Who’s More Successful: High School Geek, Jock or Class Clown?

I recently read an interesting article on different types of high school students and how successful they become in life.  To quickly summarize the article, Careerbuilder gave a survey and asked people to group themselves in one of eight categories: student government, athlete, geek, honor society, cheerleader, drama club, teacher’s pet, or class clown.  I just wanted to compare my own labels to how these types do in their career.

For me, I did not specifically belong in only category.  I classified myself as 25% athlete, 40% geek, and 35% honor society.  So it’s not surprising that “Former honor society members, athletes and geeks mostly hold professional and technical services positions at 59 percent, 55 percent and 52 percent, respectively.”  Pharmacy is a professional degree so this fits well.

Some advantages of being a honor society member and geek is that 10% make more than $100000 and 47% make $50000 or more.  A disadvantage of being a geek is that they are most dissatisfied with their job (21%).

Other Possible Career Options

If I didn’t become a pharmacist, there were three other careers I probably would have pursued. They are dentistry, optometry, and veterinary medicine. Similarly to pharmacy, they are fields which give you many options upon graduation. In addition, they give a nice salary and a potential sense of fulfulment. Here is my mindset when I compared all the fields.

DENTISTRY

Pros:

• Great starting salary. Potential of top salary with being a partner or even owning own business is crazy.
• High respect/prestige.
• Doctorate degree
• 8-5 workstyle (for the most part)

Cons:

• MOUTH. This was killer for me. I just couldn’t imagine handling the mouth every day. I just couldn’t. I can’t.
• I heard the more dentists want to make, the more they have to work. Partners and owners have to deal with a lot of things such as payroll, overhead, hiring, firing, etc.
• MOUTH. Not just the mouth, but blood and saliva in general.

OPTOMETRY

Pros:

• I like eyes, their anatomy and physiology.
• Doesn’t involve much bodily fluid
• Good salary
• Doctorate degree
• Good respect/prestige
• 8-5 workstyle

Cons:

• No optometry schools in my state. That means living out of state which equals higher tuition, traveling costs, leaving friends and family.
• It is harder to own your business due to stores like LensCrafters and Hour Eyes.

VETERINARY MEDICINE

Pros:

• I love animals, especially birds.
• Doctorate degree
• Good respect/prestige
• 8-5 workstyle (depends where you work I think)
• CHICKS!

Chick: Hey, what do you do/study?
Me: I’m a veterinary student/veterinarian.
Chick: Oh, that’s cool! I have a dog.
Me: What kind of dog?
Chick: Chihuahua
Me: Cool, did you know that chihuahuas . . . go into long and detailed explanation of their history and health including a common health problem in chihuahas.
Chick: You really know a lot about them. Can you come later tonight to check if my dog has that health problem you mentioned?
Me: Sure. GIGGIDY GIGGIDY GIGGIDY GOO…ALRIGHTTTTT.

Cons:

• Low starting salary for a doctorate degree ($50,000-$60,000). This wouldn’t be such a problem if tuition was low but it’s the same as, if not higher than pharmacy school.
• Limited areas of employment compared to pharm, dental, optometry.
• Animals can be smelly, loud, and uncooperative. They can poop and pee on you.

If the starting salary of vets was bumped up to $70,000-$80000, I probably would have gone to vet school. If there was an in-state optometry school, it still would be a toss up between pharmacy and optometry. If dentists didn’t deal with the mouth, I probably would have gone to dental school. For me, pharmacy was the right medium.