I've been wondering about this for a while now, and whilst I would volunteer to get work experience in both sectors I have an illness that prevents me from working currently. However it won't be forever (shouldn't be anyway!) and I want to start thinking about career options. I'm 22 so still quite young and when I'm better could do a uni course or apprenticeship if required.
Reason why I initially chose medicine: To help other people with what I've struggled with, which is a mental-somatic disease. I was thinking about specialising in neurology for that reason, but obviously there's a lot of hard work involved.
Computer programming I considered because it can easily be learned at home, you can get freelance work which suits my needs more, plus once I'm better I could always do an IT apprenticeship and there's plenty of work in the IT sector these days.
At the moment I'm trying to weigh the pros and cons of each but not having had much experience in either I can't really do it well and so joined this site to see if others can help me out. I'd like to know working hours and average pay of each, plus pros and cons of each job(preferably from people in the sectors).
My personality lends itself towards being curious, intelligent, and somewhat extroverted(though I can lack confidence in talking to people because of my condition), I enjoy hands on work, and problem solving, and understanding how things work and learning new things.
I should mention, pay check is a big one for me. Coming from a lower class family means I really want to make up for what I lacked in childhood. I wouldn't mind hard work if I enjoyed it and it gave me a bigger salary. Problem is I'm not sure what I enjoy most at the moment, I was always into science and maths at school and did best in those, always scoring over 97%. So either career option could work for me.
Thanks for reading if you've managed this far, and I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts.