Med school? Grad school? Or should I be like William Carlos Williams?

Here are some dark thoughts about academia, from an academic: Many bright, motivated students who have enjoyed college graduate, and then aren't sure what to do with themselves. They begin to think, "I've always enjoyed English, I'm a good writer, have done well in writing courses, and I love literature. I know I could succeed in grad school, and academia is a familiar world." So they go to grad school, and it's a mistake for them. They drop out a few years later with an MA, or they stay in until they're 30 and still not done, or they get a degree and the only job they can get is at East Podunk State, far from their family and friends -- and even their spouses. I'm talking about bright students at top schools, here. This was the hardest thing for me to understand when I was entering grad school -- "I've always been at the top of the heap before, so even though the job market is bad, it won't affect me with my prestigious degrees" -- please don't think that way. Your best job prospects are likely to be at schools you have never heard of, in an area of the country you would not choose to live. Think about whether you love English enough for that to be ok. Getting a PhD in a humanities field is something to do ONLY if it's honestly the only thing you can see doing. The job prospects in academia suck - suck - suck (English especially), the jobs pay very badly for how much time you have to invest in the degree. (Your friends who get jobs now will be buying their first houses when they are in their late 20s, and you will be just finishing grad school and struggling to make your car payments.) And real scholarship is nothing like the fun, intellectually open and exploratory stuff you have probably done and enjoyed in college - it's much more narrow, you alone in a library for 9 hours a day reading about the influences on obscure author X. If you want to pursue writing, try doing that for a few years without going to grad school. Most real-world writing jobs do not even require an MA in English. If you want to be a writer or editor, you should move to NYC or another city with a big publishing industry, and try to get a entry-level copywriter or editorial assistant job. Be prepared to "pay dues" for a few years, but you'll be building a resume and the contacts to get much better jobs by your later 20s. If you have a great science background, try being a technical or science writer. I don't know a lot about med school. It's insanely hard. It's best to do when you're young and still have stamina, and before you have a family life. It's another job where you won't be an "adult" in the field until you're 30 or so, and where you don't have a lot of choice about where you live in the intermediate phases (eg internship and residency). An MD will open a lot more doors for you than a PhD in English will -- even doors that have to do with writing. All that said, you have a wide world of choices ahead of you right now. I agree that getting a "real world" job for a year or two might be a good choice, so that you can get some perspective and narrow down what YOU really want, not just what seems like a natural next step after a lifetime of meeting high-achiever goals (get good grades in high school, get into good college, get good grades there, etc). This is the hardest thing about post-college life, but potentially the most rewarding. Good luck; remember that whatever you decide it will be interesting, and you can always change course in a few years.

I graduated with a BA in English, then went to med school. My advice to anyone looking to go into medicine is to do something other than medicine for at least some chunk of your life, because there won't be time for it again for a long, long while. I sometimes kick myself for not taking a couple of years off after undergrad to pursue an MFA. Not because I think MFA programs are great, but because it would've been awesome to do nothing but write (or maybe simply to do nothing but something other than medicine). Wavering for a few days shouldn't be enough to deter you from any major life decision. You say that you want to study English lit seriously: I say, do it! I've had classmates who've decided that medicine wasn't for them. I've also had classmates who chose to go into the field in the later stages of life. If anything, their experience added to their personalities, and bolstered their humanity. I've had the opportunity to see the admissions process from the other side, and let me tell you: there are a lot of boring, cookie-cutter applicants who've all done very well in school, and very well on the MCATs. The ones that stood out were the ones who were swell people. You could always do medicine later. You won't always be able to pursue literature: once you're in training to become an MD, you will find it difficult to find the time to pursue other areas of study. Take the time to enrich your life the way you see fit. Do something for yourself, and hope that it'll allow you to do more for others in the future. You don't need post-BA degree. I imagine you're driven to excel, but there are many ways to be a successful student of literature. Have you considered taking an extra year of undergrad to take coursework in the English department? And Ikkyu2's right on: NYU is a great school, and you'll learn some incredible medicine in NYC, or any big city for that matter. Bottom line: I say do it. Read tons, write tons. Do medicine later, if you really want to. Then write more. And one final piece of advice: don't go into medicine unless you really, really want to. The rewards are fantastic, but it's a long, tiresome, and in many ways a dehumanizing path.

My father is disappointed that I was not accepted by higher ranked schools, which has in turn made me incredibly depressed and disappointed in myself. Your father is crazy. NYU is great. I'm in med school right now. Do what you love is the simplest and most accurate advice. I love medicine, love figuring it all out, love the challenge, love the patients. It's awesome. For me. (But the memorization is not.) It is definitely not for everyone. Do not, repeat, do NOT do anything like medical school because your parents want you to. They may pay your way (mine aren't, and I'm building up huge debt because of it), but the classmates that I know that are doing it for the wrong reasons are not, in general, happy folks. Take time off if you're not sure--if you can defer, great. Some people give this advice to budding surgeons, but I think it applies in general to medical school: If there's anything else you can see yourself doing in the world besides becoming a doctor, do it, or at least try it. Probably half of my class took at least a year off before starting med school--myself included--and I was definitely happy I did it. Became a grown up, had my first relationship, had my first job. Was definitely worth it. Medical school has plenty of downsides--don't get to start making money in your 20s like your friends, you live a student life for a long time, you sacrifice weekend fun for studying or seeing patients, it takes a toll on your relationships, friends, family. It can be very lonely and frustrating. But, as you'll learn in med school (if you go), everything in life is cost benefit analysis. http://www.grahamazon.com/2006/04/grahams-tips-for-the-pre-med/ Feel free to email if you have more questions.

