I Want To Quit Medicine to study Physics

[scottbekerham]

Hi all , I'm now 20 Years old in 4 th year medical school and medical education is free of charge in my country. I applied for a medical school not becoz I love it and want to be a doctor but Becoz when I was a high school students my parents told me its the only way to get employed and earn money coz I'm in Egypt , a third world country . Now I do not want to be a medical doctor . When I was young I was extremely interested in math and Physics and I am still .also I love thinking in math and I'm tired from those astronomical amount of uninteresting material that have to be memorized for Exams.So I want to be a physics scientist that's my dream from the time I was sixteen till now . I 've 2 options the first is to leave medicine and apply for a physics Bachelor and having wasted 4 years of my life in medicine . The second is to continue medicine until graduation and then apply for a physics bachelor and then apply for a theoretical Physics grad school to get PhD in it.Please Any Advice?

 

[Diracula]

How long until you are done with your medical degree? In the US, an MD is 4 years... if your medical degree is 4 years in Egypt and you are in your 4th year I think you'd be insane to quit before you are finished. Complete it and then consider applying for physics bachelor's programs. If you are not close to completing the medical degree it's a different story.

 

[scottbekerham]

How long until you are done with your medical degree? In the US, an MD is 4 years... if your medical degree is 4 years in Egypt and you are in your 4th year I think you'd be insane to quit before you are finished. Complete it and then consider applying for physics bachelor's programs. If you are not close to completing the medical degree it's a different story.

I have still 3 Years left to graduate . I would be 23 years old then .

 

[Antiphon]

Do what you like not what you think your patents want. I don't want an unhappy doctor treating me.

However, you owe it to them and yourself to finish medical school. That way you have a career to fall back on if physics is not paying the bills.

Good luck.

 

[Diracula]

I have still 3 Years left to graduate . I would be 23 years old then .

Well that's a tough one... My personal approximate rule is if I am more than halfway done with doing something I don't like (but it has long-term value) I go ahead and suck it up and finish it. But this is just my own personal, very rough, guideline... It sounds like in your country a medical degree is a ticket for pretty solid career, right? Do you absolutely hate it, or just don't really find it all that interesting and would rather do physics?

What does a physics career look like in your desired location? Willing to move? Can you pick up a second (physics) major while still completing your medical degree?

Note that it's really really difficult to get a career doing physics research, and if you do it still takes a long time to break in and get a permanent position somewhere.

Just some stuff to think about. I think the most important thing would be to consider how much you really dislike medicine, and make sure you understand the differences in career outlook for a physicist vs. a physician/surgeon. (just because you like doing something doesn't mean someone will pay you to do it... something to keep in mind with respect to physics)

 

[Choppy]

Something else to factor into your decision is how much you like doing physics compared to reading about popular physics. While it's very interesting to relax on your own time and ponder a popular text on higher dimensions or quantum entanglement the reality is that as a physicist you will spend most of your time doing rather mundane things like writing code, searching for bugs in code, figuring out how the output from one code become the input for another code, etc.

You may want to start by taking a class or two in physics, rather than jumping in head first to see if you really enjoy it as much as you think you do.