Need help picking a college major computer science or medical i know medical will always be safe but is the technology sector really safe no out sourcing .
Well, out of the two of those I’d probably say the medical route is safer. However, while it is important to have a decently paying job, there can be drawbacks to only majoring in something for that reason if you’re not actually passionate about it.
This is particularly true with computer science. My brother was a CS major, and while he was able to land interviews for a few prestigious jobs, he didn’t get them because he was competing with kids who had been, say, coding since they were in elementary school. CS was largely a spur-of-the-moment thing for him, and although he was a very good student, he lacked the genuine passion that he needed to land a career.
It depends on what you do in the technology sector. Of course some tech jobs are being outsourced, and in others the salaries and positions available might decrease by automation or other processes.
Jobs that have the lowest potential to be outsourced or automated are jobs that require knowledge and specialized skills. Coders and programmers who are not involved in design may be outsourced or partly automated, because writing code is pretty easy. Actually designing and developing software (which includes writing some code, but is bigger than that) is harder and takes actual human effort, and is more likely to be done stateside by important stakeholders. Program management, too, is unlikely to be outsourced.
Also, I’m not sure what you mean by ‘medical will always be safe’, but medicine is driven by economic factors and highs and lows too, just like other sectors. A lot of people assume that health and medicine is somehow free of economic constraints because people always get sick, but people also consume fewer health and medical services and goods when the economy recesses - they just choose to stay sick, or go longer without getting things repaired, or what have you. This also depends a lot on your specialty - emergency room doctors may be less effected by economic factors, but dermatologists and allergists will be. Fewer people go in to get Proactiv or microdermabrasion or other medically unnecessary or pseudo-necessary services when they don’t have a lot of money. Even some specialties like cardiology or neurology are still affected; people who need stress tests or headache evaluations and who would normally get them when times are good may be less likely to do so and rely on OTC meds and strategies when times are rough.
Nurses and other allied health professionals feel the burn , too - when times are bad, hospitals and clinics and such get less funding (from government sources because taxes are down; from private corporations to preserve their profits when people spend less; from philanthropists who are being stretched thin). So they hire fewer allied health professionals to save money. Doctors’ offices may hire fewer nurses and PAs to cut costs.
Medicine isn’t recession-proof. It’s a lot more robust against recessions than many other fields, but it still feels the effects of economic change.
@julliet is exactly right. There is a common misconception that if one goes into a health related profession that he will always have a well paying job , with good benefits and that he will have his pick of jobs. That is not true . With more and more people choosing health careers , the market is becoming saturated. Often new graduates go for some period before finding a job . When they do find a job , it may be part time or in a less desirable location. It may involve relocation or working less than desirable hours. The opposite is also true. Many students that choose to go into a job where there is an extreme shortage of workers, may find themselves in difficult working situations and burn out quickly.
My advice to students when they ask for it is to choose a career that you are truly interested in, not one just to " make a lot of money" . It’s important to consider the financial implication of a career, but that shouldn’t be the primary deciding factor. I also advise students to shadow or volunteer if they are looking at healthcare professions to really get a better understanding of what healthcare involves. It’s not for everyone.
@winter15 Current medical student here. Do NOT commit to the pre-med track if your main goal is a good compensation and a comfortable lifestyle. It’s certainly good to consider things like job security and salary when thinking about what you might want to do for a living, but I can promise you that you will be unhappy if you just go into medicine without a true passion for healthcare.
Aside from the facts that pre-med is very hard and med school is even harder (and residency can be even harder, from what I’ve seen), there are a lot of dissatisfied doctors who report that, if they were to do it all over again, they would not go into medicine. Google the annual national physician survey data published on MedScape for the exact statistics, broken down by specialty. You’ll see that there are some neurosurgeons, a specialty with a median clinical salary of $700k+, who report feeling undercompensated–not because they think $700k is a small sum, but because they work a ridiculously high number of hours/week in order to make that money.
In medicine, the training is rough, the hours are rough, dealing with combative patients is rough, working with clunky EMRs is rough…I could go on. But if you happen to fall in love with medicine and all that it stands for, everything you did to get there and everything you still have to deal with will be worth it. It may surprise you to learn that physicians in psychiatry and pediatrics, two of the lowest earning specialties, are among those who report feeling most fairly compensated on average; meanwhile, the lucrative specialty of urology sits at the very bottom of that same list on the 2016 report (http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2016/public/overview#page=15). Why do you suppose that might be?
Shadow physicians, volunteer in a hospital/clinic/hospice, or work in as allied health professional to get a feel for medicine. If you don’t absolutely love it, run away and don’t look back. There are certainly much easier paths to making much more money in this day and age. But if, after years’ worth of clinical experiences, you ever reach the point where you feel like you can’t imagine doing anything else with your life, then medicine can be one of the noblest and most rewarding causes to dedicate your life to.