This is a quite silly question, but it’s something i’ve been contemplating for months now- medicine or cs.
After finishing my GCSES, and checking my marks on leaked papers i’m expecting a 9999999887 and i nedd to pick my a levels soon and this will determine my future career especially for medicine.
Throughout education i’ve been passionate about medicine and tech, both equally however i’m struggling to see what i want to go into. I’m either chosing maths, physics, cs or maths,biology,chemistry; one combination opening me up to finance/cs and another opening me up to medicine. I would love to take all of these A levels if i could.
I’m only interested in money and worklife balance- people always say you should never be a medic for the money but that’s just silly. If I’m rewarded with status and money i’ll do my job to the best of my ability and still strive to help others. worklife balance is crucial to me as i want as much time as i can get with my family, as i am quite family oriented and it means a lot to me, explaining my desire to have a high income.
with careers in finance/cs i feel like it’s harder to get into, please correct me if i’m wrong. there’s more skills to learn, networking is important and it requires luck to ‘know people’. i feel like its harder to break into while for medicine all you need to do is get good a levels, a good ucat and ur degree. to me, medicine is more linear and before i hear people say it’s hard, personally it looks much easier to me. i’ve done mock ucat tests and scored quite well considering i’m only 16, but i’m not here to flaunt and i’m aware that there’s many people smarter than me. again, everything i’m saying could be wrong, so please correct me. also i feel like medicine pays more- i’m looking to go into GP or dentistry, GP because its been my dream job as a child and because i’m amazed about how much knowledge one person can have about the human body, the latter being purely for the salary, as if someone asked me ‘why do you want to be a dentist’ i genuinely would not know. however i’m aware of all the debts and its something i want to avoid as much as possible since i’m a muslim and interest is forbidden. however i’ve read that doctors have higher lifetime earnings compared to those in tech. however it’ll take 10-12 years to break into an actual decent salary. also, you need to do A level chemistry and i’m not particularly passionate about chemistry compared to physics and cs. now with careers in finance and cs, i feel like there’s less earning potential and to land a high paying job simmilar to those in medicine, you need to be in quant finance or investment banking etc, which requires immense mathematical skills. while mathematics is a great passion of mine, i wouldn’t take it to a degree level thus i wouldn’t deem myself suitable to those highly mathematical jobs. I’ve heard that work hours are very long in finance which puts me off since i need a good work life balance, however with cs you can work from home. also its worth noting that another reason i want a good work life balance is because i want to go into entrepreneurship and one day own a startup; being in finance or cs equips me with great transferable skills. however i should also mention that cs is getting very oversaturated; whats your opinion on that? one of my friends is an extremely smart guy, landing around the same gcse results as me except he’s much more better than me at maths. he’s doing maths further maths and physics and wants to go into software engineering/artificial intelligence. in his opinion, medicine is way harder to him however to me its the opposite. i feel like medicine is much easier as i excel highly in scientific subjects relative to maths however both are strong for me.
what do you guys think will be the best career choice for me to go into? I’m literally only focused on money and time. being as nice as possible, please don’t give me a philosophical reason why i shouldn’t do something for the money; i’m from a deprived backround and financial freedom is my ultimate goal.