tougher: to become a "doctor" or "engineer?"

Dk-blue_Falcon
Sat, 14 Jul 2007 00:48:01 +0000

so i got into a discussion with my cousin about careers, and i finally asked him the question of what career he thought was harder to achieve: a doctor or engineer?

he told me that to become a doctor was more demanding given the overlong amount of schooling one must take in order to become one. true, one must go through undergrad, med school, and finally residency – in aggregate requiring immense patience. that is not to mention the relatively slight difficulty in the curricula of a prospective med student.

i, however, thought otherwise. ironically, i don’t really know exactly all the steps required to become an engineer (do they need to go to grad school?), and i know that the amount of education time-wise for a student to become an engineer is less than that required for a med student, but consider the esoteric concepts of the required subjects that engineers must be able to understand. they require so much brain power to the point where not just any lay student will be able to understand the material even with a lot of studying.

i know “doctors” have a higher avg salary than do engineers, but that is unsubstantial

for our interests’ sake though, let’s try and compare the route one must take if he/she wanted to become a chem/ee/mech/aero engineer for a prestigious entity (e.g., nasa) with the route one must take to get into a top-tier med school and later land a true doctor-paying job.

in the end though there is no wrong or right answer given the condition that there are such things as “good” doctors and “bad” doctors just as there are highly paid engineers and poorly paid engineers (that in addition to the different types of engineers). however, enlighten me. let your brains’ run wild.