Are you choosing the right profession?
The New York Times has an article today on why lawyers and doctors are more miserable than ever. It cites the global economy as one reason behind attorneys’ misery because they are now expected to be on call 24/7 for their foreign clients. For doctors, they’re impacted by tons of paperwork and constant pressure to cut costs. Applications to medical school are way down because, apparently, Gen Y expects more instant gratification and aren’t willing to go through so many years of hell to get there. The article finishes by talking about how great it is to be an investment banker. If only my math skills were better than a fifth grader’s. 
January 7th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
ooh interesting. maybe law school enrollment will go down and it will be easier to find legal jobs, i know where i live, the market is saturated with lawyers!
January 7th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
I read this article yesterday and it pissed me off (surprise, surprise… maybe I need an anger management course). They talk about how lawyers are losing their prestige and imply that the field isn’t worth going into anymore. Then they talk up i-banking like it’s the second coming. Gag me. I’ve spent years working in both fields and I definitely feel the lawyers have way more long-term options than bankers. We can work in about a trillion fields, whereas bankers can only work in, well, banks. If we want to make a lot of money, we have to work long hours. But we also have the option to work less hours and make less money. Not necessarily true for bankers. Plus, their public interest options are severely limited, if not non-existent.
A law degree opens doors, and a lot of them. People who go to law school for the “prestige” are in for a big surprise, but people who go for opportunities will probably find them.
This article also annoyed me because it seemed to imply that we should all chuck our grad degrees and become successful entrepreneurs. Since it’s so easy. Give me a break.
January 7th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I haven’t read the article yet, but I was shocked to hear it played up i-banking. I can’t think of a more lifestyle unfriendly, emotionally and physically draining job. Burn out is so high and most people I know in that line of work are varying degrees of miserable. Yeah, you make a ton of money, but you work for every penny. It gets better as you move up, but like New Duck says, how many exit options do you have? (not many) One of our closest friends works for Goldman and got a $400,000 bonus last year- but there were only 2 weeks he didn’t work over 80 hours. I vastly prefer to work more reasonable hours (ha! never thought I’d say BigLaw is reasonable, but by comparison it is) for less, but still great, pay.
Now I need to go read the article.
January 8th, 2008 at 2:11 am
I third the above comments. As sucky as my law job is, I couldn’t imagine being in i-banking. And not really because of the hours, but because the smarmy-ness that is most i-bank jobs. It’s a misconception that bankers are these brainiac number crunchers. That’s only a very small minority of i-bankers. Most of the rest are nothing but highly polished salesmen. Blech.