Re: I knew the job market was bad, but WOW!!!!
Schools not much better, I'm afraid. I just pent the last several years working towards and applying to medical school, and so far I'm o'fer for interviews despite having 3.9 GPA, hundreds of hours volunteering, great letters of recommendation, and applying to some 30 different schools in and out of state, etc... Sorry not good enough! My most recent rejection email (they don't even bother to send you a letter anymore) informed me that 6,600 students applied for about 100 slots at decent, private, Southern medical school, not Harvard, or anything Ivy League mind you. I did the math and that's about a 1%-2% ACCEPTANCE rate, which is actually pretty normal for most med schools. I even got rejected from a school where my family has 100 years of legacy (3 generations) in the medical school alone. Sorry, still not good enough. Shoot even one of my former Organic Chemistry professors got rejected from med school and he already has a PhD and has been published multiple times. Sorry, still not good enough.
The problem is that not only am I competing against my fellow students and coutrymen, but you now have to compete against the WORLD (literally). Thanks to the internet, it's just as easy to apply from Hong Kong as it is from Chicago. Med schools can and will give your slot to a foreign national in a millisecond. They essentially have an unlimited pool of applicants, not unlike employers, so everything is stacked in their favor. Not to mention the fact that everyone in the world wants to go to a US med schools. So it's essentially a one way bottle neck. But hey, the good news is that if I can manage to get into a school and make it through in one piece I'll be in debt for the rest of my life, and I'll get to live with the specter of being sued at every minute of every day.
The first thing my mentor physician ever taught me is that patients are NOT people. They are first and foremost a lawsuit waiting to happen. Sad, but true. I think an iboats member's ex-wife recently benefited from suing her current husbands doctor for over $15 million dollars! Sounds great until your malpractice premiums have to cover it and/or they pass along the burden to their customers. You see, the insurance company never looses a dime, they just turn around and charge their current customers enough to make up for the judgement and financial awards. So when jurors think they're sticking it to the "Man" at the insurance company, they're really just sticking it to themselves. Gotta love that "Free" market at work. You see, they call it that because they're "free" to do whatever they want to you, whenever they want and there's nothing you can do about it. Whoopie!
who knows though, I might actually get into a school, of course, I'm not sure how I'd pay for it. Anyone got $250,000 they're not using? I guess I could always resort to the latest method for paying for medical school in England and the UK. Guess what it is...........Prostitution! That's right boys and girls, medical school is so expensive in the Western World, that even in places like the UK where it is subsidized by the government, students are having to resort to selling their bodies just to get by. Shoot, I might even give that a try, but I'm too ugly and no one is gonna buy what I'm selling. LOL. Somehow bald, broke, boney and in debt up to the eyeballs is not as in demand as you might think. Go figure?
I wish it was funny, but it's really not. Our country is getting, older, fatter and sicker by the day and no one seems to care :/ Everyone complains of their foreign doctor, but no one will put there money where their mouth is and go to med school them self, or see to it that their kids do, and when those of that do want to make a difference try, we get rejected by our own schools, so we're back where we started with having to import and outsource our own doctors, engineers, etc....... What are we thinking!?!?!? Sorry I just had to vent!
I won't tell you what I make because it's NEVER a good idea to upset a guy that used a high powered rifle as a profession. Suffice it to say that the Canadian military pays far better than it used to, thank goodness!! I do remember that when I joined in the early 80s as a private, my take home pay was about $300 a month!
