Another almost physician here. I have considered the research path myself but chose to do just medicine instead.
What is your true motivation? I had similarly good sounding high utility goals in mind when I considered research. In retrospection I think my true motivation was that I thought research would be fun. Oh how wrong I turned out to be...
Research will not be just research. There will be a lot of bureaucratic wrestling and this will be the main fun limiting factor. If you want to be a professor (will get more money to do research) there will be even more of it. To be a stellar researcher you probably have to be good at marketing yourself. Research might be a lot more social than you think.
How much stellar (life extension) research comes from your country? Compare this to the US. You’ll probably have to move, being an intellectual heavyweight without support gets you nowhere.
Why don’t you want to treat patients? Some of the possible reasons are circumventable, but some are not. There are lots of different specialties with varied amount of patient contact.
You don’t have to be an intellectual heavyweight to be a good doctor, but you have to be motivated. Otherwise the mindless grinding of those heaps of facts will seriously wear you down. If you become a doctor, you better have at least average social skills. Otherwise you will probably not enjoy the job.
You will probably have a much better quality of life as a bad doctor than a pretty good researcher.
You can be a doctor and a part time researcher. This might alleviate the dealing with patients thing.
Another almost physician here. I have considered the research path myself but chose to do just medicine instead.
What is your true motivation? I had similarly good sounding high utility goals in mind when I considered research. In retrospection I think my true motivation was that I thought research would be fun. Oh how wrong I turned out to be...
Research will not be just research. There will be a lot of bureaucratic wrestling and this will be the main fun limiting factor. If you want to be a professor (will get more money to do research) there will be even more of it. To be a stellar researcher you probably have to be good at marketing yourself. Research might be a lot more social than you think.
How much stellar (life extension) research comes from your country? Compare this to the US. You’ll probably have to move, being an intellectual heavyweight without support gets you nowhere.
Why don’t you want to treat patients? Some of the possible reasons are circumventable, but some are not. There are lots of different specialties with varied amount of patient contact.
You don’t have to be an intellectual heavyweight to be a good doctor, but you have to be motivated. Otherwise the mindless grinding of those heaps of facts will seriously wear you down. If you become a doctor, you better have at least average social skills. Otherwise you will probably not enjoy the job.
You will probably have a much better quality of life as a bad doctor than a pretty good researcher.
You can be a doctor and a part time researcher. This might alleviate the dealing with patients thing.