Becoming a lawyer or a doctor....advice! please help!

mttyler7
Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:41:45 +0000

I’m going to be a freshman this year in the UGA Honors program…I know it’s fairly early for me to say this, especially considering that I haven’t taken any classes yet, but I think I want to either be a doctor or a lawyer. Here’s my dilemma though:

I think I would be much better at being a lawyer–I feel like my ability to critically think in terms of politics, law, and philosophy is much stronger than my ability to think critically in the field of science. I’m also much more interested in politics and constitutional law/theory than science (I’m currently a poli-sci major).

I, however, don’t really like the idea of being a lawyer, even though I’m interested in it and I think I would be good at it–I feel as though lawyers don’t really “help” the world (I know this is a law forum–please don’t get angry at this! This is just a generalization. Please prove me wrong!). My dad is a tax lawyer (a.k.a. he helps rich people get away with evading taxes) and I hate it.

I really like the idea of being a doctor, but as I said before, I feel like I’m better at the humanities than the sciences (although I consider myself to be fairly well-rounded). In high school, I always felt so bored in my science classes (even the higher level IB Chemistry Class). Does this change in college? I really just want to help people, and I feel like I could do this more directly by becoming a doctor. I especially like working with kids and am thinking about becoming a pediatrician. All of the pre-med courses for freshman have already been taken up, so I would have to wait until next semester to start on the pre-med track, but I may be able to exempt a semester of freshman chem with my IB scores and a placement test. Is there any way I could combine poli-sci and pre-med in a RELEVANT way and would med schools like this? Also, is there a way to do study abroad during the school year (fall/spring) for pre-meds? Most study abroad courses are for political science. Help! I’m just really confused right now.