Best career in the medical field?

How terrible is the path from an unrelated bachelor's in computer engineering to a career in the medical field as a physician or doctor?

• Statistics say that a lot of people go into college for one thing and then leave college with a completely separate degree or career field in mind. This happens for lots of reasons, including obviously differentiating someone's career desires from familial expectations and discovering career paths that the student was unfamiliar with before. I can be very stubborn, and I wonder if this mentality has led to me choosing a career path and then dogmatically sticking with it. I am finishing up a standard undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering, and questioning whether or not I should consider continuing my schooling with the drastically different goal of becoming a physician assistant or specializing in nutrition and metabolism. These things have always interested me, though I tend to find chemistry boring (at least the introductory kind they teach in generic undergraduate degree programs). I don't know the path from computer engineering to becoming a medical professional, and while I can picture myself as a physician more than I can picture myself happily employed in the computer software industry, I need advice on how to pursue this path in medical and what I should be doing to get there. How do I find out if I want to be a P.A. or an M.D. or a metabolic nutritionist & c.? If I decide that is what I want, how do I go about getting there?

• Answer:

  Firstly, whoever asked me to answer this: I am not a doctor. I dropped out of medical school. So I can't tell you what it's like to switch into the field... But I do have extensive experience integrating seemingly unrelated elements into a cohesive whole. So here's what I *can* offer: Nothing is "unrelated" in life: How you spend your days is what makes you into you. All of it. Therefore everything that you've experienced (and I do mean everything) has a component contribution to the person that you are at this very moment. Find ways to integrate your experience constructively instead of viewing them as itemized phases of your life. Career "paths" do not exist anymore: The framework that you choose a career at age 21 and pursue that until you retire is not serviceable to the majority of people under the age of 35 presently. Even if you were to pursue medicine -- which is relatively highly regimented -- you will still have (if you're lucky) opportunity for improvisation, parallel trajectory, etc. Nothing is a straight line. If you find chemistry boring, you may struggle in medicine. You don't necessarily need extensive knowledge of chemistry (i.e. doctorate level) to succeed as a physician. However, the mode of thinking employed in analytical chemistry *is* highly adaptive as a physician. If that bores you, you will not enjoy the constant titration of problems and solutions that being a doctor entails. Stubborn = ego. This *will* make your path in medicine difficult. Most of your years of training will have an undisclosed goal of stripping away your ego. Medicine -- with rare exception -- is a profession of service. It seems like you're trying to reverse engineer a career path from a title to where you are right now. The motivation to do this comes from knowing what you *don't* like and not truly understanding what you do.  Instead, spend more time thinking about the type of work you like to do, not purely existing job titles that you may be able to chase. This will get old and you will be left with just another degree and the same questions a few years down the road.