Given your mention of RESPs, I assume you’re in Canada (confirmed after reading your past post).
You might wish to add to your undergraduate major possibilities the possibility of the UWO Richard Ivey business program, which has excellent graduate placement for Canadian finance consulting, and management jobs. You can transfer from UBC in your third year (applying during your second, regardless of what you majored in at UBC) if you have strong grades and extracurriculars, and take an accounting pre-requisite class, among other things. It’s an easily missed but unusually valuable option for Canadians with the right interests.
Regarding the financial prospects of some of the options you mentioned: engineers tend to settle in the high five figures, to very low six figures unless they become entrepreneurs. There are some issues with age discrimination, cognitive decline, and unemployment. Doctors earn more in discounted terms, with basically full employment and more flexibility, but at the cost of a long time as a student and resident. Law has a wide distribution: the upper end of lawyers can out-earn doctors, but a great mass do worse. Finance, for those who can do it and enjoy it, looks better financially than most anything else, even doing well against entrepreneurship in the tails (there are more finance billionaires than tech billionaires), while dominating in the central range.
As others have said, it’s a terrible move to get a PhD unless you are going to be working in academia or some field where it is strongly required, but if you have good reason to focus there it may be a pre-requisite.
Outsourcing and automation have ways of nibbling at many fields, I wouldn’t take that as a huge differential consideration.
SIAI, FHI, and Overcoming Bias do.
FHI does publish its work in academic journals. It’s an academic institute at a university. It’s true Robin puts most of his output on his blog.
If you’re strong at math, I would tend to push for math/statistics/computer science over biotech and especially cognitive science. Even in the soft areas, people with hard backgrounds tend to do better, and the hard areas have more flexibility (math people can go to psych programs and get good industry jobs, psych/cogsci undergrads can’t get into hard science grad programs and are less competitive in the job market). You can learn the results in the psych literature later, but you’ll do much better with solid quant and technical skills, as opposed to scrambling for remedial hard skills after a soft undergrad.
Other considerations depend on facts about you, your aptitudes, and your interest. Feel free to contact me via the PM system to set up a counseling session.
Law has a wide distribution: the upper end of lawyers can out-earn doctors, but a great mass do worse.
Do you mean that amogst all law specializations, the “great mass” do worse, even in the more lucrative specializations, because the profession is so competitive and only partners in firms are making the big money? Or do you just mean that many lawyers end up in or choose specializations that are less lucrative in the first place? An interest in pursuing law would come out my interest to make money at it and I have the skills to become succesful in the profession. I wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to make as much as a doctor, but if my income would be no greater by what I studied in law school, then I would just choose not to attend in the first place.
I mean that there is segmentation in the market: lawyers in large firms (and some boutiques) serving large corporate clients tend to make much more than other lawyers. I will be posting more on the legal market on 80,000 hours.
Given your mention of RESPs, I assume you’re in Canada (confirmed after reading your past post).
You might wish to add to your undergraduate major possibilities the possibility of the UWO Richard Ivey business program, which has excellent graduate placement for Canadian finance consulting, and management jobs. You can transfer from UBC in your third year (applying during your second, regardless of what you majored in at UBC) if you have strong grades and extracurriculars, and take an accounting pre-requisite class, among other things. It’s an easily missed but unusually valuable option for Canadians with the right interests.
Regarding the financial prospects of some of the options you mentioned: engineers tend to settle in the high five figures, to very low six figures unless they become entrepreneurs. There are some issues with age discrimination, cognitive decline, and unemployment. Doctors earn more in discounted terms, with basically full employment and more flexibility, but at the cost of a long time as a student and resident. Law has a wide distribution: the upper end of lawyers can out-earn doctors, but a great mass do worse. Finance, for those who can do it and enjoy it, looks better financially than most anything else, even doing well against entrepreneurship in the tails (there are more finance billionaires than tech billionaires), while dominating in the central range.
As others have said, it’s a terrible move to get a PhD unless you are going to be working in academia or some field where it is strongly required, but if you have good reason to focus there it may be a pre-requisite.
Outsourcing and automation have ways of nibbling at many fields, I wouldn’t take that as a huge differential consideration.
FHI does publish its work in academic journals. It’s an academic institute at a university. It’s true Robin puts most of his output on his blog.
If you’re strong at math, I would tend to push for math/statistics/computer science over biotech and especially cognitive science. Even in the soft areas, people with hard backgrounds tend to do better, and the hard areas have more flexibility (math people can go to psych programs and get good industry jobs, psych/cogsci undergrads can’t get into hard science grad programs and are less competitive in the job market). You can learn the results in the psych literature later, but you’ll do much better with solid quant and technical skills, as opposed to scrambling for remedial hard skills after a soft undergrad.
Other considerations depend on facts about you, your aptitudes, and your interest. Feel free to contact me via the PM system to set up a counseling session.
Do you mean that amogst all law specializations, the “great mass” do worse, even in the more lucrative specializations, because the profession is so competitive and only partners in firms are making the big money? Or do you just mean that many lawyers end up in or choose specializations that are less lucrative in the first place? An interest in pursuing law would come out my interest to make money at it and I have the skills to become succesful in the profession. I wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to make as much as a doctor, but if my income would be no greater by what I studied in law school, then I would just choose not to attend in the first place.
I mean that there is segmentation in the market: lawyers in large firms (and some boutiques) serving large corporate clients tend to make much more than other lawyers. I will be posting more on the legal market on 80,000 hours.