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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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Progress Update (alt title "Dummy learns to code after wanting to understand funny programming memes"):
I'm going to be traveling the half a day it takes to get to my med school to wrangle with the Dean in order to get him to wrangle with the ECFMG regarding the certification of said med school. I can only hope there isn't a lot of money involved, since they're cheapskates, but at this point I think the return from me becoming eligible for the USMLE would outweigh expenses as high as $100k, not that I'm going to offer to pay that much unless I have no other choice. The longer I put it off, the higher the odds that when it finally does happen, they'll throw up their hands and say that they can't vouch for the standard of education at the time I was a student.
In the meantime, my coding saga continues. I've done a handful of leetcode problems (easy, I got my hopes up regarding tackling a medium until I realized that my intuitive approach of using arrays would go FUBAR, and that I need to figure out how to use linked lists and dictionaries, two concepts that were never tackled in my odd 2 years of high school programming experience, meager as it is).
I've done a metric fuckton of MIT OCW problems, though the majority seem to be finicky edge case teachers rather than true concepts, but I'm aware that a fine eye for the edge cases is something programmers need to cultivate.
I try not to use GPT if I can help it, but it often serves to better explain certain concepts I struggle with than even the otherwise excellent MIT professors providing the video lessons of the course. As a note:
Avoid using ChatGPT 3.5 (the free one) for learning to code
From my experience, it makes subtle and fucking annoying errors in about 10% of the problems I ask it to tackle, and I had to beat my head against a wall a few times when it hallucinated issues in the code that didn't exist, or proclaimed that a solution authoritatively, only to walk it back when challenged.
Actual GPT-4 API/Bing are much better, if they're making subtle errors in the code, then it's still running, and the problems are far beyond my capacity to deduce.
I already feel bad for the people in companies who can't use it as a coding assistant, because it makes tidying up spaghetti and fixing syntax errors a breeze. I do my best to grok concepts even when I'm using it, often telling it not to correct any issues in the code or underlying algorithm unless I've personally spotted it, or am utterly stuck.
I finally know how to actually write recursive code, scary as it is, as opposed to having a theoretical understanding of what that involved. That's the first concrete step outside my old curriculum, and it isn't really that hard as long as you adapt to mentally juggling what variables you're tossing back.
My interview went well, and I'm currently on track to get a post in the oncology department at a rather upscale hospital. It's sleepy work, well, if not sleepy, then when patients deteriorate I'm not the one on the hook, but I'd be better served with ER experience, so if I get in, I'm going to badger them into letting me kill a few people once in a while haha.
You know what? I kinda like programming, barring the tedious minutiae. I used to hate maths back in school, but here I get to throw teraflops at knotty little issues till they cave in. Plus you get a visceral sense of progress that studying medicine doesn't provide, as well as regular "aha!" moments. The relative lack of rote memorization is refreshing, and I'm putting in the work while I can.
PS: Do not visit the discussion section in any leetcode problem. My fellow Indian brethren are busy living their wannabe programming influencer dreams in there.
I thought the main issue with moving to the US as a doctor wasn’t the USMLE, it was residency (which even many American doctors struggle with). Spending $100k only to run into that wall seems like it might be a waste? I was thinking for you, by the way, why not consider Singapore or Hong Kong? Both full of high-paid Indian doctors treating the local and global super-rich.
Coding is fun, I wrote about my own amateurish learning experience with Python and then ML/ data science a while ago. But it’s hard not to think, especially with Copilot and GPT-4 (which didn’t even exist publicly when I started!) that these jobs are going the way of the dodo. Anecdotally there are already stories of big data science / ML teams getting laid off because in-house models perform worse than generic GPT/Claude/large scale pre-trained model merely tuned by a single local engineer on whatever corporate dataset it is. 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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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.
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)
In you case some differences are:
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.
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