If you’re interested in maximizing income, I would rule out pre-med. It’s sub-optimal preparation for any career except medicine, and medicine is sub-optimal for income. A few reasons:
Salaries are essentially capped by reimbursement rates and man-hours. The best surgeon in the world isn’t going to make more than a few million a year doing elective surgeries twelve hours a day year round.
The things that generate the most income for rich people with MD’s, patents and start-ups and C-suite gigs, don’t require the MD credential. There are better stepladders. The possible exception is medical celebrity, but the odds of you being the next Dr. Oz are extremely low.
The average physician makes far less over his lifetime than he could applying the same horsepower and hours worked to, say, finance. It’s a fairly straightforward back-of-the-envelope calculation. In addition to losing seven to ten years of income after college (residency only pays a little above living wages) and possibly incurring $250K in student debt when money means the most due to time-value, you’ll graduate into a market absolutely determined (for very understandable reasons) to bend the healthcare cost curve down and pay doctors less. American doctors are currently paid much, much better than doctors almost everywhere else in the world, due in large part to guild-like protections, and this cannot continue indefinitely. Globalization’s already lined up to crush radiology and elective surgery, two of the better-remunerated fields, and IBM would very much like to put oncologists everywhere out of a job. Another half-dozen specialties are in turf battles against mid-level providers like nurses.
All that said, I highly recommend medicine. Just not for optimized philanthropy.
The average physician makes far less over his lifetime than he could applying the same horsepower and hours worked to, say, finance. It’s a fairly straightforward back-of-the-envelope calculation.
That doesn’t seem obvious to me. Can I see that calculation? I suspect you’re comparing the absolute top-of-the-line financial career trajectory (which is very very hard to achieve) with a typical doctor path.
Attrition rates for investment banking are FAR higher than for medicine. The vast majority of investment bankers don’t make partner, while most good students who go to medical school graduate and earn high incomes as practicing doctors.
Finance does still have higher expected value for those suited to it, but not as large a difference as that suggests.
ETA: you’re right that it’s bogus to compare top-of-the-line finance to average physician. I should have said “The average Stanford-educated physician makes far less over his lifetime than he could applying the same horsepower and hours worked to, say, finance.”
Not sure what to say. There’s finance and there’s finance. HYPS and maybe two or three others have pipelines for pushing kids to the banks and hedge funds at the very top. And yes, I mean undergrad. The fourth or fifth of each class that goes into finance isn’t doing it to sell mutual funds in mid-sized cities. Many bail after a few years, but those who stay in can easily become millionaires, and some do it before their former classmates in med school finish their residencies.
OP is going to Stanford undergrad. You should start calculating your chances of a career at GS around the time you have been accepted to a top-10 MBA school.
According to this page, three graduates with a Mathematical & Computational Sciences degree (an undergraduate degree similar to CS) work at financial institutions: JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Keep in mind that these are graduates from the class of 2011, so they’ve only been out of school for 2 years; and the degree program only has about 15 graduates per year, so three alumni make a sizable fraction.
What I’m trying to say is, it’s probably feasible to get a job in finance with only an undergraduate degree from Stanford.
it’s probably feasible to get a job in finance with only an undergraduate degree from Stanford.
It is, but you’ll get an undergrad kind of a job.
JPMorgan has 260,000 employees. The compensation expense in 2012 was about $30.5 billion which means the average total compensation (including bonuses, etc.) was about $117K per employee.
That’s a nice salary but seems to be roughly similar to what doctors make.
Edit to add: WRT networking, it’s kind of a suitcase word. Lots of people talk about it. I am sceptical that public speaking and improv classes are the best places to meet the best networking prospects, though they might be excellent for meeting interesting people. Athletes typically do better than the mean at Stanford-type schools in terms of career earnings, despite lower HS GPAs and test scores. If you’re not currently a recruited athlete, you might still be able to walk on to the crew team or ultimate team.
If you’re interested in maximizing income, I would rule out pre-med. It’s sub-optimal preparation for any career except medicine, and medicine is sub-optimal for income. A few reasons:
Salaries are essentially capped by reimbursement rates and man-hours. The best surgeon in the world isn’t going to make more than a few million a year doing elective surgeries twelve hours a day year round.
