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Wellness Wednesday for July 12, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I had previously given Singapore consideration, but ran into an insurmountable issue:

They only accept two medical colleges from all of India, the former, AIIMS Delhi, is the premier med school in India. Think of it as being equivalent to Harvard Med. The other, Christian Medical College, Vellore, I've also only heard in very high regard.

I checked, and even the other pathway, being listed as a specialist in their Specialist Accreditation Board, also requires you to have graduated from those two. Barring a time machine (or forgery), neither I nor 99.99% of Indian doctors qualify. This above and beyond the requirement to have done a postgrad residency.

So the people you ran into were the elite of the elite.

From what I've read, there are plenty of local grads in SG, so they're in no real rush to take in any more, hence the exceedingly picky standards. I don't know anywhere else in the world where they're quite so anal about it.

As for HK, they have good pay but horrible working hours. I even met a HK junior doctor giving the PLAB, and she had had enough it. And I'd rather not live under the CCP's eye if I can help it. I think I'd be rather miserable there.

You might well find they’re automated faster than you, since doctors have both a cartel and there’s some public expectation for ‘bedside manner’, comforting patients etc (especially in oncology) that LLMs and robots can’t yet do convincingly.

Always a risk of course, but have I really got anything better to do? My current (default) plan is to give an exam called the MSRA in the UK in Jan, and enter psych training, assuming I have enough work experience to get a competency form signed off there. That involves about 3 months of work experience before their submission deadline. If my USMLE issue is sorted, I will seriously give it a shot, having secured the tentative approval of my girl. Or just skedaddle off to Can/Aus/NZ, since there would be no other barriers for a PLAB graduate with an existing GMC registration.

If I'm solving leetcode mediums by the end of the year, I think I have a crack at getting into something that weights both my clinical experience and programming skill. That means jobs in medical startups or pharma for the most part, and I doubt all of them will dry up in the 2 years or so of runway I can give myself. Think Tier 2, Tier 1 is still a pipedream.

Tangential rant.

My roommate who is a 2nd gen american-indian dated a bunch of indian dudes who went to AIIMS Delhi or IIT Bombay and now live in our high COL US city. She obviously has zero context for Indian institutes.

Then i hear her complain one day about how these men she dates only talk about work, never have time, cant make time for hobbies or jusst generally sound self important.....all while showering praises on any ivy league dude she ran into.

The ignorance is mindblowing. This is literally the 0.01 percentile of the country. They were the top 200 smartest Indians among 1 million annual applicants. MIT CS basically hands out free-admits eyes-closed to any IIT top 100 ranker. Some of my closest friends are MIT CS kids, and it is an open secret that the international chinese and Indian kids are straight up smarter. (Might not be as wellrounded tho) The funniest part is that all of these men are insanely humble, becuase thwy know their brand does all the talking for them. But in this case, they just come off as under-signalling.

Then when her dates dont work out, she'll say something like : "my expectations arent too high. I just want date someone like the guys i go on dates with, but that'll have time for me."

Lady, I dont think you even understand that youre dating the 10% of the 0.001 percentile of India who are both mindbogglingly smart and somehow hot enough for you to swipe on them. Her ex worked at google and paid for a whole Euro-trip and she says she doesnt care about how much money her partner has....... girl.......

Its a little sad to know just how monumentally delusional the expectations on these dating apps are. Also a little sad to hear people say things like : "Green cards to the US are not that hard. My friend did his medicine from Aiims / is a professor after studying at IIT bombay" and he got in. You should try something like that."

Bruh, I'd have better odds if I tried winning the lottery.

Yeah. That sounds like "full professor at MIT or Harvard". As I understand it, MIT also pretty much hands out those free admissions to anyone that's published significant math research in high school or won national or international math contests.

Yup, even though at this point I'm quite confident that I can teach myself enough programming/data science/ML to be employable within a year or two, I'm still worried that visa issues and my Indian citizenship will make it pointless, at least for the sake of going to the US. Do you have any idea what the implications of the EB1 rollback to 2012 are?

Then i hear her complain one day about how these men she dates only talk about work, never have time, cant make time for hobbies or jusst generally sound self important.....all while showering praises on any ivy league dude she ran into.

Man, she really must have no fucking clue, because that type of man (or woman) is precisely what you get after you submit even smart and hardworking med students to the insane standards that AIIMS demands. I really don't think you can go through that and come out a person who cares about anything other than their work and career, or at least that's true for the majority. Even if I was as smart as them (probably not), I certainly wouldn't want to go through that kind of grind.

that type of man (or woman) is precisely what you get after you submit even smart and hardworking med students to the insane standards that AIIMS demands. I really don't think you can go through that and come out a person who cares about anything other than their work and career, or at least that's true for the majority.

Yeah. I've heard that in the US, only the service academies, MIT, and Caltech basically irrevocably change those who attend for life. I know a man who, over thirty years after graduating from the US Naval Academy, will occasionally clean a counter and then say "Hooyah. This part of our mission is now accomplished."

I dont fit into any Eb1 category, so dunno much about it. I have a few tier1 papers and US patents to my name, but none sufficiently cited to get me that Eb1. PhDs are practically required.... and I dont have 5 years to kill.

Isnt your long term partner a US citizen ? I have pretty much resigned to that being the pathway that will come up earliest. I have a pending eb2 submission, but thats a few decades in thw queue.

Isnt your long term partner a US citizen?

She's as Indian as I am, though she could currently sit for the USMLE and I can't.

I'm really unfamiliar with the pathway for immigration for programmers to the US. Was it much easier when you did it? What kind of visa do you think I might qualify for?

I'm not a (immigration) lawyer.
I'm skipping a few important details but.... here's what I know.

The standard pathway is: (I used this)

  • Get into a STEM masters program (Healthcare ML might be a good for you)
  • Get approved for a 3 year work visa by landing a job (STEM OPT)
  • Pray to the god of luck, that your H1b application gets picked up over 3 tries
  • Continue working on the H1B
  • get into a for-ever waitlist for EB2 your green card
  • Live on the H1b for life-ish

In you case some differences are:

  • Not sure if doctors are eligible for EB1 (you can get that in 3 years from application date)
  • If you apply for a Green Card through your partner, then you don't have the usual waitlist (assuming she already has hers)
  • If you apply to do research or work at an NGO, you can get easier visas. (J1, F1, O1, noprofit-h1b)

Honestly, I would look at Canada. Climate change is going to make it very livable, and the immigration process is generous towards high achieving people. You get your PR in 1 year, and citizenship in 5 years. Then you're free to move to the US on a special visa and stay as long as you'd like. Canada will be solving its social-security pyramid issue through brute force immigration. They get to ride the American economic wave for free, while having a ton of under-utilized natural resource in store.

Thanks for the comprehensive reply!

I'll consider Canada, if the US looks currently infeasible.

I'll consider Canada, if the US looks currently infeasible.

Be aware that we will assimilate you.

"Sorry, resistance is futile, eh"