I second this. My wife is a biologist by training but went to nursing school (this was back in 2000) to ensure she'd always have a job, in any economy. She fe

I second this. My wife is a biologist by training but went to nursing school (this was back in 2000) to ensure she'd always have a job, in any economy. She fell in with a nationally known urologist MD/PhD during the program and got an offer before graduation to start working in his clinic attached to the university. The pay was awful (~$35k/yr at that time) because of the glut of fresh nurses minted by the uni each year. The work wasn't bad in a clinic -- standard office hours and no obligation to pick up shifts at the hospital -- and it was a great opportunity to get involved in real research (she published in her first year there), but it was mostly repetitive and boring, and again, the pay stunk. When my company relocated me out of state, she switched over to drug safety & pharmacovigilance at a CRO, and then at a pharma. Most of the roles in those areas require a health care provider background (either RN/BSN or MD/RPh) and the stress & money are muuuuuuuuuuuuch better. I was a senior IT manager with a team of about 80 people in 10 countries and she was making more than I was (back in about 2009). Nursing school is much easier than medical school, and there are still perks to having that professional credential, and, as she and her colleagues always joke, they can "always go back to the hospital if things get bad". That said, my next door neighbors are both consulting radiologists and work from home. I barely see them, but by all appearances they're making bank while exerting hardly any effort. My childhood friends who've become doctors are a pediatrician and an ER doc, respectively, and they work much harder but they love the career they've chosen. To each his own: in every field there are ample opportunities for the top performers.