Johnny: One of my aunts went to medical school in her early 40s, after her children were off to college. This was back in the 1970s and was sufficiently unusual that she got written up in Harvard’s alumni magazine. Most med schools had age limits at the time, not wanting to waste a medical education on an oldster who wouldn’t have time to apply it. She has been very happy with her career as a physician.

So… if you think the material is interesting and the job would be satisfying, go for it! It is true that you will lose some income during the years of training (best to account for this with about a 4% inflation-adjusted rate of return unless you have some proven way of making better investments than the rest of the world) but most people who are in an intensive program of education don’t have time to spend/enjoy money. You see a lot more miserable $55,000/year cubicle-dwelling programmers than $15,000/year graduate students. For most people the joy of owning a brand-new BMW fades fast whereas the joy of learning new things and being surrounded by interesting friends does not fade.

“At age 35, with an MS in Computer Sci, is it too late to go back to school and get a medical degree?”

A couple of things to consider. First, can you afford to not work for a few years and invest well over six figures in tuition and other expenses? Do you have the stamina to put in 80-100 hour weeks during that time? Do you have no serious adversion to the risk of spending that kind of money and maybe not being able to complete the education for one reason or another? Consider your lost income during medical school and residency and add it to the cost of the education. Enter the time value of money. If that money was properly invested for the rest of your 30 years of working life, it could easily become over a couple of million bucks on its own. Will you really make so much more money over the next couple of decades that it will outweigh the downsides?

If you answer yes to the above questions, then do it. Or do it anyway because you really want to do it and the money isn’t the issue.

As for Academia, what’s your hurry:
I had wanted an academic career in biology and, through a stroke of luck, had a mentor as an undergrad that could put me on a facinating career path. Although not a super high paying career path, it would have been a comfortable life and had some really cool perks. With everything in my favor at that point in my life, I suffered a major, life changing catastrophy. My apartment building was burned down by an arsonist. I lost my cats, all my stuff, all my research notes and almost me. So, instead of an academic career, I went into medical information systems. Twenty-some years later, I had a mid-life crisis… I never did what I really wanted to do with my life. I am now a consultant in the biopharmaceutical industry. I design software to help them determine if their drug candidates are safe and effective and I’ve mentored a lot of young kids entering the industry. Not a bad calling, except that I always wanted to be a research biologist, not a computer geek (OK, I actually like being a computer geek but…). While I’m not rich, I’ve made pretty good money over the years. Money that I would never have made in an academic career. With that (and a supportive wife), I realized that I could afford to fund my own research. Mid-live crisis over. I don’t have to chase grants, I have no pressure to publish and I can follow up on what *I* want to research. My research project is tedious and time consuming, but I can do it when I feel like doing it. I buy whatever I want to equip my lab because I’m the one holding the purse strings. I only have to cost justify my expenditures to me. As a result, my microscope is worth more than my car (but I still drive a pretty nice car). However, the absolute *BEST* part is that when I publish (when *I’m* ready to publish), I’ll answer an important question that’s still waiting for me after these last twenty-some years.

Philip, what on Earth would posess you to compare salary between a postdoc and a practicing physician? A postdoc is a limited-term apprentice, most comparable to a medical resident. Interns on average earn $38.5-49K per year, which is about $10 per hour for an 80-hour workweek.

http://tlc.discovery.com/fansites/residentlife/article/stats.html

At age 35, with an MS in Computer Sci, is it too late to go back to school and get a medical degree?

Nick: The Federal Trade Commission did a study some years ago of the return on investment from various forms of education, ranging from trade schools to colleges and post-grad schools of various kinds. Medical school was #1 in R.O.I. So enjoy your deskjob but don’t feel sorry for the medical doctors flying overhead in their $1 million personal airplanes on their way to their waterfront vacation houses.

Wally: Malpractice insurance is a painful cost that has to be passed on to consumers but it is only a problem for doctors who wish to work part-time (most MDs could make an adequate living working only 2 days per week but the insurance company would still charge them the same premium as a doc working 5 days per week; hence the only part-time jobs that make sense are for the federal government hospitals or HMOs that pay the insurance premium). Any survey that you see of MD salaries will be after paying malpractice insurance and other expenses.

Miriam: Some science professors at top schools earn a decent salary, though keep in mind that even if Professor Jane gets $10 million in grants she can only pay herself an amount fixed by the university (usually in the neighborhood of $80-120,000 per year). More important, however, is the fact that being a tenured professor at a top school is not an average fate for a person who chooses to pursue a career in science. http://www.studentdoc.com/obstetrics-gynecology-salary.html shows that average ob-gyn in the U.S. at $238,000/year and the very lowest paid at $184,000/year. The energetic smart person who made it to a tenured professorship should probably be compared to the top-earning ob-gyns at $350,000/year or top-earning radiologists at $429,000/year (http://www.studentdoc.com/radiology-salary.html).

Obviously if you love what you’re doing even a $20,000/year salary is just fine but I’m not sure that people should get worked up over the fact that more men than women or vice versa are getting jobs that pay below a certain threshold.

Let’s not forget that Ob/Gyn’s, among others, have a little something
called malpractice insurance that crimps bottom line.

My bottom line: working on behalf of General Al Haig in ‘08!

Most scientists get paid what they deserve. Why should a post-doc get paid more than $35,000 for surfing the web, sleeping in until noon, washing test tubes, attending journal club, and publishing papers in journals that nobody, including other scientists, ever read?

Medical school is 4 years on top of a BA, with 2 years of residency over that. So factoring in 8 years of college at minimum of 20k a year, so we end up with 160k in student loans (probably a lot more), add two more years of that when you’re making diddly. 10 years of your life before you can start earning a dime, really. So I’m not sure medical school is the best bang for the buck. Also consider your OBGYNs are on call 24×7. In fact the only doctors I know who work 9 to 5 are radiologists. I’m glad I write software for a living, and I make more than your average math/science academic and I can barely spell theta =D

I think many professors also get additional research grants and the like. They have to bust their butts getting the proposals out in time but once you get a few under your belt, it snowballs. This might be why Universities offer small pay too – a portion of the grant cushions the Prof’s salary, a portion pays for grad student research and a portion goes towards the school. Thus it is in the school’s best interest to make sure the Prof is going to do all he/she can to go after those grants, endowments or whatever else is out there.

On a side note, I have always heard that in biology, the women out number the men.

Thanks for reminding me why I dropped out of my math ph.d. program to become a programmer. Yeah. Then to ditch that to become a trader. Well, on the bright side, all that math and cs didn’t totally go to waste.