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This is amazing. I graduated from medical school two years ago with $300,000 in debt. I'm a software developer on the side and would love to stop residency to t
by aabajian 8y ago
This is amazing. I graduated from medical school two years ago with $300,000 in debt. I'm a software developer on the side and would love to stop residency to try a healthcare startup and/or pursue a research, but the risk is too great - I need the attending salary to pay off the debt.
- glitchc 8y agoIf I may ask, how exactly do you have the time to be both a resident and a software developer? There aren't enough hours in the day. Do you even sleep?
- blang 8y agoThere is time for life outside of residency. My wife started residency with a 5 month old and had another child half way through, this delayed her graduation a total of 4 weeks.
- CindyCarlson 8y agoWhile that's very encouraging to hear, that depends wildly on what program and specialty you are in. West coast vs East Coast plays a role too. Peds/OBGYN/IM/Derm and most female dominated specialties you see this. Neurosurgery, Ortho, Gen surg, etc not so much.
- yawz 8y agoI have outmost respect for this type of dedication. Amazing!
- glitchc 8y agoGood work supporting her. I'm sure that played a large factor. I suspect a single mom would have a much tougher time.
- rcdmd 8y agoHeh, I'll chime in as I did residency at a busy program and advanced my coding skills on the side. Even working 80hr+ weeks you find downtime. Some of that you use for sleeping and studying. With whatever's left, some of my co-residents liked to read. Others had sort of social lives outside the hospital. For me, I coded with most of my freetime. It helped scratch an itch-- problems are solved with 100% certainty, errors can be found with testing preventing many mistakes before they actually affect people, you can build something with your creative juices and get a level of independence not possible in medicine... The list goes on. But my point is, residency is demanding, but you still have a little downtime here and there.
- glitchc 8y agoTo parent and others, with due respect, I assumed that the OP was a professional software developer, based on the phrasing about using software to pay bills. Coding on your own time is more so a hobby, but as soon as you try to make money from it, even consulting on the side, the hours pile up. There's opening your own business, contracting, soliciting clients, meetings, status updates... way more than just the programming aspect. So in these cases, we talking coding as a hobby, or coding as a profession alongside medicine?
- Kenji 8y ago> It helped scratch an itch-- problems are solved with 100% certainty You didn't get deep into software development if you say that. No offence ;)
- aabajian 8y agoI did a prelim-surgery intern year. The hours are worse than medicine, but there are way less "mandatory" activities (no lectures, no endless rounding, etc.). For the most part, you're on the floor waiting for pages. I used the time between pages to write code. Now I'm a radiology resident and have much more time.
- notyourwork 8y ago> the time between pages to write code. Makes me feel like a slacker for not studying medicine or law while I'm waiting for my code to compile.
- gcheong 8y agoAll those wasted sword fights. https://3d.xkcd.com/303/ https://3d.xkcd.com/303/
- aabajian 8y agoI did my master's degree in computer science at Stanford, but now I'm a radiology resident at the University of Washington in Seattle.
- jpindar 8y agoSomeone make this: a plugin for an IDE that pops up a page from a whitelist (probably of documentation, but it could be anything you want to study) whenever you compile.
- vinhboy 8y agoDon't forget. He also had time to browse HN...
- gunnr15 8y agoAre you in the Bay Area? Would love to learn more about your experience.
- aesclepius 8y ago
- bbgm 8y agoI have a friend who is a resident and is the mother of 2 young children. That’s way more work than being a software developer. You find a way.
- trhway 8y ago>I'm a software developer on the side and would love to stop residency to try according to TV series residents don't even have time to sleep :)
- gachavez 8y agoFellow MD student here. I feel your pain. I've planning to just do PGY-1, work as a GP at urgent care night/weekends and do software dev full time.
- GoodOldNe 8y agoYou're going to work as a "GP" with at most one third of the training of almost every other doctor in practice? Seems like you're shorting your future patients a bit. My advice as someone who sees a lot of patients who were incompetently managed at urgent care is to avoid going this route. You're setting yourself and your patients up to fail with potentially devastating consequences.
- jcoffland 8y agoThis is not surprising. On my last two visits to late night urgent care I encountered complete incompetence. On the first occurrence, the Doctor did not know how to suture my hand. She put in four sutures when at least twice as many were needed and placed them way to close to the margin. She failed to even clean it properly. It ripped open again while I was sleeping. On the next, unrelated visit, the doctor was drunk. His face was all red and he reeked of alcohol.
- aesclepius 8y ago> You're going to work as a "GP" with at most one third of the training of almost every other doctor in practice? Not really a GP, more like a glorified triage nurse. Urgent care is where they give antibiotics out generically, and immediately transfer anybody sicker to the ED. (worked there, done that as part of residency)
- arkades 8y agoPGY1 gets you a license, but most private insurers will not reimburse for non-board certified providers.
