HACKER Q&A
📣 febrilian

Advice for a failing medschool student/freelance web dev


I'm 22 years old, currently studying medicine in Jakarta. It's been rough, I currently have the lowest GPA in my class and I'm failing a lot of classes. I've been taking a few months break and got in web development, gaining some amount of money there as a freelancer. I'm really used to the working life and it's hard to go back to medical school where I'm so mediocre there and still got a long way to go. I don't want to make my parents depressed knowing that I'm considering dropping out of the medschool but it makes me suffer to stay there.

Anyone has the same experience? What kind of advice would you give to me? Thank you very much

  👤 kstenerud Accepted Answer ✓
Following someone else's vision of what you "should" be is soul-crushing, and it won't ever become less soul-crushing even if you did become what they wanted.

Generally, parents want their children to become doctors for monetary and security reasons, which is understandable albeit terrible if that's not what their child really is.

Have you considered switching majors to computer science? The argument would be that you can do it, you have some industry experience already, and there's money to be made in computers.

Don't drop out; change majors. Even in computers where people can just jump right in and build things, there's a HUGE advantage to having a proper education.

👤 theGeatZhopa
Connect the boths. Take some special topic you learned till now and use your new skills to represent it.. as a example. You could do something for the doctors in your country. Like some database access as Webpage.. With that you may earn a little bit and do CS.

In the end, I see you developing machine vision for analyzing XRay and making it simpler for the doctors to interpret them :)

Stop. Connect. Make new. Revert. But Never stop learning!