Ruminatin’ in the storm

So apparently ruminating literally means swallowing and then bringing your food back up during a meal and chewing on it some more. As you guys might have heard, we have had a storm recently (here’s a pic of the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth which is our student center where we have performances – $5 bucks for Wynton Marsalis last year baby!) Anyway, as usual, whenever I have time off I end up thinking about the career. I honestly dunno if its ambition anymore or insecurity but here are my current thoughts about potential career paths and their inadequacies.

In general, I still haven’t found the perfect career. This may be because I am really looking for a career in which I can have it all: be able to do something that is interesting and constantly stimulating, honorable and worthy of respect, get paid handsomely, while having free time to do things I like (travel, interact with diff cultures) and to raise a family and finally something where I can feel like I am having a social impact. That said, here are some of my recent thoughts on potential career tracks and their potential shortcomings.

1) Venture capital – its cushy, you get paid handsomely, you get to feed your ego (once you have raised that billion dollar fund), its very stimulating and you get to interact with all kinds of experts, lots of excuses to travel and meet new people

drawbacks: you really don’t get a sense that you are making any kind of social impact although this is a great profession to make enough money and have the time to do philanthropy on the side. You also pretend that you are starting businesses more than you actually are although I am not sure just how much I want to “get my hands dirty” as an entrepreneur these days.

2) Working for McKinsey in one of their more entrepreneurial practices (like Beijing) – very prestigious, you don’t get paid that well but its a stepping stone into bigger and better things, the networking is phenomenal (for example, there are 5 McKinsey projects apparently studying the Iraq rebuild strategy), they give you weekends off which is pretty cool, you travel a lot, its very international

drawbacks: its really not very entrepreneurial and can be very academic and rigid, seems like its more of a stepping stone than a long term career for me. Again a big drawback is that you don’t really get to feel much of a social impact in your work although I guess there are pro-bono projects you can do (e.g. Gates Foundation is a client of McKinseys as well as several African governments)

3a) Neurosurgery – my latest fad specialty in medicine, you get to put your hands in people’s brains! How cool is that? ;) This may be nothing or it may be something but its very prestigious and we have really only hit the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we can already and will be able to do in applied neurobiology in the next decade. Already there are experiments being done that are making people walk and talk again, curing people with tremors (I have seen this myself, its literally miracle work). You really really get to help people, it is prestigious, well paying, very secure.

drawbacks: apparently you can sacrifice your life for this specialty very easily and in some places that is even expected, 7 years of residency, hard to have a family life, you are on call the rest of your life, working with very sick patients

3b) Interventional Neuroradiology – you do minimally invasive neurosurgeries basically by going through blood vessels and doing microprocedures on people, this may be to neurosurgery what balloon angioplasty and stents have been to heart surgery. This is a happy medium in many senses, there is cutting edge work being done also in this field, there is tons of potential AND you get a life, only problem is that it is VERY competitive to get into any of these programs and still a long residency process if you include the fellowship time (6 years total)

3c) Emergency Room Doc – its shift work, you work a couple of days a week and then take the rest of the time off, its very intense extremely challenging exciting and you really get to help people. You are paid well, the residency is short (3 years) and the people you help are really the people most in need and it is very financially challenging to be in ER medicine (most ER depts in the US do not do research, don’t get as much grant funding and take in all the sick uninsured people so they are cost centers to the administration).

drawbacks: this may be a happy medium within the constraints of medicine. You still have to do residency you still have to stay local mostly.

4) Working for or running an NGO building social justice in places like Burundi or doing barefoot doctor work in China

drawback: no $$, no real prestige although lots of self respect, tough life but you get to travel and meet a lot of needy people and build the things we take for granted here. I think ultimately I might be better suited to directing an NGO from the board as a philanthropist though.