site banner

Wellness Wednesday for September 28, 2022

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).

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I feel pretty unsecure about the future. I immensely regret my Physics degree, probably the biggest regret. All the areas interesting to me (astro and nuclear) are dead end and becoming more and more computational so I will probably end up as a programmer, which I found easy to understand but one of the most boring profession in existence (heresy, I know), or I can pursue some experimental condensed matter specialization and trying to find work in material science, better than programming. In other words, I was fascinated with the idea of Physics and with studying Physics but hate all the profession I am qualified for.

TLDR: I wish I had done Medical School as my mother wished.

Are you American? Not sure your age or where you are in your career process, but there are plenty of people who start medical school well after finishing college. It sounds like you are just out of undergrad, so you aren't even that much behind. There are many 1-year postbac programs designed to fulfill any prereqs you are missing and also help you get other experience that helps with admission.

Another more obscure path that might be a good fit for you is getting a PhD in medical physics. There's a lot of demand to hire them for clinical positions at big medical centers.

I'm not American and in Europe Medical School is a 6 year track with an intense workload that would make no sense: I would to get a full time job to finance it given that there's no university in my city and I would need to rent an apartment, so I ruled out as something to stop regretting. As for Medical Physics there's a tough job market but it would be feasible by emigrating. Thank you for your answer.