Everybody, thank you very much for your answers. My friend says that these replies helped her gain a perspective on things. I'll update again if I know what she decided. Again, thanks, AskMe!

Just to fall in with everybody else: don't get too caught up in the romance of a humanities degree and the idea of being a professor. Should you complete your degree and overcome the long, long odds against getting a job as an English professor, you'll very likely be in a situation that you may not like. Consider that as a graduate of a prestigious institution, your professors are very likely either screaming white-hot young scholars working on sought after topics (which you yourself may not find interesting), or they are old guard professors who got hired in the 70s when the job market was very, very different. Either way, the life they are leading is not in line with what most English professors are facing for at least the first 10-15 years of their career: low pay, unfavorable location, and tremendous workloads of entry-level courses like Comp 101. Don't base your understanding of academic life on how they live. I agree you should seek out the advice of a professor you trust, but again, take that advice with some salt as well. Many professors know no other job experience than academia, and will tell you that you couldn't possibly be happy doing something other than being an academic. It may be true for them, but it may not be true for you. I did a PhD in Comparative Literature, spent a few low paid years in the trenches, and eventually won the lottery: a tenure track position in an English department at a well respected European university. I left after a year, fed up with bad pay, disinterested students, and a generally miserable and defeatist attitude among my colleagues. I now make videogames and couldn't be happier. The advice I always gave my students is this: only go into academia if you can't see yourself being happy doing anything else. After a few years trying to make it work, I realize I could see myself being happy doing something else and took my own advice. I have a few friends who stayed in academia and are happy; I have many more friends who left academia and are happy, too.

Another vote for deferring med school. This is what I did and I had a great time. I wasn't sure I would truly go back to school until the last possible minute and in the end it was the right decision. There were several people in my med school and residency classes who went on to do non-medical things after completing their training. Hard to believe but it's true! 2 actual novelists from my residency class, computer programmers, web designers, stay-at-home parents. One thing that hasn't been mentioned above -- don't be put off by the difficulty of med school. For one thing, it's not as bad as it used to be, with work hour restrictions, etc. Med school in most places has become a very supportive environment where the admin and your instructors will do everything they can to get you through once you've made the cut and have been accepted. You will meet some fantastic lifelong friends and you'll be doing things that will blow your mind. I hate studying, I hate sleeplessness, I hated the location of my med school, and I hate being broke but all in all I have fond memories of those four years. The really huge down side to med school is that this is a terrible time to actually practice medicine in the United States. You cannot count on a high salary, reasonable work hours, and appreciative patients any more. But if you have a way to pay for med school and you can get out without the six figure debt to system, you have the freedom to do whatever you want when you get out. Don't like insurance forms? Work for a pittance at a free clinic! Don't like seeing patients? Take time off and write the great american novel! So if the question is med school vs. grad school, go to med school, it's a blast! If the question is should I be a doctor vs. an English professor, that's a much more difficult question to answer but I am not sure that's the question you have to answer or even can answer right now.

NYU is a fantastic med school. Defer, defer, defer! They'd rather have you when you are ready than when you're not sure you want to do med. And if you don't want to do it, first year is going to be terrible. Try Teach for America or some other 1 year teaching thing. But deferring shouldn't be too difficult.

I also get some sense that this crisis of indecision you’re having is, to some degree, caused by your father’s disappointment in your admission to NYU. Your father is being very unfair and slightly crazy. Getting into NYU med school is a huge accomplishment. Ignore your dad. I know it’s hard. Forget about what your parents want. You can’t spend the rest of your life trying to appease the old man, just as you can’t spend your whole life trying to piss him off. What do you want to do?

I don’t think you should get an MA. If you or your family had money to spare, I would say go for it. But an MA costs big bucks, and isn’t really worth all that much unless you really want to teach. If you want to spend time with books and writers, consider library school or publishing internships. If you want to become a professor in English, go for your PhD, make sure you’re fully funded and get into a top-notch program at a very good school. You have many years of hard scrabble existence ahead of you as you compete for a pool of ever-decreasing jobs with similarly talented, driven people with excellent credentials. At your current level of indecision, I’m not sure if getting an MD is right for you either. Keep in mind what doctors do: they take care of sick people. Do you like to take care of sick people? Do you like making them better? Does spending the remainder of your precious youth memorizing medical information and caring for sick people sound like a valuable, enjoyable use of your time? If you answered with anything other than a resounding, annoyingly-perky ‘YES’ to any of these questions, then medicine isn’t the right field for you. So what should you do? Tell NYU that you’ll come back in a year. In that year, spend half your time volunteering at hospitals and getting as much exposure to sick people and the process of making them better as possible. Spend the other half of your time doing other things you enjoy and investigating potential professions that deal with the things you enjoy. An excellent choice would be working part time at an independent bookstore and continuing the literary activities that you are already engaged in. You will be working for the rest of your life. Doesn’t it make sense to take some time now to figure out what that will be, while you don’t have a mortgage and car payments and home repairs and credit card bills and hospital bills and little hungry mouths to feed and a spouse demanding a vacation and a 401k?