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It's one of the things I thought about when I drew up my list of places I would be applying to work for, along with many others. Fortunately this country still has a plethora of cities in red states, some of which are run by people who - as you put it - give a damn, and have a decently high population of young people. I'm going to be moving to one of them. I spent my college and then law school career with an almost single-minded focus on the area I want to practice in, so while I attend a relatively regional school, I'm not limited to searching for jobs in the DMV. I've had very pleasant and productive conversations with offices that I can say without exaggeration span the country. It seems like I'll have my pick of several different places.
I might have to make a follow-up post about my process for making the speadsheet of places I want to apply to. It was extremely Mottian. Salary and cost of living of course, but I also made my own adjusted cost of living. I have excel columns on total population, population growth or decline, median age, percentage of white population, largest minority population, size of the local Jewish community (I like Chabad), presence of graduate programs, ease of access to nature, violent crime rate, property crime rate, addiction rate, presence of a "progressive prosecutor", political leaning of the county, political leaning of the state, gun laws, presence of a med school, reputation of local hospitals, and a few others.
If you want a large Jewish community, have you tried moving out towards Pikesville? You'll encounter fewer gunshots and more "I'm the only one out driving on a Saturday morning..." Not that you should stay here if you don't like it. It's a big wide world, find a place where you're comfortable.
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Without doxxing yourself, would it be possible to give your top 5 or 10 cities by those criteria? Would make for an interesting discussion.
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If you have a law degree and bar license, you can do pretty well in this area. That's my secret, I zeroed in on practicing the exact type of law that people that live here are most likely to need.
Lol definitely mottean, but I think there's no real substitute for doing an actual 'vibe check' and living in an area for a while. But knowing what you're getting into is good.
A mild pro-tip on this point is that moving somewhere with a lot of retirees tends to vastly increase the availability of local medical resources. Two main reasons: old folks are the major consumer of medical services so providers go where the money goes... and experienced doctors in the twilight of their careers will also move to this area as a pre-emptive retirement move, so you can have access to professionals with MASSIVE amounts of experience available, although it can be hard to book an appointment because they will work whatever hours they please.
I also don't mind gambling a bit that as a younger, healthy guy I'm unlikely to need any major medical services and so the quality of hospitals is demoted somewhat in my general hierarchy of needs.
Absolutely. I'm going to be doing some traveling this semester and next, visiting the areas I'm particularly interested in. I'm planning on walking around the area near where I would potentially be working, as well as checking out the areas I might live in. It's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass, but as you said, there's no substitute for an actual vibe check.
Good tip, thank you.
I differ from you in this for two reasons. The first, my hobbies include activities that put me at a noticeably higher risk for needing emergency medical care. I'm a particular enthusiast of competitive shooting (2-gun my beloved), as well as hiking and camping. I've done what I can to give myself an edge if something were to happen - I got my EMT-B several years ago and have mostly retained the emergency trauma lessons, as well as a Stop The Bleed course. My friend group recently had a competition where we had to record ourselves putting on a tourniquet from wherever we keep it in our daily lives in under sixty seconds. We're uh... weird. But fun. Anyway, so I tend to want to have good quality medical care in the area for that reason. The second, I'm hoping this next move will be my last for some time. I'd like to put down some roots. So, with an eye to the future, I take medical care into account. I thought about accounting for primary school quality as well, but I figure I'll either be somewhere with good schools, or I'll be making enough that I can afford to put my kid(s) in private school.
I've also pulled the trick of befriending guys with actual experience with trauma medicine and having them around me a good portion of the time.
One is previously a Navy Corpsman who has stitched up bullet wounds in Marines, the other was previously an EMT and now a fireman. So long as I have one of them around I can be relatively certain I'll make it to the hospital if I'm not killed instantly by any particular event.
My health insurance is geared towards catastrophic events (and paying for lost wages from being unable to work) so I do have to make sure I can get to the emergency room.
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