True: Because I had no money, my father wasn’t going to pay for anything more than my bachelor’s degree at a school within commuting distance, and (the big one) I wanted to get away from living with my mother for good ASAP. No debt, no home for the summers, goodbye. Although I strongly considered medical school, I correctly reasoned that I could get an associate’s degree in nursing and be independent of my parents much sooner.
Now, the more time I spend in nursing, the more I wish I’d gone to medical school, but knowing why I didn’t helps curb that regret. One year from now, I’ll be a nurse practitioner–doing most of the work of a physician, without the massive debt and on-call time.
I don’t want to work 50-80 hours a week at a stressful job. I don’t need a ton of money to be content physically. Even on a fraction of what a doc makes I can still pay my bills and still have left overs for savings. I lack motivation and the work ethic to be a physician. Plus I think medicine has largely been co-opted by pharma.
My younger brother is in med school, and many of my undergrad classmates at college were pre-med. Not for me.
Well then you’d have the respect of men , the love of children, and women swooning over you…until you caught leprosy, then where would you be mr fancy pants?
My TER (tertiary entrance rank) was 9% below the cutoff for medicine. If Year 12 hadn’t been the year my grandmother died and my mother got cancer, I probably could have made it. (That’s not completely unwarranted arrogance - my predicted score based off my marks in Year 11 was over the cutoff, and I did well in the UMAT.)
But I would make an absolutely hopeless doctor anyway. I’m useless in an emergency. The training plays away from my strengths not to them (I’m good at understanding things, but terrible at memorising random facts, which is why I would never be an interpretor or translator either). And while I’m fine with blood, other bodily fluids make me heave.
Now that I’m grown up and have an appreciation of all the crap doctors put up, I’m thouroughly glad of it.
Never wanted to. Didn’t dream of it when I was a kid, didn’t play “doctor”, didn’t plan for it.
I’m no good with maths or chemistry. I have a terrible bedside manner and no patience with people who are ill or in pain unless they’re directly related to me. Don’t like pus or gross, oozy things. I’m really sensitive to smells.
I have never wanted to be a Doctor. Not even a little bit. Neither have I entertained the ideas that are often put forward as the dream jobs kids desire, such as an astronaut, a political leader, or a professional sportsman. My sister also never wanted to be a nurse, vet, or marine biologist. Or to have a pony.
Never really wanted to be a medical doctor, but if I were to attempt it the memorization would get me. In computer terms, I have a good processor but no disk space – give me a problem and some identities or a list of terms and I can probably solve it for you. I can make a system and think up tons of little ways it could go terribly wrong. Want me to memorize the names of all the bones or muscles? Hell no, not gonna happen.
I never wanted to be a doctor. Funnily enough, I apparently share my great-uncle’s ability for diagnosis; I just had zero interest. In part it may be because in Spain it is viewed as a “safe” profession, and while I’m not a risk-taker in the physical sense, I am one mentally. “Safe” never appealed to me, and looking at sick bodies for 8 hours/day? See below.
Nurse was one of the professions my mother thought desirable for me, but since it was “so I could take better care of her”, and since I spent so much of my childhood nursing her already, the mere mention of studying that made me want to run off to Anctartica.
Because almost nothing about becoming a physician sounds fun at all, let alone actually being one.
Even if you ignore the financial considerations (and those are pretty hard to ignore), throwing 8 or more years of your life into school just… Ugh. No thanks. That’s a whole lot of socializing, sleep, dicking around on the internet, and living to miss out on for comparatively little reward. If I want 50 hour weeks and 72 hour shifts and sleepless nights standing around in a uniform, I want to be working, not studying- I have too many insecurities about my usefulness to be comfortable with still being a student well into my late 20s!
I knew right off the bat that I did not and do not want a desk job. That was my springing board. I considered things like massage therapy, nursing, skilled trades like construction, etc, almost let my dad talk me into various positions in the Canadian Forces at various times but I’ve never really “bought what they’re selling” from an ideological standpoint. Nothing seemed like quite the right fit, until…
I was 19 when I finally, finally decided on paramedicine. Then months later found out it would take me 2 years from the date of getting my drivers’ license to be eligible to even apply for school, a bitch as I didn’t have my license yet… But dammit, my heart is set on it now. In the interim I’ve a handful of related things to choose from that wouldn’t keep me from being able to prepare for school: fitness instructing, private security, 9-1-1 phone op, etc. All will look good to an admissions panel.
Academically, it was the heavy emphasis on tons of rote memorization, something I’m very poor at.
Occupationally, it seemed that most doctor paths require a high degree of face-to-face with the general public. I’m fine interacting with professional colleagues, but the random general public drives me batty. It seemed analogous to working a retail customer returns service counter–sure, I helped that person, but had to endure lengthy whining, crankiness, and weirdness.
I wanted to be a doctor really bad when I was in junior high - so much I looked at what I would have to do education-wise to become an MD. I was horrified that I would have to complete another 16 years of school before I could even get into an internship program (assuming I could even get in to all those schools, which was definitely not a sure thing).
The idea of going to school even another 4 years was at the time just overwhelming (I despised school), so the doctor idea was discarded.
When I was in grad school, I roomed with a couple of guys who were in med school. I was good friends with one of them, and soon after he started actually seeing patients, he confessed to me that he didn’t like it. He soon found his dream specialty: anesthesiology. As he put it, you walk into the operating room, introduce yourself to the patient, and then render him unconscious. Awesome.