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Most Difficult Degree to Achieve?

mildlyunfazed said:
Medicine on the other hand is almost entirely wrote learned material and very rarely do you have to solve unforeseen problems, but rather be good at memorising. As a result, the students I met in medicine are a lot more hard working than engineers. I believe this is because engineers develop the skills to solve unfamiliar problems not requiring memorisation but rather logic. Medicine on the other hand requires the mundane task of memorisation rather than logic. This is just a comparison between engineering and medicine.

Medicine is not as hard as people think. It just requires more dedication.
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I'm a fourth year medical student and am married to a second generation engineer turned math teacher. She hated engineering and left it, and while I respect engineers greatly, I am very sure that career is not for me, and unlike you, enjoy medicine quite a lot. While I think you're onto something here, I'll quibble with a few of your points.

On the average, yes, I think the average engineer is book-smarter (in a quantifiable and testable way) than the average physician. Engineering requires more outside-the-box thinking and more risk taking and gambling with resources. Both careers are about problem solving using logic and science. But because people vary a lot less in their physical properties than things, engineering as a whole field involves more uncharted territory and uncertainty.

However, what you're forgetting about medicine is the formidable interpersonal challenges involved with the career. To be a good physician, you have to be both book-smart and people-smart. You have to be able to see your patients as both specimens to be regarded with the cold light of scientific scrutiny and human beings just like you to be regarded with care and compassion, often simultaneously, and without cognitive dissonance. You can't really fail at either half of this if you want to keep patients coming back to you. And the fact is, most people in the world are not up to this challenge. Most people are good at analyzing and understanding systems logically, or navigating the uncertain world of human communications networks, but not both, let alone both at once!

In contrast, I've seldom met an engineer who was skilled enough with people to hold a job that depended on it. They're stereotyped as abrasive or socially inept, and while I'd hardly say that's true across the board, stereotypes exist for a reason. Back when I was taking my science prerequisites for medical school along with pre-engineering students, some of them even remarked, "I'm so glad I'm going into a career where I don't need to be good with people, I just need to invent things that work." Or something to that effect.

A more charitable way to say what you said about memorization and medicine, is that physicians rely more on predetermined algorithms to solve problems than engineers do. I take issue with the assertion that there's less logical reasoning involved. A doctor who makes clinical decisions without sound, well-thought-out logical reasons for doing so is a train wreck waiting to happen. It's just that the reasoning tends to follow more trodden paths.

In the end, though, both fields are hard because both of them are dynamic, changing games. Neither a physician nor an engineer can afford to not stay abreast of the newest developments in his/her field. Both must be ready to jettison an outmoded, less efficacious way of doing things, no matter how cherished, ingrained, or convenient it may be, if he's to stay competitively employed.
 
I'll tell you one aspect where being a doctor is more difficult than being an engineer.

School.

If you want to be an engineer and you have the aptitude, nobody is going to stop you. The doors are wide open. If you have the aptitude and want to become a doctor, there are significant barriers to entry.
 
Cyc said:
I'll tell you one aspect where being a doctor is more difficult than being an engineer.

School.

If you want to be an engineer and you have the aptitude, nobody is going to stop you. The doors are wide open. If you have the aptitude and want to become a doctor, there are significant barriers to entry.
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Especially in Canada. Even with every end of your application covered its still very hard to get in to medical school, especially in the great white north. The volume of information (not to mention clinical skills) we are expected to know is immense. In 3 weeks of class I already have a volume of notes equal to one term of a full course load. Its pretty brutal.
 
surely this depends on the person?

i simply couldn't get a medicine degree because i couldn't cut people up. its therefore impossible for me to acheive even though i am pretty sure intellectually it would be far easier than the degree i'm attempting to acheive.

i can't really understand why engineers are getting picked out. i had an ex-engineer as a tutor for first year undergrad physics problems and he couldn't do them, yet now i teach first year engineers without even really having to prep.... attaining a decent understanding of the physical and mathematical principles behind their work seems less important to the engineers i've met, so it seems to me like they learn complicated recipes. clearly they have to be able to apply this stuff to new situations but that skill seems to come as much from intuition as understanding physics.

personally i'd guess a pure maths PhD is the hardest to attain for most people. the combination of extreme abstraction and extreme precision required is beyond any other subject i know.
 
