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I find concrete advice tailored to my circumstances very helpful, and I'm grateful that you offered it.
The main reason I am in all this rush is because of my timelines till transformative AI. I think my median is about 5 years till.
This makes spending more than 2 or 3 years doing a degree something I am uncomfortable with, unless they payoff is astronomical. A PhD seems to be entirely off the cards.
I would personally like to do a degree, I feel like I missed out on a fun college or uni experience, and god knows I'm going to be studying my ass off anyway with no end of exams in sight. But my rational brain tells me this is an indulgence I can ill afford.
I have no strong issue with staying in clinical medicine, but only if the salaries are good, and by the time they're merely mediocre in the UK, it'll largely be too late.
As it seems, I'll probably be spending one year at the minimum working in the UK, I've done the hard part, and I just need to save up money.
My dad owns a hospital. It's a very small one, don't get your hopes up that I have fuck you money. It's more like fuck me money haha.
I don't want to stay in India if I can help it, which is why I never considered doing a hospital management course or staying here and running it.
If you say its an option in the States, I can look into it, but I feel like it's not something I have any real aptitude for. I certainly see how hard my dad works to keep it going, and it scares me.
I have considered moving laterally into Pharma in the UK. It's all the rage with the pissed off locals, but I think my Indian degree is a mild handicap since they're looking for people with regulatory knowledge and field experience in the UK itself. Not impossible, but I'd need to spend a few years working there to build up my credentials I think.
The idea of going into consulting scares me, because if you thought doctors are mildly at risk from AI, the overpaid consultants of a different sort at McKinsey have seen nothing yet.
I don't think my girl has ladder climbing tendencies that I've seen, beyond a desire to escape the genteel poverty she was born into.
Other than that, I broadly agree with your points and think they're good advice. I hope that if I can drag her there on vacation, simply looking around will knock her out of a funk that mere verbal argumentation can't.
Meeting nice Americans , enjoying the lovely weather, seeing the sheer wealth and happiness they have, those are far more like to.
Thank you for taking time out of your day to help me! I'll mull over what you said, especially that Drop Out Club you mentioned.
At least in America PhD is merely a scam for foreigners who want a visa or Americans who don't understand time value of money. I was thinking more of a professional degree - executive MBA in the health field, a partially-remote data science or bioinformatics MA/MS. That leads to banking/consulting in the medical sector.
McKinsey consultants have nothing to fear from AI, because their job isn't to provide solutions. If you wanted to fix your problems, you could simply ask your employees how to improve. Managers hire a McKinsey consultant to give you social cover to refine and then do what they wanted to do in the first place. They are a priestly caste, not a service provider.
Non-MBB consultants might take a hit from AI, but even that's a good job as a springboard. You use your MBBS to get into the UK, you use your time in the UK to find some 1 year, possibly half-remote MBA/Masters, use that to get into banking/consulting, use that to get a transfer to the US office, use that to find out where you want to go in the future, which could be something different. It's the crazy American in me talking here - always be evolving, always be seeking, and swing from your vine to whatever better vine is swinging by.
If AI is your thing, there's probably someone hiring in medical AI.
Then tell her the real truth about AWFLs and social climbing. Watch her normie feed, and point out every time someone says something disparaging about America. See if there's a hidden class climbing motive to it. There almost always is. 99% of the time it's some AWFL trying to show how they're more caring/educated than their prole background, or complaining that their life is so hard because they're underappreciated by the proles. I've managed to pop plenty of rational but agreeable women out of the basic white chick liberalism memeplex simply by pointing out the status posturing underlying so much of it.
This isn't to say that America doesn't have problems. Be honest with her, America has problems, some of America's problems can be solved, and some of America's problems can be solved by (honest) liberals. But AWFL liberalism isn't about solving America's problems, America's problems, or even America. It's about the social status of AWFLs.
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