The things that generate the most income for rich people with MD’s, patents and start-ups and C-suite gigs, don’t require the MD credential. There are better stepladders. The possible exception is medical celebrity, but the odds of you being the next Dr. Oz are extremely low.
The average physician makes far less over his lifetime than he could applying the same horsepower and hours worked to, say, finance. It’s a fairly straightforward back-of-the-envelope calculation. In addition to losing seven to ten years of income after college (residency only pays a little above living wages) and possibly incurring $250K in student debt when money means the most due to time-value, you’ll graduate into a market absolutely determined (for very understandable reasons) to bend the healthcare cost curve down and pay doctors less. American doctors are currently paid much, much better than doctors almost everywhere else in the world, due in large part to guild-like protections, and this cannot continue indefinitely. Globalization’s already lined up to crush radiology and elective surgery, two of the better-remunerated fields, and IBM would very much like to put oncologists everywhere out of a job. Another half-dozen specialties are in turf battles against mid-level providers like nurses.
All that said, I highly recommend medicine. Just not for optimized philanthropy.
That doesn’t seem obvious to me. Can I see that calculation? I suspect you’re comparing the absolute top-of-the-line financial career trajectory (which is very very hard to achieve) with a typical doctor path.
Attrition rates for investment banking are FAR higher than for medicine. The vast majority of investment bankers don’t make partner, while most good students who go to medical school graduate and earn high incomes as practicing doctors.
Finance does still have higher expected value for those suited to it, but not as large a difference as that suggests.
OP is going to Stanford, so a career at GS, Deutsche Bank, JPM, or Bridgewater is a realistic possiblity in a way it simply isn’t at 99.9% of schools.
ETA: you’re right that it’s bogus to compare top-of-the-line finance to average physician. I should have said “The average Stanford-educated physician makes far less over his lifetime than he could applying the same horsepower and hours worked to, say, finance.”
That still isn’t obvious to me and I still think you’re comparing apples and durians.
Not sure what to say. There’s finance and there’s finance. HYPS and maybe two or three others have pipelines for pushing kids to the banks and hedge funds at the very top. And yes, I mean undergrad. The fourth or fifth of each class that goes into finance isn’t doing it to sell mutual funds in mid-sized cities. Many bail after a few years, but those who stay in can easily become millionaires, and some do it before their former classmates in med school finish their residencies.
OP is going to Stanford undergrad. You should start calculating your chances of a career at GS around the time you have been accepted to a top-10 MBA school.
According to this page, three graduates with a Mathematical & Computational Sciences degree (an undergraduate degree similar to CS) work at financial institutions: JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Keep in mind that these are graduates from the class of 2011, so they’ve only been out of school for 2 years; and the degree program only has about 15 graduates per year, so three alumni make a sizable fraction.
What I’m trying to say is, it’s probably feasible to get a job in finance with only an undergraduate degree from Stanford.
It is, but you’ll get an undergrad kind of a job.
JPMorgan has 260,000 employees. The compensation expense in 2012 was about $30.5 billion which means the average total compensation (including bonuses, etc.) was about $117K per employee.
That’s a nice salary but seems to be roughly similar to what doctors make.
In Australia, a Medicare funded physician makes anywhere between 100k to 150k [1], whereas the avg. finance position pays 88k [2]. So you’re right.
[1] http://www.health.qld.gov.au/hrpolicies/wage_rates/documents/hpeb2-wage-rates.pdf
[2] http://content.mycareer.com.au/salary-centre/financial-services
Sorry that these are Australian wages. I don’t care about U.S. wages.
Edit to add: WRT networking, it’s kind of a suitcase word. Lots of people talk about it. I am sceptical that public speaking and improv classes are the best places to meet the best networking prospects, though they might be excellent for meeting interesting people. Athletes typically do better than the mean at Stanford-type schools in terms of career earnings, despite lower HS GPAs and test scores. If you’re not currently a recruited athlete, you might still be able to walk on to the crew team or ultimate team.
I think the point of public speaking classes isn’t to do networking, but to improve communication skills and therefore skill at networking.