. Biomedical technology is exploding right now because technology is advancing exponentially and we're growing in medical knowledge at the same time and medicine is so complicated that there's still so much that we don't know. You put all this together, and there's a lot of potential and growth in this field.

Getting an MS in BME would take two or three years. It's probably the best option for high-end finances with the least hell. I'd get home from Rwanda, work for a year and a half, and start grad school in the fall of 2012, and then come back and get a better job.

Looking at job openings for engineers, most of them say a master's degree is strongly preferred, and most positions require a few years of work experience. So I'd have to get an entry-level job when I get back. I know that I need to get a master's degree, because most of the stuff you can do with just a bachelor's degree is also stuff that companies use technicians with a 2-year degree to do. So if I'm going to get a master's in engineering, it might as well be biomedical engineering. Nuclear engineering is a distant second option.

Right now, this option is in the lead. I'd also have the choice of getting a MS in BME, working for a few years and then still getting an MBA. Or some programs have a joint BME and MD degree. Either way, I'm going home and working first. And right away I want to start reading books about the difference career paths, especially testimonials of people that chose these careers and then wrote reflections about it.





University of Washington is really highly ranked in every one of these categories for its graduate programs. It's by far the best school in the Northwest. Maybe I could just live in Vancouver for six months and then I could pay in-state tuition to UW. The rest of the top-tier schools are in California, the Northeast, and a few in the Midwest. I think I would apply for a scattering of famous schools and use University of Washington as a backup.




*Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist for the New Yorker. He simply finds interesting things to write about and then comes up with really cool insights about that topic. One of his books is called “Outliers”. Outliers in this context refers to the people lie outside the average level of success; i.e., exceptionalliy successful people (regardless of what field they've entered.) He writes about the characteristics that most closely correlate with being successful at what you do. Like, intelligence helps, but it's not as important as you might think.