It depends whether you're measuring by work or skill.

In the former case, veterinary school. Vet school is a bitch.

In the latter case, probably pure math. I'm doing a PhD in theoretical physics and it's motherfucking hard, but I don't know if it's quite as bad as what the math kids go through.
 
mathematics is a lot of memorization.

but not like vocabulary.

i find the struggle in mathematics to be whether or not i am able to tear down my walls and start fresh for each concept.
the deeper i progress, the less biased i have to be in my own mind in order to let new ideas settle. sometimes it takes all semester for me to be able to do that. its like my brain blocks out these concepts initially, but once it accepts them i can do it all day and my whole way of thinking is altered.
 
In terms of raw brainpower, I would say a Ph.D in mathematics is the most difficult degree to attain. Medical school is a program which I believe anyone with a reasonable degree of intelligence can get through given they put forth enough effort. But relative to the world population very few could ever do original research in mathematics, let alone pass the requisite classes to be able to start on a dissertation at all. Honestly, anyone who claims medical school is harder than getting a doctoral degree in mathematics is speaking from complete ignorance due to a lack of exposure to advanced math. Yes, I know the common retort, that most hard math/science types have never had exposure to medical school material either. However I am not really referring to formal education. Simply look at textbooks used by med students and then textbooks used by mathematics Ph.D students. In terms of how difficult it is to understand the material the medical school material gets shit on.

Finishing the first two years of mathematics at most universities is like taking your first steps as a baby in your math education. I initially majored in mathematics as an undergraduate with the intention of eventually going on to get a doctorate and I did respectably well, but I simply did not have the natural talent that would have enabled me to be successful at a graduate level. That sort of talent simply cannot be learned. I switched to electrical engineering and am in graduate school in that field right now, which is very difficult in its own right, but the most challenging engineering and physics classes tend to be the highly theoretical and mathematical ones. Go figure. Graduate classes in any science field (physics, chemistry, computer science, engineering, especially economics) are almost always far more difficult than their undergraduate counterparts because they are usually expressed in a far more mathematical way. There is a reason why there are far fewer theoretical chemists than experimental chemists, fewer theoretical computer scientists than applied ones, etc. The mathematicians/theoretical scientists who prove theorems and rigorously establish new theories are the ones who show extreme natural talent from a very early age, usually with no guidance at all (think Einstein, Gauss, Terrence Tao). It is very uncommon for a theoretician not to attain their doctorate in their early twenties or even earlier. However, many famous experimental and applied scientists are not natural geniuses, and achieve their fame and success through persistence, experimentation, and gradual fine tuning of results over the years. For the demigods there is theory. For us mere mortals there is the application.

It goes without saying that doctoral level education in ANY field is very challenging. But it is nearly a verifiable fact that effort and persistence can compensate for a lack of natural talent far more in say, sociology, medicine, or even experimental science than in mathematics. The overwhelming majority of people in this world could never get through a doctoral program in math, ever.
 
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^ I'll agree with this post. Medical school, IME, selects for the hardest working, not the most intelligent. Granted you still must be of above-average intelligence to do medical school. But the concepts are formidable in their quantity, rather than quality.

My last post was not quite on topic, because I was talking about the careers of medicine versus engineering, rather than earning the degrees.

The straight-A requirement for medical school is not proof of intelligence. It's proof of dedicated singlemindedness and competitiveness.
 
MDAO said:
A more charitable way to say what you said about memorization and medicine, is that physicians rely more on predetermined algorithms to solve problems than engineers do. I take issue with the assertion that there's less logical reasoning involved. A doctor who makes clinical decisions without sound, well-thought-out logical reasons for doing so is a train wreck waiting to happen. It's just that the reasoning tends to follow more trodden paths.
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They're not so different in this sense. Engineers are licensed for the same reason doctors are licensed. People's lives are at stake. Sure there is cutting edge research and development but there's a big market for standardized, cookie cutter solutions. Guy who dots the i's, crunches the numbers, and makes sure everything is to protocol. Medical differentials are harder than building a bridge imo, but then this is also an apple/orange comparison. Makes more sense to compare the R&D doctor to the R&D engineer, the GP to the cookie cutter engineer and so on.
 
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