Creators and Maintainers

On a mental activity level, there are two kinds of people - creators and maintainers. Actually there might be a third category called the destroyers which I don't consider as a separate category. They are basically negative creators. (Hence the belief of some in Hinduism that Shiva was born from Brahma)

Anyway the creators are the people who have this innate urge to create, to grow and to design. They want to develop solutions to every known problem, sometimes going to the extreme of "creating" problems in the first place. The maintainers are people who want to maintain status quo. These are the people who love equilibrium and will go to lengths trying to maintain it. They carefully watch any imbalance in the mix and quickly fly to the rescue. We as humans like everything else, carry these two (actually three) propensities in varying degree. Some have a fountain of creativity flowing endlessly while some are excellent administrators bringing order to the chaos.

The point is that hard core creators don't make good doctors in the sense that they might not be too happy with what they do. They are better off being developers/designers/architects etc., where they are paid to create. To some extent they are better off not getting into system administration as well. Admins on the contrary may have one additional advantage over the developers for becoming good doctors. I am in no way saying that doctors are not creators, but they don't normally use that faculty too much. One of the reasons why I think that doctors are afraid of technology or atleast resistant to their use.

So before you choose what you want to be, an engineer or a doctor (those are the current major alternatives), know yourself. Know where you heart is and then choose. Not on somebody's advice that becoming a doctor is difficult or there is a lot of scope if you study computer science. If you are good at what you do, there will always be scope and the future will always be bright.