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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I hear my friends in family practice and pediatrics talk about income inequality all the time, more so when neurosurgeons or ortho folks talk about their million plus monthly salaries and luxury cars. It makes one wonder if money was not a big factor, would many of these people still want to help humanity? [/quote]

PCP from above. If the question is whether I’d do medicine for teacher pay the answer is no. But I’m okay with the current level of pay (basically all doctors make at least 150k). But you have to protect yourself as the system will try to take advantage of you. I would never take a lower paid speciality and have a bad quality of life. That makes no sense to me. I purposely made the trade off I made to be on the lower end and fought and ensured that I worked for a system that gave me the support I needed to have a good work life balance (MA support, call triage) and made it clear that family came first. [/quote]

I’m a teacher who got a full ride to college as a biology major and dropped out of pre-med to become a teacher. I entered college as a sophomore because of AP credits.  I ONLY say this for everyone to understand I was not at the dumb end of the spectrum and this was a choice I made my sophomore year of college.  Sure, you can say I was “weeded” out, but here was my plan.   At the end of the day, I wanted the following:

Debt free schooling (college was paid for, why go into huge debt for medicine?)
The ability to have the same days off as my future kids
To choose a helping profession and work with kids

As I teacher, I earn around 120k now and have clearly been doing it for a while to earn that.  In the end, I figured pediatrics would end up boring with the endless strep throat, ear infections and immunizations etc and it wouldn’t be all that fun. But teaching is pretty challenging each day and you get more of a relationship with the kids. If I chose pediatrics, I would have more debt, the crappiness of being an on-call resident and have to work year round.  I’m still good with my choice.  
That said, I think the way we do medical school here is pretty awful and could use some upgrades.[/quote]

I had several former teachers in my medical school class so I agree but I’ll say that just being pre med doesn’t mean you would have gotten into med school. To really have chose teacher over med school, you’d have to have an acceptance in hand and say no I’ll be a teacher. Super tough to get into med school even with all pre med courses completed [/quote]

In my mind, that would have been a stupid thing to do financially.  I had 8 semesters of free education.  With a biology degree, the jobs aren’t that plentiful and many still required a masters. But with an education degree, the jobs were plentiful.  Why would I make the decision to become a teacher after I only had a biology degree? That choice had to be made earlier so I could get the education degree during the 8 free semesters. Granted, I ended up double majoring, but again, you are stuck with the choice of earning money vs. going into massive debt.  No summers vs same schedule as future kids etc. I chose earning money, a pension, summers off and time with my future kids.  If med schools were publicly funded, I probably would have applied. You are right, who knows if I would have gotten in, but there is always those Caribbean schools. ;)

My larger point is that other than the prestige of being a pediatrician/ GP  vs being a teacher, it is a pick your poison kind of thing.  I needed to be out of my parents house after college and teaching allowed me more stability at a younger age than pursuing a medical degree would have given me.  If we need to widen the pool of doctors and stop importing doctors, publicly funding the program and providing more financial support would have worked for me.[/quote]

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