It greatly bothers me that rayiner's post is showing up as 'dead', presumably because it was either downvoted too much or just flagged too much.

Anyway. So while we're all giving out examples and anecdotes, here's mine: I'm from an Asian family of 5, I was the only one who was given the 'follow your dreams!' advice out of the 5 (there's a long/funny story behind this). I did end up being the only one who went to school for a non-STEM field (literature/music).

Guess who's the only one unemployed out of the 5. Guess who wishes who was forced to stick to a STEM field? If I have children, damn right I'll force them toward STEM field, enroll them to a school with reputable robotics programs, expose them to folks who're in engineering/medical fields, etc.

Do read qzxt's relevant post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308799

And lastly, because the idea of censorship doesn't sit well with me, here is what rayiner posted:

My parents had a plan for me and my brother growing up: I'd be an engineer and he'd be a doctor. At some point when we were old enough, we asserted yourselves, and I went into law and he went into banking. But in retrospect I'm glad my parents didn't just tell me "follow your dreams!" If it were up to me as a teenager, I'd just sit around all day masturbating and eating Cheetos. Kids need more direction than that.

Here is the thing about kids: they're not very smart. And they don't know it. My infant is convinced that if she sucks hard enough on my arm milk will come out. At 17 I was no less misguided just about different things.

You can always quit your professional job that puts food on the table to follow a more capricious path. But when your teenage dreams collapse against the hard ground of reality, you can't usually do the opposite.

Couldn't that have been easily avoided with "Follow your dreams, but here's what you're likely to get paid with each of your career choices..." advice?

My sister and I are both good little half-Asians. My (white) mom eventually won the childrearing battle, so we were raised under the "Follow your dreams, we just want you to be happy" advice. Guess what? We both ended up in high-paying STEM careers anyway. Why? Because we both liked science anyway, and we were aware of (but not beholden to) average career salaries for the various fields we were looking at.

Now, there were a lot of times this could have gone otherwise. My sister almost double-majored in anthropology; I almost majored in philosophy or sociology. Oh, and I almost dropped/flunked out of college twice. But we didn't, because we had this background knowledge of what the real world was like and were somehow able to make smart decisions anyway.

There seems to be this assumption in this thread that teenagers are stupid. I reject that - I certainly wasn't stupid as a teenager. Of my teenage friends that were stupid, it was usually because their parents were stupid, and so the parents wouldn't be able to make better decisions than them anyway. Rather, teenagers are ignorant - they lack life experience, so they often don't have the full picture. The cure for that is to provide all the relevant information and then let your kid make their decision, it's not to make the decision for them.

I think a lot of Asian parents in particular have good intentions in this regard but don't understand the realities of a career in medicine. The hours in medicine are brutal, the pay is much less than most people believe, and virtually everyone goes massively into debt to finance their medical educations. Going into engineering or computer programing is a much surer route to financial success.

Still, these parents' hearts are in the right place. "Follow your bliss" is a great plan when you don't have to pay for it. A more responsible plan, if you don't want a profession like medicine or law, is "Develop a useful trade for income and pursue your passions on the side." If your trade involves things like computers, sales, or marketing, it can often contribute to success in your passion projects as well.

> Going into engineering or computer programing is a much surer route to financial success.

It wasn't 12 years ago...

Just curious, are you $200K in debt from going to both public undergrad and public med schools?

In general, many people complain of high med school debt, but if one looks closely the reason is that they choose private over public and not with their choice to go into medicine per se.

"Just curious, are you $200K in debt "

My wife (is younger than I am) graduated within the last 8 years from PUBLIC medical school and has roughly 200k in debt when we got married although I'm not certain what that debt is from or how much was already paid off etc.

I had asked about both PUBLIC UNDERGRAD and PUBLIC MEDICAL SCHOOL.

State University of New York Undergrad including all expenses is about $22K per year (just checked) or about $90K

The NY State Med School Tuition is about $30K per year or $120K + living expenses.

So for around $250K one can get both Undergrad and Medical Education.

A number of people graduating from medical school have large debt precisely because they do not choose to go to both public undergrad AND public medical school.

4 years undergrad private school can be about $250 K for tuition and living costs. Thus, by choosing to attend public undergrad and medical school can cost the same as private undergrad alone.

He did say "200k in debt when we got married," which suggests to me at least that he is talking about all of her debt, from undergrad and medical school.

Still, $250k is a shitload of debt. Putting back a solid $2k/month towards the principal (not even counting interest here) would still take a little over ten years to pay it off.