- ReallyAnonymous 8y ago48 yo surgeon here - be careful, bc without board certification, you'll limit yourself to who will let you work in their clinic. You're getting paid for residency, just do two more years, get your FP / int med certification. As an aside, I went to UNC Chapel Hill 1992-1996 and it cost $2k/year tuition. Now it's $20k. We've had a shift in attitude in this country of "why am I paying for something that benefits someone else," but it's going to bite us in the ass down the road as intelligent / hard working people say "why should I accumulate debt to work that hard? I'll just choose something else." General Surgery and OB/Gyn have gone from being the hardest residencies to get, to now only requiring you graduate from medical school. The hours and the pay are the reason. Orthopedic surgeons get $1000 to put a scope in a knee and scrape a little whereas general surgeons get $400 to take out an appendix in the middle of the night. Ortho is hardest residency to get. I was top 25% of my class and if I tried to become a surgeon 10 years earlier, I wouldn't have. Most older surgeons were top 1% of their class. My senior partner was, and man is he super smart. Anyway, I still love my job, but the hours suck (80/week). Society benefits from my service (returning sick people to the workforce) and taxes I pay ($200k / year). Not too bad return on investment, imo.
- cartoonfoxes 8y agoI'm a software developer and would love to do medical school, but have too much student debt and the risk is too great. Want to trade places?
- 0xcafecafe 8y agoGeniune question: why does a degree cost that much? Is it the teaching staff salaries? Is it extremely state of the art equipment? Is it possible to disrupt that?
- seibelj 8y agoSome things that don’t help are the artificial restrictions on building new medical schools, the difficulty of becoming a doctor in America if you were trained in a foreign country (even a developed country like France), and union-style laws that prevent nurses from doing routine procedures reserved only for licensed MD’s (even banning certificate programs).
- dboreham 8y agoSame reason gold costs a lot: many people want it and there's limited supply.
- HatchedLake721 8y agoWhat? High demand made a degree skyrocket to $300,000? Half of Europe provides free education and doesn’t have a quarter of a million cost per student even close.
- pandler 8y agoI’ve started thinking of the obligation to stick in industry to pay off my loans as an analog to having an organization like the US military pay for my degree. I have a few friends in the military studying at university for free. Their payment for those degrees essentially consists of X number years of obligatory post-degree military service, in addition to whatever military obligations during their study. [1] It’s an imperfect analog I think, but it’s helped me contextualize my situation and remove some feelings of bitterness towards the debt I still owe. [1] I’m not military so I don’t know 100% how that works - open to corrections
- extralego 8y agoSounds like smart thinking to me. I do similar rationalizing myself, and I wouldn’t worry too much what others think. These things are tough to reconcile but we are all wrestling with them, and we have to keep our heads healthy to contend. The only mistake I’d warn against is letting this influence your judgement of others, or your prescription for future generations. They are counting on us and we are counting on them. The point about the military speaks to the reality that you are not alone, but the bottom line is we have been dealt an injustice. We must not pass this nonsense on to those depending on us to make it right. We’ve got to stand together against the agregious opportunism undermining the livelihoods of Americans. If nothing else, I don’t want to bare this weight through my middle age and still have the kids speaking of me in the way they speak of baby-boomers today. This isn’t to say the baby-boomers are to blame, but it is tough to feel sorry for them given the opportunities they had. I’d much rather get the praise the Great Generation gets. Let’s work for it. Love yourself, and all the moreso by loving others as well.
- pandler 8y ago> The only mistake I’d warn against is letting this influence your judgement of others, or your prescription for future generations. I’m curious what your segue is from contextualizing and rationalizing decisions I’ve/we’ve made for myself/ourselves to judgements on others. My point, I guess, was that it’s easy to think of university costs purely in monetary cost and ignore the inherent time-cost required to pay. The calculus I did when looking at schools was: it costs X much, median starting salary for this field is Y, I’ll have to “do my time” for Z years as payment for my education. Looking at it that way, I’m paying for school with time, not money.
- alrehn 8y agoGood on you for having that attitude, and not the "I had to do this bad thing, so they should too" line of thinking that is all too common.
- mprev 8y agoI think the debt level is crazy. But it sounds like you wish you’d had a free medicine degree so that you could be free not to practise medicine. I’d think if you get the degree for free then you almost should feel more obligated to practise.
- Broken_Hippo 8y agoUm... we do kind of need some research doctors. It might not be traditional practice, but how else are we going to advance medicine? I would think similarly about doing things with a healthcare startup - doctors are in the unique position of understanding medicine to a degree that makes it more likely to base the startup around actual facts instead of simply hiring a practicing doctor as a consultant for the project. There are more roles in medicine than simply delivering care.
- kendallpark 8y ago> I'm a software developer on the side and would love to stop residency to try a healthcare startup and/or pursue a research, but the risk is too great - I need the attending salary to pay off the debt. This is exactly why I pressed a giant pause button halfway through my MD to get a PhD in computer science. There was no other time I could do it. After 4th year? Too much debt; also looks bad for residencies to take time off. After PGY-1? Too much debt; would hurt me if I wanted to do a full residency. After residency? Too much debt; also that forces me to wait quite a few more years before pursuing my research/software dev ideas. Right now I can manage the debt from the first two years with my graduate stipend + summer internship gigs in the industry. If I had waited even one more year to do this, the debt would have been be prohibitive.
- Improvotter 8y agoHoly smokes, I cannot even imagine being 300 grand in debt.
- jpambrun 8y agoBut it would be a total waste for society if they paid your education in full and you did not practice. One related challenge of inexpensive education is the 'brain drain'. I am Canadian and hold a PhD in Engineering. Tuition was about 3,000 CAD a year throughout my education, with scholarships I ended up no dept at all. Now the temptation is move to the US or Europe is pretty strong, but I am still far from having 'repaid' the gouvernement's 100s of thousands of dollar (with ~160,000$ of in-pocket scholarships) investment in me. I think free or near-free education is great, but it's a bit of a gamble.